“We call for global collaboration to share knowledge and make AI technologies available to the public under open source terms,” he said.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk is also scheduled to discuss AI with Sunak in a livestreamed conversation on Thursday night. The tech billionaire was among those who signed a statement earlier this year raising the alarm about the perils that AI poses to humanity.
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres and executives from U.S. artificial intelligence companies such as Anthropic, Google’s DeepMind and OpenAI and influential computer scientists like Yoshua Bengio, one of the “godfathers” of AI, are also attending the meeting at Bletchley Park, a former top secret base for World War II codebreakers that’s seen as a birthplace of modern computing.
Attendees said the closed-door meeting’s format has been fostering healthy debate. Informal networking sessions are helping to build trust, said Mustafa Suleyman, CEO of Inflection AI.
Meanwhile, at formal discussions “people have been able to make very clear statements, and that’s where you see significant disagreements, both between countries of the north and south (and) countries that are more in favor of open source and less in favor of open source,” Suleyman told reporters.
Open source AI systems allow researchers and experts to quickly discover problems and address them. But the downside is that once an an open source system has been released, “anybody can use it and tune it for malicious purposes,” Bengio said on the sidelines of the meeting.
“There’s this incompatibility between open source and security. So how do we deal with that?”
Only governments, not companies, can keep people safe from AI’s dangers, Sunak said last week. However, he also urged against rushing to regulate AI technology, saying it needs to be fully understood first.
In contrast, Harris stressed the need to address the here and now, including “societal harms that are already happening such as bias, discrimination and the proliferation of misinformation.”
She pointed to President Biden’s executive order this week, setting out AI safeguards, as evidence the U.S. is leading by example in developing rules for artificial intelligence that work in the public interest.
Harris also encouraged other countries to sign up to a U.S.-backed pledge to stick to “responsible and ethical” use of AI for military aims.
“President Biden and I believe that all leaders … have a moral, ethical and social duty to make sure that AI is adopted and advanced in a way that protects the public from potential harm and ensures that everyone is able to enjoy its benefits,” she said.
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