Second global AI security summit faces tough questions, lower turnout

Second global AI security summit faces tough questions, lower turnout

Last year, world leaders, corporate executives and academic experts gathered in Britain’s Bletchley Park for the world’s first global AI Security Summit, hoping to reach consensus on regulating a technology that some warn poses a threat to humanity.

Tesla mogul Elon Musk and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman sided with some of their fiercest critics, while China signed the Bletchley Declaration alongside the United States and others, signaling a willingness to cooperate despite rising tensions with the West.

Six months later, the second AI Security Summit, a virtual event co-hosted by Britain and South Korea, will take place as hype about artificial intelligence’s potential gives way to questions about its limitations.

“There are some very different approaches…it will be difficult to move beyond what was agreed at Bletchley Park,” said Martha Bennett, senior analyst at research and advisory firm Forrester, referring to the historic but necessarily broad agreement on AI security.

Deeper questions about the use of copyrighted material, lack of data and environmental impact also appear to be of little interest to such affluent congregations.

Although the organizers have presented an event comparable to Bletchley, some of its main participants have declined the invitation to Seoul.

Hype

As the first summit closed in November, British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak promised subsequent events would be held every six months so the government could monitor the rapidly developing technology.

Since then, attention has shifted from inherent risks to the resources needed to drive AI development, such as the vast amounts of data needed to train large language models, and the electricity that powers the growing number of data centers.

“The policy discourse around AI has evolved to include other important concerns, such as market concentration and environmental impact,” said Francine Bennett, interim director of data and the AI-focused Ada Lovelace Institute.

OpenAI CEO Altman has suggested the future of AI depends on the success of energy. In February, the Wall Street Journal reported he was also seeking to raise as much as $7 trillion to boost production of computer chips, a component currently in short supply.

But pinning the future of AI on scientific discovery and lucrative funding efforts may not be the best move, experts warn.

“The failure of technology to live up to the hype is inevitable,” said Professor Jack Stilgoe, an expert in technology policy at University College London.

“People will find surprising and creative uses for this technology, but that doesn’t mean the future will look the way Elon Musk or Sam Altman envisioned it.”

Shares in tech giant Meta plunged 13% last week after it announced it would double down on AI, although the results of big investments by Google and Microsoft were cheered by the market.

No plans

The South Korean summit on May 21-22 has always been billed as a “mini-summit” in anticipation of the next in-person gathering in Paris.

A virtual “leaders session” on the first day, followed by an in-person meeting of technology ministers on the second day, was explicitly designed to build on the legacy of Bletchley Park.

But far fewer leaders and ministers are set to attend, according to sources familiar with the matter, even with the French government postponing the next gathering to 2025.

A spokeswoman for the European Union did not rule out the bloc’s presence but confirmed its chief technology regulators – Margrethe Vestager, Thierry Breton and Vera Jourova – would not attend.

U.S. State Department confirmed it would send a representative to Seoul, but did not say who. The Canadian and Dutch governments said they would not attend.

Brazil’s government said it was still considering its invitation, citing a clash with the G20 event the country is hosting the same week.

The Swiss government said Ambassador Benedikt Wechsler, head of digitization at the Department of Foreign Affairs, will attend in person.

“Nothing will ever match the first gathering of its kind,” said Linda Griffin, public policy lead at Mozilla, the organization behind the Firefox web browser.

“Getting an international agreement is very difficult, so it may take several iterations of this event to find a rhythm.”

Griffin said there was no specific reason why Mozilla did not attend the Seoul summit but that it was focused on the Paris event.

Similarly, Google’s pioneering AI research unit DeepMind said it welcomed the summit, but declined to confirm its attendance.

Geoffrey Hinton, a former Google researcher, and the “godfather” of AI, told Reuters he had declined an invitation to the event, citing an injury that made flying difficult.

A British government spokesman said: “The Seoul AI Summit will build on Bletchley Park’s momentum to deliver further progress in AI safety, innovation and inclusion, bringing us all closer to a world where AI improves our lives across the board.”