Rishi Sunak’s AI-Generated Invitation List May Not Reach Its Target

Prime Minister Rishi Sunak had high expectations for his upcoming AI summit, aiming to gather top executives and world leaders to address the potential dangers of the technology. However, with less than two weeks remaining, the guest list lacks significant representation from powerful nations.

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau will miss their meeting with US President Joe Biden on 1-2. meeting at Bletchley Park in November. The people familiar with the matter asked to remain anonymous because the plans are not yet complete. With French President Emmanuel Macron and Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida still undecided, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni is the only Group of Seven leader to host so far.

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While there is still time for late additions, the lack of top leaders will dent the profile of the event as Britain seeks to establish an international approach to AI. Sunak is trying to place the UK at the forefront of developing and regulating a technology that he says could be “paradigm-shifting” while also posing risks that require “guardrails”.

Nevertheless, nations are making progress on a common approach to artificial intelligence, which is the UK’s main goal in organizing the summit. A draft release seen by Bloomberg this week shows representatives talking about the language and describing the technology as capable of causing “catastrophic harm.” The document also raises specific concerns about the impact of artificial intelligence on cybersecurity and biotechnology. The authorities aim to have the final wording published by October 25.

Despite the absences, all invited countries send high representatives according to the people. US Vice President Kamala Harris and Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo will attend the event, and Chinese Premier Xi Jinping will send representatives in her place. Canada is sending Industry Minister Francois-Philippe Champagne, and Germany is being represented by Digital Minister Volker Wissing.

“International representation varies from country to country,” the British government said in a statement. “As is completely normal for summits of this type, we do not confirm participants this far in advance, but we are confident that the right people will be there.”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was due to attend, but that now looks unlikely because of Gaza’s conflict with Hamas, the people said. The presence of European Union President Ursula von der Leyen is also now unclear due to the conflict.

About 100 people from 28 countries are expected to attend a summit of companies and industry experts on November 1, hosted by Technology Minister Michelle Donelan, and a small group of major companies and governments convened by Sunak the next day.

“This summit is about Sunak acting as a world leader and the UK setting the agenda, so it matters who turns up,” said Anand Menon, UK director at the Changing Europe think tank. “Meetings with the US and the EU will introduce global approaches to AI. The UK is simply not a big enough market to have the global influence to make such decisions on its own.”

Altman, Clegg

Sunak also hopes to welcome a number of senior Big Tech leaders. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Adobe Inc. CEO Shantanu Narayen have been invited, but neither has confirmed they will attend. Microsoft Corp.’s Brad Smith is likely to attend.

Former British Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg, now head of global affairs at Meta Platforms Inc., and James Manyika and Demis Hassabis of Alphabet Inc.’s Google and DeepMind Technologies Ltd. are expected to join, people familiar with the matter said. said. Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, Inflection AI’s Mustafa Suleyman and Coher’s Aidan Gomez confirmed their participation.

“It feels like a real moment for me personally and only in our industry to take these things seriously and get everyone around the table,” Suleyman, who grew up in the U.K. but now lives in Silicon Valley, said in an interview.

Britain aims to organize new intergovernmental and technology summits twice a year to keep regulation in step with developments. The draft document accompanying the communication presents proposals for convening an expert panel of academics from different countries to prepare an annual “state of knowledge report” on AI security.

Deep fakes

Representatives are expected to discuss risks related to cyber security, biotechnology and election interference. Members of the British government privately told Bloomberg that they are concerned about the use of so-called deep artificial intelligence in next year’s national elections.

Reaching an agreement at the summit is an ambitious goal for Sunak, and there are competing views from different parts of the world. One senior minister expressed concern that US tech companies could rely on Biden to limit regulation to light measures to avoid destroying opportunities to create future trillion-dollar AI companies.

While the United States has supported Britain’s efforts, the minister said it was ready to let Britain lead the tricky process of unifying the nations. In contrast, another British minister predicted that China would demand tighter state regulation of artificial intelligence in line with its philosophy of managing critical national infrastructure.

“In the past there’s been this adversarial relationship between industry and regulators, and now it has to be much more collaborative working together from the ground up,” Suleyman said.

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