Second Global AI Summit: South Korea, UK to Co-Host
South Korea and the United Kingdom will co-host the second global AI summit in Seoul this week, as the breathtaking pace of innovation since the first AI summit in November has left governments struggling to manage an increasing array of risks.
UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol will oversee a virtual summit on Tuesday. This event comes amid calls for improved regulation of artificial intelligence, despite significant disagreements over its potential impact on humanity.
“Although positive efforts have been made to shape global AI governance, significant gaps still remain,” Sunak and Yoon said in a joint opinion article published in the UK’s I newspaper and South Korea’s JoongAng Ilbo, entitled ‘Only global AI standards can stop a race to the bottom’.
The November event was promoted as the AI Safety Summit, but the scope of challenges has since broadened.
Starting Tuesday, the meetings, now referred to as the AI Seoul Summit, will focus on three priorities: AI safety, innovation, and inclusion, according to the summit’s website.
“Risks such as large-scale labour market impacts, AI-enabled hacking or biological attacks, and society losing control over general-purpose AI could emerge,” although there is debate about the likelihood, a global AI safety report released on Friday said.
Also Read: Britain Invites China To Its Global AI Summit
“But… it will be the decisions of societies and governments that will determine the future of AI,” said the report backed by experts from more than 30 countries.
The report acknowledges the expanding array of risks posed by rapidly evolving technology, including existential threats to humanity, AI inequality, data scarcity, the use of copyrighted material, and the environmental impact from the substantial electricity consumption of AI data centres.
At the UK-hosted November summit, Tesla’s Elon Musk and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman mingled with some of their fiercest critics, while China co-signed the ‘Bletchley Declaration’ on collectively managing AI risks alongside the United States and others.
This time, it remains unclear who will attend the virtual summit on Tuesday or the in-person session chaired by UK and South Korean ministers on Wednesday.
A separate AI forum hosted by South Korea on Wednesday expects attendees including Jack Clark, co-founder of AI safety and research company Anthropic, and executives from OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Microsoft, Meta, and IBM, according to the event’s website.
