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Six months after the first one at Bletchley Park, the 2nd AI Safety Summit (May 21-22, 2024) convenes in Korea

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This May 20, 2024 University of Oxford press release (also on EurekAlert) was under embargo until almost noon on May 20, 2024, which is a bit unusual, in my experience, (Note: I have more about the 1st summit and the interest in AI safety at the end of this posting),

Leading AI scientists are calling for stronger action on AI risks from world leaders, warning that progress has been insufficient since the first AI Safety Summit in Bletchley Park six months ago. 

Then, the world’s leaders pledged to govern AI responsibly. However, as the second AI Safety Summit in Seoul (21-22 May [2024]) approaches, twenty-five of the world’s leading AI scientists say not enough is actually being done to protect us from the technology’s risks. In an expert consensus paper published today in Science, they outline urgent policy priorities that global leaders should adopt to counteract the threats from AI technologies. 

Professor Philip Torr,Department of Engineering Science,University of Oxford, a co-author on the paper, says: “The world agreed during the last AI summit that we needed action, but now it is time to go from vague proposals to concrete commitments. This paper provides many important recommendations for what companies and governments should commit to do.”

World’s response not on track in face of potentially rapid AI progress; 

According to the paper’s authors, it is imperative that world leaders take seriously the possibility that highly powerful generalist AI systems—outperforming human abilities across many critical domains—will be developed within the current decade or the next. They say that although governments worldwide have been discussing frontier AI and made some attempt at introducing initial guidelines, this is simply incommensurate with the possibility of rapid, transformative progress expected by many experts. 

Current research into AI safety is seriously lacking, with only an estimated 1-3% of AI publications concerning safety. Additionally, we have neither the mechanisms or institutions in place to prevent misuse and recklessness, including regarding the use of autonomous systems capable of independently taking actions and pursuing goals.

World-leading AI experts issue call to action

In light of this, an international community of AI pioneers has issued an urgent call to action. The co-authors include Geoffrey Hinton, Andrew Yao, Dawn Song, the late Daniel Kahneman; in total 25 of the world’s leading academic experts in AI and its governance. The authors hail from the US, China, EU, UK, and other AI powers, and include Turing award winners, Nobel laureates, and authors of standard AI textbooks.

This article is the first time that such a large and international group of experts have agreed on priorities for global policy makers regarding the risks from advanced AI systems.

Urgent priorities for AI governance

The authors recommend governments to:

  • establish fast-acting, expert institutions for AI oversight and provide these with far greater funding than they are due to receive under almost any current policy plan. As a comparison, the US AI Safety Institute currently has an annual budget of $10 million, while the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has a budget of $6.7 billion.
  • mandate much more rigorous risk assessments with enforceable consequences, rather than relying on voluntary or underspecified model evaluations.
  • require AI companies to prioritise safety, and to demonstrate their systems cannot cause harm. This includes using “safety cases” (used for other safety-critical technologies such as aviation) which shifts the burden for demonstrating safety to AI developers.
  • implement mitigation standards commensurate to the risk-levels posed by AI systems. An urgent priority is to set in place policies that automatically trigger when AI hits certain capability milestones. If AI advances rapidly, strict requirements automatically take effect, but if progress slows, the requirements relax accordingly.

According to the authors, for exceptionally capable future AI systems, governments must be prepared to take the lead in regulation. This includes licensing the development of these systems, restricting their autonomy in key societal roles, halting their development and deployment in response to worrying capabilities, mandating access controls, and requiring information security measures robust to state-level hackers, until adequate protections are ready.

AI impacts could be catastrophic

AI is already making rapid progress in critical domains such as hacking, social manipulation, and strategic planning, and may soon pose unprecedented control challenges. To advance undesirable goals, AI systems could gain human trust, acquire resources, and influence key decision-makers. To avoid human intervention, they could be capable of copying their algorithms across global server networks. Large-scale cybercrime, social manipulation, and other harms could escalate rapidly. In open conflict, AI systems could autonomously deploy a variety of weapons, including biological ones. Consequently, there is a very real chance that unchecked AI advancement could culminate in a large-scale loss of life and the biosphere, and the marginalization or extinction of humanity.

