Zuckerberg discusses AI risks with Japan premier

Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg (pic) met Prime Minister

Fumio Kishida to discuss the risks of generative AI during a visit to Japan, a government spokesman said yesterday.

Zuckerberg is on a mini-tour of Asia that includes stops in Japan, India and South Korea, where he travelled on Tuesday night.

The 39-year-old mixed business with pleasure while in Japan, going skiing with his family and learning about sword-making from a master craftsman.

Zuckerberg and Kishida met on Tuesday and “discussed a broad range of topics including the status of AI’s technological advancement ... (and) the risk surrounding generative AI”, top Japanese government spokesman Yoshimasa Hayashi told reporters yesterday.

Japanese media quoted Zuckerberg as saying “We had a good, productive conversation about AI and the future of technology”.

“I’m really excited for the work that is happening here in Japan,” he said after the 30-minute meeting.

Spearheaded by OpenAI’s ChatGPT, generative artificial intelligence is a technology that can conjure up text, images and audio from simple prompts in just seconds.

Its rapid development has been heralded as potentially revolutionary for everything from video games to politics – but with negative as well as positive consequences.

Meta was one of 20 major tech firms, including OpenAI, to sign a pledge this month to crack down on AI content intended to deceive voters ahead of crucial elections around the world this year.

Tech groups had previously agreed to use a common watermarking standard that would tag images generated by AI applications such as ChatGPT, Meta’s Llama, Microsoft’s Copilot and Google’s Gemini.

Zuckerberg arrived in Seoul on a private flight on Tuesday night for the second leg of his Asia trip and is expected to meet South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol, local media reported.

“We are coordinating with Meta to arrange a meeting,” a spokesman for Yoon’s office told AFP yesterday.

Zuckerberg met the CEO of consumer tech giant LG Electronics to discuss extended reality projects, South Korea’s Yonhap news agency reported.

Meta is collaborating with LG to develop a premium headset that will compete with Apple’s Vision Pro, the Korea Economic Daily reported.

South Korean media said the Meta boss also plans to meet the head of Samsung Electronics, one of the world’s biggest producers of smartphones and computer chips. – AFP