SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — World leaders agreed to sign a new agreement on artificial intelligence as they met virtually Tuesday to discuss not only the potential risks of AI, but also its benefits and ways to drive innovation. is expected to be adopted.
The AI Seoul Summit was a follow-up to the first AI Safety Summit held in November at Britain's Bletchley Park, where participating countries agreed to work together to curb potentially “catastrophic” risks posed by rapid advances in AI.
The two-day conference, co-hosted by the South Korean and UK governments, comes as major technology companies such as Meta, OpenAI and Google unveil the latest versions of their AI models.
On Tuesday evening, South Korean President Yoon Seok-yeol and British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak are scheduled to meet other world leaders, industry leaders and heads of international organizations for a virtual meeting. The online summit will be followed by an in-person meeting with digital ministers, experts and others on Wednesday, organizers said.
“It has only been six months since world leaders met at Bletchley, but even in this short time the landscape for AI has changed dramatically,” Yoon and Sunak said in a joint article published in South Korea's JoongAng Ilbo newspaper and its British online edition on the iNews site on Monday. “The pace of change will only accelerate, so our efforts must also accelerate.”
The UK meeting focused on AI safety issues, but the agenda for this week's meeting has been expanded to include “innovation and inclusion,” Wang Yoon-jeong, deputy director of South Korea's National Security Agency, told reporters on Monday. told.
Wang said participants will then “discuss not only the risks posed by AI, but also its positive aspects and how AI can contribute to humanity in a balanced way.”
According to Park Sang-wook, President Yoon's senior presidential adviser for science and technology, the AI agreement will include the results of discussions on safety, innovation, and inclusiveness.
Leaders from seven wealthy democracies – the US, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and the UK – were invited to the virtual summit, along with leaders from Australia and Singapore, and representatives from the UN, EU and OpenAI. , Google, Meta, Amazon, and Samsung, according to the South Korean presidential office.
China will send a representative to Wednesday's face-to-face talks, but will not participate in the virtual summit, South Korea's presidential office said. China participated in the UK summit.
In their article, Yoon and Sunak said they plan to call on companies to do more to demonstrate how they assess and respond to risks within their organizations.
“We know that, like any new technology, AI poses new risks, including intentional misuse by people who wish to harm us,” the researchers said. “However, with new models being released almost every week, we are still learning where these risks can occur and how best to properly manage them. ”
The Seoul meeting is being touted as a mini-virtual summit, serving as an interim meeting until a full-fledged in-person meeting, which France has committed to hosting.
Governments around the world are scrambling to develop regulations for AI, even as the technology advances rapidly and threatens to transform many aspects of daily life, from education and the workplace to copyright and privacy. There are concerns that advances in AI could take away jobs, deceive people and spread disinformation.
The developers of the most powerful AI systems are also coming together to establish a unique, shared approach to setting safety standards for AI. Facebook parent company Meta Platforms and Amazon announced Monday that they are joining the Frontier Model Forum, a group founded last year by Anthropic, Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI.
In March, the United Nations General Assembly approved its first resolution on the safe use of AI systems. In early May, the United States and China held their first high-level talks on artificial intelligence in Geneva to discuss how to address the risks of rapidly evolving technology and set common standards to manage it. Ta.
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Associated Press writer Kelvin Chan in London contributed to this report.
