South Korea and the United Kingdom will co-host the second global AI summit in Seoul this week. Since the first AI summit in November, the rapid pace of innovation has left governments working to address the growing array of risks associated with artificial intelligence.
UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol will oversee a virtual summit on Tuesday.
As reported by Reuters, the event will address calls for better regulation of AI despite ongoing disagreements over the technology’s potential impact on humanity.
In a joint opinion article published in the UK’s i newspaper and South Korea’s JoongAng Ilbo, Sunak and Yoon highlighted the need for global AI standards to prevent a “race to the bottom.”
The article, entitled ‘Only Global AI Standards Can Stop a Race to the Bottom,’ emphasized that while positive efforts have been made to shape global AI governance, significant gaps remain.
The November event, known as the AI Safety Summit, has expanded its scope of challenges significantly. The meetings starting Tuesday, now called the AI Seoul Summit, will focus on three main priorities: AI safety, innovation, and inclusion, according to the summit’s website.
A global AI safety report released on Friday identified risks such as large-scale labor market impacts, AI-enabled hacking, biological attacks, and the potential loss of societal control over general-purpose AI.
Despite varying opinions on the likelihood of these risks, the report underscores that the decisions of societies and governments will determine the future of AI. This report is supported by experts from over 30 countries.
The report also acknowledges the broadening spectrum of risks posed by the rapidly evolving technology. These include existential threats to humanity and AI inequality, data scarcity, the use of copyrighted material, and the environmental impact due to the significant electricity consumption by AI data centers.
The UK-hosted summit in November featured notable attendees such as Tesla’s Elon Musk and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who engaged with some of their most vocal critics. China co-signed the ‘Bletchley Declaration’ at this event, agreeing to collectively manage AI risks alongside the United States and other nations.
Details regarding the participants for the virtual summit on Tuesday and the in-person session chaired by UK and South Korean ministers on Wednesday remain unclear.
However, a separate AI forum hosted by South Korea on Wednesday is expected to include attendees such as Jack Clark, co-founder of AI safety and research company Anthropic, as well as executives from OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Microsoft, Meta, and IBM, according to the event’s website.
