Martin Coulter
LONDON (Reuters) – World leaders, corporate executives and academic experts gathered at Britain’s Bletchley Park last year for the world’s first global summit on AI safety, hoping to reach consensus on regulating a technology that some warned posed a threat to humanity.
Tesla (NASDAQ:) mogul Elon Musk and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman engaged with some of their fiercest critics as China signed the “Bletchley Declaration” along with the United States and other countries, signaling a willingness to cooperate despite rising tensions in relations with the West. .
Six months later, the second AI Security Summit, a largely virtual event co-hosted by the UK and South Korea, will take place as hype around AI’s potential gives way to questions about its limitations.
“There are some radically different approaches … it will be difficult to move 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 AI safety. .
More pressing issues regarding the use of copyrighted material, data shortages and environmental impact are also unlikely to attract such a star-studded gathering.
Although organizers had announced an event similar to Bletchley, a number of its key participants declined invitations to Seoul.
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When the first summit ended in November, British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak promised that subsequent events would be held every six months to allow governments to keep abreast of rapidly evolving technologies.
Since then, attention has shifted from existential risk to the resources needed to advance AI, such as the massive amount of data needed to train large language models and the electricity that powers a growing number of data centers.
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“The policy discourse around AI has expanded to include other important issues such as market concentration and environmental impacts,” said Francine Bennett, interim director of the Ada Lovelace Institute for Data and AI.
OpenAI CEO Altman has suggested that the future of artificial intelligence depends on an energy breakthrough. In February, the Wall Street Journal reported that he was also trying to raise up to $7 trillion to boost production of computer chips, a component that is currently in short supply.
But tying the future of AI to scientific breakthroughs and lucrative funding efforts may not be the best move, experts warn.
“The failure of technology to live up to the hype is inevitable,” said Professor Jack Stilgoe, an expert on technology policy at University College London.
“People will find amazing and creative uses for this technology, but that doesn’t mean the future will be what Elon Musk or Sam Altman imagine it to be.”
Shares of tech giant Meta (NASDAQ:) fell 13% last week after it announced it was doubling its investment in artificial intelligence, although returns from major investments by Google (NASDAQ:) and Microsoft (NASDAQ:) were greeted by markets.
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The summit in South Korea on May 21-22 has always been called a “mini-summit” ahead of the next face-to-face meeting in Paris.
A virtual “leadership session” on the first day, followed by an in-person meeting of technology ministers on the second day, was specifically designed to build on the legacy of Bletchley Park.
However, far fewer leaders and ministers will attend the event, even as the French government delays the next meeting until 2025, according to sources familiar with the situation.
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The European Union spokesman did not rule out the bloc’s presence, but confirmed that its chief technical regulators – Margrethe Vestager, Thierry Breton and Vera Jurova – will not be present.
The US State Department confirmed it would send representatives to Seoul, but did not specify who exactly. The governments of Canada and the Netherlands said they would not attend.
Brazil’s government said it was still reviewing its invitation, citing a conflict with the G20 event the country is hosting the same week.
The Swiss government said Ambassador Benedikt Weschsler, head of digitalization at the Foreign Ministry, will attend in person.
“Nothing will ever compare to the first meeting of its kind,” said Linda Griffin, public policy director for Mozilla, the organization behind the Firefox web browser.
“International agreements are really difficult to make, so it may take several iterations of these events to find a rhythm.”
Griffin said there was no specific reason why Mozilla was not present at the Seoul summit, but it was focused on the Paris event.
Similarly, Google’s pioneering artificial intelligence research unit DeepMind said it welcomed the summit but declined to confirm its participation.
Geoffrey Hinton, a former Google researcher and the “godfather” of artificial intelligence, told Reuters he declined an invitation to the event, citing an injury that made it difficult for him to fly.
A UK government spokesman said: “The AI Summit in Seoul will build on the momentum of Bletchley Park and drive further progress in AI safety, innovation and inclusivity, bringing us all closer to a world in which AI improves our lives across the board.”
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