Stuart Russell OBE [Order of the British Empire], Professor of Computer Science at the University of California at Berkeley and an author of the world’s standard textbook on AI, says: “This is a consensus paper by leading experts, and it calls for strict regulation by governments, not voluntary codes of conduct written by industry. It’s time to get serious about advanced AI systems. These are not toys. Increasing their capabilities before we understand how to make them safe is utterly reckless. Companies will complain that it’s too hard to satisfy regulations—that “regulation stifles innovation.” That’s ridiculous. There are more regulations on sandwich shops than there are on AI companies.”

…

Notable co-authors:

  • The world’s most-cited computer scientist (Prof. Hinton), and the most-cited scholar in AI security and privacy (Prof. Dawn Song)
  • China’s first Turing Award winner (Andrew Yao).
  • The authors of the standard textbook on artificial intelligence (Prof. Stuart Russell) and machine learning theory (Prof. Shai Shalev-Schwartz)
  • One of the world’s most influential public intellectuals (Prof. Yuval Noah Harari)
  • A Nobel Laureate in economics, the world’s most-cited economist (Prof. Daniel Kahneman)
  • Department-leading AI legal scholars and social scientists (Lan Xue, Qiqi Gao, and Gillian Hadfield).
  • Some of the world’s most renowned AI researchers from subfields such as reinforcement learning (Pieter Abbeel, Jeff Clune, Anca Dragan), AI security and privacy (Dawn Song), AI vision (Trevor Darrell, Phil Torr, Ya-Qin Zhang), automated machine learning (Frank Hutter), and several researchers in AI safety.

Additional quotes from the authors:

Philip Torr, Professor in AI, University of Oxford:

  • “I believe if we tread carefully the benefits of AI will outweigh the downsides, but for me one of the biggest immediate risks from AI is that we develop the ability to rapidly process data and control society, by government and industry. We could risk slipping into some Orwellian future with some form of totalitarian state having complete control.“

Dawn Song: Professor in AI at UC Berkeley, most-cited researcher in AI security and privacy:

  •  “Explosive AI advancement is the biggest opportunity and at the same time the biggest risk for mankind. It is important to unite and reorient towards advancing AI responsibly, with dedicated resources and priority to ensure that the development of AI safety and risk mitigation capabilities can keep up with the pace of the development of AI capabilities and avoid any catastrophe”

Yuval Noah Harari, Professor of history at Hebrew University of Jerusalem, best-selling author of ‘Sapiens’ and ‘Homo Deus’, world leading public intellectual:

  • “In developing AI, humanity is creating something more powerful than itself, that may escape our control and endanger the survival of our species. Instead of uniting against this shared threat, we humans are fighting among ourselves. Humankind seems hell-bent on self-destruction. We pride ourselves on being the smartest animals on the planet. It seems then that evolution is switching from survival of the fittest, to extinction of the smartest.”

Jeff Clune, Professor in AI at University of British Columbia and one of the leading researchers in reinforcement learning:

  • “Technologies like spaceflight, nuclear weapons and the Internet moved from science fiction to reality in a matter of years. AI is no different. We have to prepare now for risks that may seem like science fiction – like AI systems hacking into essential networks and infrastructure, AI political manipulation at scale, AI robot soldiers and fully autonomous killer drones, and even AIs attempting to outsmart us and evade our efforts to turn them off.”
  • “The risks we describe are not necessarily long-term risks. AI is progressing extremely rapidly. Even just with current trends, it is difficult to predict how capable it will be in 2-3 years. But what very few realize is that AI is already dramatically speeding up AI development. What happens if there is a breakthrough for how to create a rapidly self-improving AI system? We are now in an era where that could happen any month. Moreover, the odds of that being possible go up each month as AI improves and as the resources we invest in improving AI continue to exponentially increase.”

