Author: Martin Coulter
LONDON: Last year, representatives of world leaders, corporate executives and academic experts gathered in Britain’s Bletchley Park for the world’s first global artificial intelligence security summit, hoping to reach a consensus on regulating a technology that some say poses a threat to humanity.
Tesla tycoon Elon Musk and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman clashed with some of their fiercest critics, while China joined the United States and others in signing the “Bletchley Declaration,” signaling a willingness to cooperate despite rising tensions with the West.
Six months later, the second AI Safety Summit will take place, a largely virtual event co-hosted by the UK and South Korea, as hype around AI’s potential gives way to questions about its limits.
“There are radically different approaches… it will be challenging to go beyond what was agreed at Bletchley Park,” said Martha Bennett, senior analyst at research and advisory firm Forrester, referring to the historic but necessarily broad agreement on artificial intelligence security.
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Thornier questions about the employ of copyrighted material, data scarcity and environmental impact are also unlikely to attract such a star-studded gathering.
Although organizers announced an event comparable to Bletchley, many of its key participants declined invitations to Seoul.
NOISE
After the first summit in November, British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak promised that subsequent events would be held every six months so that governments could keep track of the rapidly developing technology.
Since then, the focus has shifted from existential risk to the resources needed to fuel AI development, such as the huge amounts of data required to train enormous language models and the electricity to power a growing number of data centers.
“The policy discourse around AI has broadened to include other essential issues such as market concentration and environmental impacts,” said Francine Bennett, interim director of data and the Ada Lovelace Institute focusing on AI.
OpenAI CEO Altman has suggested that the future of artificial intelligence depends on a breakthrough in energy. In February, the Wall Street Journal reported that he is also trying to raise as much as $7 trillion to boost production of computer chips, a component currently in compact supply.
But experts warn that making the future of artificial intelligence dependent on scientific breakthroughs and lucrative financial efforts may not be the best move.
“It is inevitable that technology will not live up to expectations,” said Professor Jack Stilgoe, a technology policy expert at University College London.
“People will find surprising and original uses for this technology, but that doesn’t mean the future will look the way Elon Musk and Sam Altman imagine it.”
Shares of tech giant Meta fell 13% last week after it announced it would double its investments in artificial intelligence, even as markets welcomed gains from enormous investments by Google and Microsoft.
NO SHOWS
The South Korea summit on May 21-22 has always been called a “mini-summit” in anticipation of another in-person meeting in Paris.
A virtual ‘leadership session’ on day one, followed by an in-person meeting of technology ministers on day two, was clearly intended to build on the legacy of Bletchley Park.
However, significantly fewer leaders and ministers are expected to attend, according to sources familiar with the matter, even though the French government has postponed the next meeting until 2025.
A European Union spokesman did not rule out the bloc’s presence, but confirmed that its top technology regulators – Margrethe Vestager, Thierry Breton and Vera Jourova – would not be present.
The US State Department confirmed it would send representatives to Seoul, but did not say whom. The Canadian and Dutch governments have said they will not attend.
Brazil’s government said it was still considering receiving the invitation, citing a clash with the G20 event the country is hosting the same week.
The Swiss government said that Ambassador Benedikt Weschsler, head of digital affairs at the foreign affairs department, would be present in person.
“Nothing will ever compare to a first meeting of this kind,” said Linda Griffin, director of public policy at Mozilla, the organization behind the Firefox browser.
“Getting international agreements is really tough, so it may take a few iterations of these events to find a rhythm.”
Griffin said there was no specific reason why Mozilla did not attend the Seoul summit but focused on the Paris event.
Similarly, pioneering artificial intelligence research unit Google DeepMind expressed satisfaction with the summit but declined to confirm its attendance.
Geoffrey Hinton, a former Google researcher and “godfather of artificial intelligence”, told Reuters that he declined an invitation to the event, citing an injury that made it challenging to fly.
A UK government spokesman said: “The Seoul AI Summit will build on the momentum of the Bletchley Park event to ensure further progress is made in the safety, innovation and inclusion of AI, bringing us all closer to a world where AI improves our lives across the board.”
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