Let's deal with the risks and make AI a force for good in the world, pleads Sunak

ARTIFICIAL intelligence can revolutionise the world “dwarfing anything any of us have achieved in a generation,” Rishi Sunak said today but both he and Elon Musk issued warnings that it must not be allowed to spiral out of control

- Nicholas Cecil, Simon Hunt and Jitendra Joshi

As leading AI chiefs and world leaders headed to an artificial intelligence safety summit at Bletchley Park, once the top-secret home of Second World War codebreakers, the Prime Minister outlined its key aims to exploit the ground-breaking technology while limiting its threats.

They include to “agree on the risks of AI, inform how we manage them, discuss how we can collaborate better internationally and look at how safe AI can be used for good globally”.

Seeking to put Britain at the heart of the AI future, Mr Sunak tweeted: “Used in the right way, AI could dwarf anything any of us have achieved in a generation. It’s why I want to seize every opportunity for our country to benefit in the way I’m so convinced that it can.”

But before heading to the two-day summit in Buckinghamshire, billionaire Mr Musk, an early investor in OpenAI, gave a far starker warning: “You have to say how can AI go wrong,” he told the Joe Rogan podcast. “Well if AI gets programmed by the extinctionists, its utility function will be the extinction of humanity.”

Among the summit’s attendees were US vice-president Kamala Harris, European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen and UN secretary-general Antonio Guterres, with China’s technology vice minister Wu Zhaohui also expected to be there.