Gillian Hadfield, CIFAR AI Chair and Director of the Schwartz Reisman Institute for Technology and Society at the University of Toronto:

 “AI labs need to walk the walk when it comes to safety. But they’re spending far less on safety than they spend on creating more capable AI systems. Spending one-third on ensuring safety and ethical use should be the minimum.”

  • “This technology is powerful, and we’ve seen it is becoming more powerful, fast. What is powerful is dangerous, unless it is controlled. That is why we call on major tech companies and public funders to allocate at least one-third of their AI R&D budget to safety and ethical use, comparable to their funding for AI capabilities.”  

Sheila McIlrath, Professor in AI, University of Toronto, Vector Institute:

  • AI is software. Its reach is global and its governance needs to be as well.
  • Just as we’ve done with nuclear power, aviation, and with biological and nuclear weaponry, countries must establish agreements that restrict development and use of AI, and that enforce information sharing to monitor compliance. Countries must unite for the greater good of humanity.
  • Now is the time to act, before AI is integrated into our critical infrastructure. We need to protect and preserve the institutions that serve as the foundation of modern society.

Frank Hutter, Professor in AI at the University of Freiburg, Head of the ELLIS Unit Freiburg, 3x ERC grantee:

  • To be clear: we need more research on AI, not less. But we need to focus our efforts on making this technology safe. For industry, the right type of regulation will provide economic incentives to shift resources from making the most capable systems yet more powerful to making them safer. For academia, we need more public funding for trustworthy AI and maintain a low barrier to entry for research on less capable open-source AI systems. This is the most important research challenge of our time, and the right mechanism design will focus the community at large to work towards the right breakthroughs.

…

Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,

Managing extreme AI risks amid rapid progress; Preparation requires technical research and development, as well as adaptive, proactive governance by Yoshua Bengio, Geoffrey Hinton, Andrew Yao, Dawn Song, Pieter Abbeel, Trevor Darrell, Yuval Noah Harari, Ya-Qin Zhang, Lan Xue, Shai Shalev-Shwartz, Gillian Hadfield, Jeff Clune, Tegan Maharaj, Frank Hutter, Atılım Güneş Baydin, Sheila McIlraith, Qiqi Gao, Ashwin Acharya, David Krueger, Anca Dragan, Philip Torr, Stuart Russell, Daniel Kahneman, Jan Brauner, and Sören Mindermann. Science 20 May 2024 First Release DOI: 10.1126/science.adn0117

This paper appears to be open access.

For anyone who’s curious about the buildup to these safety summits, I have more in my October 18, 2023 “AI safety talks at Bletchley Park in November 2023” posting, which features excerpts from a number of articles on AI safety. There’s also my November 2, 2023 , “UK AI Summit (November 1 – 2, 2023) at Bletchley Park finishes” posting, which offers excerpts from articles critiquing the AI safety summit.

UK AI Summit (November 1 – 2, 2023) at Bletchley Park finishes

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This is the closest I’ve ever gotten to writing a gossip column (see my October 18, 2023 posting and scroll down to the “Insight into political jockeying [i.e., some juicy news bits]” subhead )for the first half.

Given the role that Canadian researchers (for more about that see my May 25, 2023 posting and scroll down to “The Panic” subhead) have played in the development of artificial intelligence (AI), it’s been surprising that the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) has given very little coverage to the event in the UK. However, there is an October 31, 2023 article by Kelvin Chang and Jill Lawless for the Associated Press posted on the CBC website,

Digital officials, tech company bosses and researchers are converging Wednesday [November 1, 2023] at a former codebreaking spy base [Bletchley Park] near London [UK] to discuss and better understand the extreme risks posed by cutting-edge artificial intelligence.

The two-day summit focusing on so-called frontier AI notched up an early achievement with officials from 28 nations and the European Union signing an agreement on safe and responsible development of the technology.

Frontier AI is shorthand for the latest and most powerful general purpose systems that take the technology right up to its limits, but could come with as-yet-unknown dangers. They’re underpinned by foundation models, which power chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard and are trained on vast pools of information scraped from the internet.

