AI Safety Summit: South Korea and the UK at a virtual AI-Seminar High-Resolution, High-Accuracy Conference

The second AI Safety Summit in the UK was held in November and resulted in countries agreeing to work together to contain the potentially “catastrophic” risks caused by the rapid advancement of artificial intelligence.

The two-day meeting — co-hosted by the South Korean and U.K. governments — also comes as major tech companies like Meta, OpenAI and Google roll out the latest versions of their AI models.

On Tuesday evening, South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol and British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak are to meet other world leaders, industry leaders and heads of international organizations for a virtual conference. The in-person meeting of digital ministers, experts and others will follow the online summit.

“It is just six months since world leaders met at Bletchley, but even in this short space of time, the landscape of AI has changed dramatically,” Yoon and Sunak said in a joint article published in South Korea’s JoongAng Ilbo newspaper and the U.K.’s online inews site on Monday. Our work must accelerate since the pace of change will only continue to accelerate.

Wang said participants will subsequently “discuss not only the risks posed by AI but also its positive aspects and how it can contribute to humanity in a balanced manner.”

China doesn’t plan to participate in the virtual summit though it will send a representative to Wednesday’s in-person meeting, the South Korean presidential office said. China was at the U.K. summit.

AI Safety Summit: South Korea’s Artificial Intelligence Summit meets the Frontier Model Forum, an OpenAI, Google, Microsoft and OpenAI network

The US government has previously said advances in AI create national security risks, including the potential to automate or accelerate the development of bioweapons or to enable more damaging cyberattacks on critical infrastructure.

The South Korean meeting was billed as a mini virtual summit until a full-blown meeting that France has pledged to hold is held.

Developers of the most powerful AI systems are also banding together to set their own shared approach to setting AI safety standards. Facebook parent company Meta Platforms and Amazon announced Monday they’re joining the Frontier Model Forum, a group founded last year by Anthropic, Google, Microsoft and OpenAI.

The US is seen as a global leader in artificial intelligence thanks to companies like OpenAI and Meta. But the US government says it needs help from other nations to manage the risks posed by AI technology.

China had been invited to join the new safety network, however the Department of Commerce declined to comment on that. The Trump administration and Biden administration wanted to prevent China’s use of advanced artificial intelligence to threaten the US, and therefore imposed a series of restrictions on the Chinese.