Two major steps towards governmental oversight of artificial intelligence (AI) took place this week in the United States and the United Kingdom. Behind both initiatives are moves by each nation to boost their AI research capabilities, and includ efforts to broaden access to the powerful supercomputers needed to train AIs.
On 30 October, US President Joe Biden signed his nation’s first AI executive order, with a huge swath of directives for US federal agencies to guide the of use AI — and put guardrails on the technology. And on 1–2 Nov, the United Kingdom hosted a high-profile AI Safety Summit, convened by Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, with representatives from more than two dozen countries and tech companies including Microsoft and Meta. The summit, held at the famed wartime code-breaking facility Bletchley Park, produced the Bletchley Declaration, which agrees to better assess and manage the risks of powerful ‘frontier’ AI — advanced systems that could be used to develop risky technologies, such as bioweapons.
“We’re talking about AI that doesn’t yet exist — the things that are going to come out next year,” says Yoshua Bengio, an AI pioneer and scientific director of Mila, the Quebec AI Institute in Canada, who attended the summit.
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