The AI Safety Summit is a labour of love for British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, a tech-loving former banker who wants the U.K. to be a hub for computing innovation and has framed the summit as the start of a global conversation about the safe development of AI.[emphasis mine]

But U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris may divert attention Wednesday [November 1, 2023] with a separate speech in London setting out the Biden administration’s more hands-on approach.

…

Canada’s Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry Francois-Philippe Champagne said AI would not be constrained by national borders, and therefore interoperability between different regulations being put in place was important.

…

As the meeting began, U.K. Technology Secretary Michelle Donelan announced that the 28 countries and the European Union had signed the Bletchley Declaration on AI Safety. It outlines the “urgent need to understand and collectively manage potential risks through a new joint global effort.”

South Korea has agreed to host a mini virtual AI summit in six months, followed by an in-person one in France in a year’s time, the U.K. government said.

…

Chris Stokel-Walker’s October 31, 2023 article for Fast Company presents a critique of the summit prior to the opening, Note: Links have been removed,

…

… one problem, critics say: The summit, which begins on November 1, is too insular and its participants are homogeneous—an especially damning critique for something that’s trying to tackle the huge, possibly intractable questions around AI. The guest list is made up of 100 of the great and good of governments, including representatives from China, Europe, and Vice President Kamala Harris. And it also includes luminaries within the tech sector. But precious few others—which means a lack of diversity in discussions about the impact of AI.

“Self-regulation didn’t work for social media companies, it didn’t work for the finance sector, and it won’t work for AI,” says Carsten Jung, a senior economist at the Institute for Public Policy Research, a progressive think tank that recently published a report advising on key policy pillars it believes should be discussed at the summit. (Jung isn’t on the guest list.) “We need to learn lessons from our past mistakes and create a strong supervisory hub for all things AI, right from the start.”

Kriti Sharma, chief product officer for legal tech at Thomson Reuters, who will be watching from the wings, not receiving an invite, is similarly circumspect about the goals of the summit. “I hope to see leaders moving past the doom to take practical steps to address known issues and concerns in AI, giving businesses the clarity they urgently need,” she says. “Ideally, I’d like to see movement towards putting some fundamental AI guardrails in place, in the form of a globally aligned, cross-industry regulatory framework.”

But it’s uncertain whether the summit will indeed discuss the more practical elements of AI. Already it seems as if the gathering is designed to quell public fears around AI while convincing those developing AI products that the U.K. will not take too strong an approach in regulating the technology, perhaps in contrasts to near neighbors in the European Union, who have been open about their plans to ensure the technology is properly fenced in to ensure user safety.

…

Already, there are suggestions that the summit has been drastically downscaled in its ambitions, with others, including the United States, where President Biden just announced a sweeping executive order on AI, and the United Nations, which announced its AI advisory board last week.

Ingrid Lunden in her October 31, 2023 article for TechCrunch is more blunt,

…

As we wrote yesterday, the U.K. is partly using this event — the first of its kind, as it has pointed out — to stake out a territory for itself on the AI map — both as a place to build AI businesses, but also as an authority in the overall field.

That, coupled with the fact that the topics and approach are focused on potential issues, the affair feel like one very grand photo opportunity and PR exercise, a way for the government to show itself off in the most positive way at the same time that it slides down in the polls and it also faces a disastrous, bad-look inquiry into how it handled the COVID-19 pandemic. On the other hand, the U.K. does have the credentials for a seat at the table, so if the government is playing a hand here, it’s able to do it because its cards are strong.

The subsequent guest list, predictably, leans more toward organizations and attendees from the U.K. It’s also almost as revealing to see who is not participating.

