“I don’t know what the UK is bringing to the table in all this,” says Keegan McBride, lecturer in AI, government, and policy, at Oxford University’s Internet Institute.
“They’re so narrow in their focus.”
He and others in the British AI scene argue it would be better for the government to instead look at how it can help British AI companies compete at a moment of rapid change and huge investment in AI.
- that which has narrow, but potentially dangerous capabilities—such as models that could be used to develop bioweapons—
- and “frontier AI,” a somewhat nebulous concept that the UK is defining as huge, multipurpose artificial intelligence that matches or exceeds the power of large language models like the one behind OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
“Only a handful of companies are doing this,” says McBride. “They're almost all American or Chinese, and the infrastructure that you need to train these sorts of models are basically all owned by American companies like Amazon or Google or Microsoft.
- ”WIRED spoke to more than a dozen British AI experts and executives. None had been invited to the summit. The only representative of the UK AI industry known to be attending is Google DeepMind, which was founded in London but acquired by the search giant in 2014. That’s causing a lot of frustration.
Britain’s Big AI Summit Is a Doom-Obsessed Mess
UK prime minister Rishi Sunak’s global summit on AI governance
will focus on extreme scenarios of algorithms causing harm.
Many British AI experts would rather he focus on near-term problems.
THE UK GOVERNMENT, with its reversals on climate policy and commitment to oil drilling and air pollution, usually seems to be pro-apocalypse.
But lately, senior British politicians have been on a save-the-world tour.
Prime minister Rishi Sunak, his ministers, and diplomats have been briefing their international counterparts about the existential dangers of runaway artificial superintelligence, which, they warn, could engineer bioweapons, empower autocrats, undermine democracy, and threaten the financial system. “I do not believe we can hold back the tide,” deputy prime minister Oliver Dowden told the United Nations in late September.
- Dowden’s doomerism is supposed to drum up support for the UK government’s global summit on AI governance, scheduled for November 1 and 2.
The event is being billed as the moment that the tide turns on the specter of killer AI, a chance to start building international consensus toward mitigating that risk. . .
x
No comments:
Post a Comment