Who is attending Sunak’s AI safety summit – and what will they discuss?
Global leaders, tech executives and experts – including Elon Musk – are gathering on Wednesday and Thursday at Bletchley Park, the home of second world war codebreakers, for a landmark summit on safety in artificial intelligence.
In a speech last week Rishi Sunak said AI – the term for computer systems that can perform tasks typically associated with intelligent beings – brought opportunities but also significant risks, such as making it easier for rogue actors to make chemical or biological weapons.
Here we answer your questions about the summit.
What will the summit discuss?
The AI safety summit will look at frontier AI systems, which the government describes as “highly capable” models that can perform a wide variety of tasks matching or exceeding the performances of the most advanced AI available today.
An example of frontier AI, according to a government document released last week, is the “large language model” technology that underpins AI tools such as the ChatGPT chatbot and its Google-made rival, Bard. But the main concern is the future: the power of models being released next year and in years to come. How can they be tested and monitored to ensure they do not cause harm?
Who will be attending?
Sunak, the UK prime minister, and the technology secretary, Michelle Donelan, will be there, along with Kamala Harris, the US vice-president, the European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, and the Italian prime minister, Giorgia Meloni.
However, other world leaders, including the US president, Joe Biden, the French president, Emmanuel Macron, and the Canadian prime minister, Justin Trudeau, have decided not to make the trip.
Downing Street said on Monday the rejections did not count as a “snub” to the prime minister, adding that he was pleased at the levels of attendance from governments, the industry and civil society. The UK still does not know whether anyone from the Chinese
government will attend, having made a public push for senior officials to do so.
The tech industry will be represented by executives from companies including Google’s AI unit Google DeepMind, the ChatGPT developer OpenAI, and Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta. Meta’s president of global affairs, the former UK deputy prime minister Nick Clegg, will be attending.
Experts attending include two of the three “godfathers” of modern AI, Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio, who are concerned about the pace of development in AI and believe the risk of extinction from the technology is on a par with the threat from pandemics and nuclear war. However, their fellow “godfather”, Yann LeCun – now chief AI scientist at Meta – has described fears that AI could wipe out humanity as