…

Lunden’s October 30, 2023 article “Existential risk? Regulatory capture? AI for one and all? A look at what’s going on with AI in the UK” includes a little ‘inside’ information,

…

That high-level aspiration is also reflected in who is taking part: top-level government officials, captains of industry, and notable thinkers in the space are among those expected to attend. (Latest late entry: Elon Musk; latest no’s reportedly include President Biden, Justin Trudeau and Olaf Scholz.) [Scholz’s no was mentioned in my my October 18, 2023 posting]

It sounds exclusive, and it is: “Golden tickets” (as Azeem Azhar, a London-based tech founder and writer, describes them) to the Summit are in scarce supply. Conversations will be small and mostly closed. So because nature abhors a vacuum, a whole raft of other events and news developments have sprung up around the Summit, looping in the many other issues and stakeholders at play. These have included talks at the Royal Society (the U.K.’s national academy of sciences); a big “AI Fringe” conference that’s being held across multiple cities all week; many announcements of task forces; and more.

…

Earlier today, a group of 100 trade unions and rights campaigners sent a letter to the prime minister saying that the government is “squeezing out” their voices in the conversation by not having them be a part of the Bletchley Park event. (They may not have gotten their golden tickets, but they were definitely canny how they objected: The group publicized its letter by sharing it with no less than the Financial Times, the most elite of economic publications in the country.)

And normal people are not the only ones who have been snubbed. “None of the people I know have been invited,” Carissa Véliz, a tutor in philosophy at the University of Oxford, said during one of the AI Fringe events today [October 30, 2023].

…

More broadly, the summit has become an anchor and only one part of the bigger conversation going on right now. Last week, U.K. prime minister Rishi Sunak outlined an intention to launch a new AI safety institute and a research network in the U.K. to put more time and thought into AI implications; a group of prominent academics, led by Yoshua Bengio [University of Montreal, Canada) and Geoffrey Hinton [University of Toronto, Canada], published a paper called “Managing AI Risks in an Era of Rapid Progress” to put their collective oar into the the waters; and the UN announced its own task force to explore the implications of AI. Today [October 30, 2023], U.S. president Joe Biden issued the country’s own executive order to set standards for AI security and safety.

There are a couple more articles* from the BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) covering the start of the summit, a November 1, 2023 article by Zoe Kleinman & Tom Gerken, “King Charles: Tackle AI risks with urgency and unity” and another November 1, 2023 article this time by Tom Gerken & Imran Rahman-Jones, “Rishi Sunak: AI firms cannot ‘mark their own homework‘.”

Politico offers more US-centric coverage of the event with a November 1, 2023 article by Mark Scott, Tom Bristow and Gian Volpicelli, “US and China join global leaders to lay out need for AI rulemaking,” a November 1, 2023 article by Vincent Manancourt and Eugene Daniels, “Kamala Harris seizes agenda as Rishi Sunak’s AI summit kicks off,” and a November 1, 2023 article by Vincent Manancourt, Eugene Daniels and Brendan Bordelon, “‘Existential to who[m]?’ US VP Kamala Harris urges focus on near-term AI risks.”

I want to draw special attention to the second Politico article,

Kamala just showed Rishi who’s boss.

As British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s showpiece artificial intelligence event kicked off in Bletchley Park on Wednesday, 50 miles south in the futuristic environs of the American Embassy in London, U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris laid out her vision for how the world should govern artificial intelligence.

It was a raw show of U.S. power on the emerging technology.

…

Did she or was this an aggressive interpretation of events?

*’article’ changed to ‘articles’ on January 17, 2024.

AI safety talks at Bletchley Park in November 2023

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There’s a very good article about the upcoming AI (artificial intelligence) safety talks on the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) news website (plus some juicy perhaps even gossipy news about who may not be attending the event) but first, here’s the August 24, 2023 UK government press release making the announcement,

Iconic Bletchley Park to host UK AI Safety Summit in early November [2023]

Major global event to take place on the 1st and 2nd of November.[2023]

– UK to host world first summit on artificial intelligence safety in November

– Talks will explore and build consensus on rapid, international action to advance safety at the frontier of AI technology

– Bletchley Park, one of the birthplaces of computer science, to host the summit

International governments, leading AI companies and experts in research will unite for crucial talks in November on the safe development and use of frontier AI technology, as the UK Government announces Bletchley Park as the location for the UK summit.

The major global event will take place on the 1st and 2nd November 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.

