Last week the UK and Prime Minister Rishi Sunak hosted the 2023 AI Safety Summit at Bletchley Park, Buckinghamshire. The summit brought together leaders from 27 countries around the world, including the United States, China, the EU, India, Israel, and the Middle East. The introduction to the summit can be viewed here. The goal of the summit was stated as:
“The summit will bring together international governments, leading AI companies, civil society groups and experts in research to consider the risks of AI, especially at the frontier of development, and discuss how they can be mitigated through internationally coordinated action. Frontier AI models hold enormous potential to power economic growth, drive scientific progress and wider public benefits, while also posing potential safety risks if not developed responsibly.”
AI Safety Summit 2023
The summit included a conversation between Prime Minister Sunak and Elon Musk about AI, so let’s begin there. Elon and Sunak cover a wide variety of topics, so I’ll let them speak for themselves.
A number of roundtable discussions happened during the event as well, examining different aspects of AI safety and opportunities. A summary of their discussions, opinions, and recommendations can be viewed here. Their areas of focus included:
- A strategic discussion of the next 5 years to 2028 with a focus on the priorities for international collaboration, the key choices and challenges.
- A practical discussion of international collaboration following the Summit, including developing a shared understanding of model capabilities and safety risks, and risks from disinformation and deepfakes in the context of elections.
- A strategic discussion to explore where AI is creating the greatest opportunities now, and the specific areas most fruitful for further international collaboration.
Time magazine had a good article about the event, and you can read the piece at “U.K.’s AI Safety Summit Ends With Limited, but Meaningful, Progress.” I found the below quotes to be a good highlight.
“Officials from around the world did not attempt to come to an agreement here on a shared set of enforceable guardrails for the technology. But Sunak announced on Thursday that AI companies had agreed at the Summit to give governments early access to their models to perform safety evaluations. He also announced that Yoshua Bengio, a Turing Award-winning computer scientist, had agreed to chair a body that would seek to establish, in a report, the scientific consensus on risks and capabilities of frontier AI systems.”
“I am pleased to support the much-needed international coordination of managing AI safety, by working with colleagues from around the world to present the very latest evidence on this vitally important issue,” Bengio said in a statement.
In the lead up to the summit, the Future of Life Institute, published “As Six-Month Pause Letter Expires, Experts Call for Regulation on Advanced AI Development“. This is the institute that in the spring of this year published the open letter calling for a six month pause on work to develop new AI capabilities. It was signed by over 30,000 leaders, experts, and researchers. Their latest work included a list of questions to be answered by AI companies “in order to inform the public about the risks they represent, the limitations of existing safeguards, and their steps to guarantee safety.” They also included their list of recommendations here.
I’ll close with a quote and brief interview from British mathematician Bertrand Russell.
“Love is wise; hatred is foolish. In this world, which is getting more and more closely interconnected, we have to learn to tolerate each other, we have to learn to put up with the fact that some people say things that we don’t like. We can only live together in that way. But if we are to live together, and not die together, we must learn a kind of charity and a kind of tolerance, which is absolutely vital to the continuation of human life on this planet.”
Bertrand Russell