To be hosted at Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire, a significant location in the history of computer science development and once the home of British Enigma codebreaking – it will see coordinated action to agree a set of rapid, targeted measures for furthering safety in global AI use.

Preparations for the summit are already in full flow, with Matt Clifford and Jonathan Black recently appointed as the Prime Minister’s Representatives. Together they’ll spearhead talks and negotiations, as they rally leading AI nations and experts over the next three months to ensure the summit provides a platform for countries to work together on further developing a shared approach to agree the safety measures needed to mitigate the risks of AI.

Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said:

“The UK has long been home to the transformative technologies of the future, so there is no better place to host the first ever global AI safety summit than at Bletchley Park this November.

To fully embrace the extraordinary opportunities of artificial intelligence, we must grip and tackle the risks to ensure it develops safely in the years ahead.

With the combined strength of our international partners, thriving AI industry and expert academic community, we can secure the rapid international action we need for the safe and responsible development of AI around the world.”

Technology Secretary Michelle Donelan said:

“International collaboration is the cornerstone of our approach to AI regulation, and we want the summit to result in leading nations and experts agreeing on a shared approach to its safe use.

The UK is consistently recognised as a world leader in AI and we are well placed to lead these discussions. The location of Bletchley Park as the backdrop will reaffirm our historic leadership in overseeing the development of new technologies.

AI is already improving lives from new innovations in healthcare to supporting efforts to tackle climate change, and November’s summit will make sure we can all realise the technology’s huge benefits safely and securely for decades to come.”

The summit will also build on ongoing work at international forums including the OECD, Global Partnership on AI, Council of Europe, and the UN and standards-development organisations, as well as the recently agreed G7 Hiroshima AI Process.

The UK boasts strong credentials as a world leader in AI. The technology employs over 50,000 people, directly supports one of the Prime Minister’s five priorities by contributing £3.7 billion to the economy, and is the birthplace of leading AI companies such as Google DeepMind. It has also invested more on AI safety research than any other nation, backing the creation of the Foundation Model Taskforce with an initial £100 million.

Foreign Secretary James Cleverly said:

“No country will be untouched by AI, and no country alone will solve the challenges posed by this technology. In our interconnected world, we must have an international approach.

The origins of modern AI can be traced back to Bletchley Park. Now, it will also be home to the global effort to shape the responsible use of AI.”

Bletchley Park’s role in hosting the summit reflects the UK’s proud tradition of being at the frontier of new technology advancements. Since Alan Turing’s celebrated work some eight decades ago, computing and computer science have become fundamental pillars of life both in the UK and across the globe.

Iain Standen, CEO of the Bletchley Park Trust, said:

“Bletchley Park Trust is immensely privileged to have been chosen as the venue for the first major international summit on AI safety this November, and we look forward to welcoming the world to our historic site.

It is fitting that the very spot where leading minds harnessed emerging technologies to influence the successful outcome of World War 2 will, once again, be the crucible for international co-ordinated action.

We are incredibly excited to be providing the stage for discussions on global safety standards, which will help everyone manage and monitor the risks of artificial intelligence.”

The roots of AI can be traced back to the leading minds who worked at Bletchley during World War 2, with codebreakers Jack Good and Donald Michie among those who went on to write extensive works on the technology. In November [2023], it will once again take centre stage as the international community comes together to agree on important guardrails which ensure the opportunities of AI can be realised, and its risks safely managed.

The announcement follows the UK government allocating £13 million to revolutionise healthcare research through AI, unveiled last week. The funding supports a raft of new projects including transformations to brain tumour surgeries, new approaches to treating chronic nerve pain, and a system to predict a patient’s risk of developing future health problems based on existing conditions.

Tom Gerken’s August 24, 2023 BBC news article (an analysis by Zoe Kleinman follows as part of the article) fills in a few blanks, Note: Links have been removed,

…

World leaders will meet with AI companies and experts on 1 and 2 November for the discussions.

The global talks aim to build an international consensus on the future of AI.

The summit will take place at Bletchley Park, where Alan Turing, one of the pioneers of modern computing, worked during World War Two.

…

It is unknown which world leaders will be invited to the event, with a particular question mark over whether the Chinese government or tech giant Baidu will be in attendance.

The BBC has approached the government for comment.

The summit will address how the technology can be safely developed through “internationally co-ordinated action” but there has been no confirmation of more detailed topics.

It comes after US tech firm Palantir rejected calls to pause the development of AI in June, with its boss Alex Karp saying it was only those with “no products” who wanted a pause.

And in July [2023], children’s charity the Internet Watch Foundation called on Mr Sunak to tackle AI-generated child sexual abuse imagery, which it says is on the rise.

Kleinman’s analysis includes this, Note: A link has been removed,

…

Will China be represented? Currently there is a distinct east/west divide in the AI world but several experts argue this is a tech that transcends geopolitics. Some say a UN-style regulator would be a better alternative to individual territories coming up with their own rules.

If the government can get enough of the right people around the table in early November [2023], this is perhaps a good subject for debate.

…

Three US AI giants – OpenAI, Anthropic and Palantir – have all committed to opening London headquarters.

But there are others going in the opposite direction – British DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman chose to locate his new AI company InflectionAI in California. He told the BBC the UK needed to cultivate a more risk-taking culture in order to truly become an AI superpower.

…

Many of those who worked at Bletchley Park decoding messages during WW2 went on to write and speak about AI in later years, including codebreakers Irving John “Jack” Good and Donald Michie.

Soon after the War, [Alan] Turing proposed the imitation game – later dubbed the “Turing test” – which seeks to identify whether a machine can behave in a way indistinguishable from a human.

There is a Bletchley Park website, which sells tickets for tours.

Insight into political jockeying (i.e., some juicy news bits)

This has recently been reported by BBC, from an October 17 (?). 2023 news article by Jessica Parker & Zoe Kleinman on BBC news online,

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz may turn down his invitation to a major UK summit on artificial intelligence, the BBC understands.

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While no guest list has been published of an expected 100 participants, some within the sector say it’s unclear if the event will attract top leaders.

A government source insisted the summit is garnering “a lot of attention” at home and overseas.

The two-day meeting is due to bring together leading politicians as well as independent experts and senior execs from the tech giants, who are mainly US based.

The first day will bring together tech companies and academics for a discussion chaired by the Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology, Michelle Donelan.

The second day is set to see a “small group” of people, including international government figures, in meetings run by PM Rishi Sunak.

…

Though no final decision has been made, it is now seen as unlikely that the German Chancellor will attend.

That could spark concerns of a “domino effect” with other world leaders, such as the French President Emmanuel Macron, also unconfirmed.

Government sources say there are heads of state who have signalled a clear intention to turn up, and the BBC understands that high-level representatives from many US-based tech giants are going.

The foreign secretary confirmed in September [2023] that a Chinese representative has been invited, despite controversy.

Some MPs within the UK’s ruling Conservative Party believe China should be cut out of the conference after a series of security rows.

It is not known whether there has been a response to the invitation.

China is home to a huge AI sector and has already created its own set of rules to govern responsible use of the tech within the country.

The US, a major player in the sector and the world’s largest economy, will be represented by Vice-President Kamala Harris.

…

Britain is hoping to position itself as a key broker as the world wrestles with the potential pitfalls and risks of AI.

However, Berlin is thought to want to avoid any messy overlap with G7 efforts, after the group of leading democratic countries agreed to create an international code of conduct.

Germany is also the biggest economy in the EU – which is itself aiming to finalise its own landmark AI Act by the end of this year.

It includes grading AI tools depending on how significant they are, so for example an email filter would be less tightly regulated than a medical diagnosis system.

The European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen is expected at next month’s summit, while it is possible Berlin could send a senior government figure such as its vice chancellor, Robert Habeck.

…

A source from the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology said: “This is the first time an international summit has focused on frontier AI risks and it is garnering a lot of attention at home and overseas.

“It is usual not to confirm senior attendance at major international events until nearer the time, for security reasons.”

Fascinating, eh?