The British media have dubbed it the "doom summit." On Wednesday and Thursday, November 1 and 2, at Bletchley Park north of London, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak's government will hold the first global conference devoted to the risks associated with artificial intelligence (AI). On this former base for British intelligence services – where mathematician Alan Turing managed to decipher the German encryption machine Enigma during the Second World War – around a hundred executives, business leaders and experts will discuss the existential risks posed by "Frontier AI": the most advanced generative AI models, capable of creating extremely elaborate content (video, images, sound, text) in record time.
Ahead of the summit, Downing Street, which has surrounded itself with experts of undisputed renown to prepare for this meeting (such as Yoshua Bengio, professor of computer science at the University of Montreal), published its own particularly gloomy conclusions on the risks associated with "Frontier AI." From 2030 onward, future generations of these models could help terrorist groups foment chemical attacks, enable cyberattacks of unprecedented scale and effectiveness, manipulate public opinion on a massive scale, and increase unemployment and poverty. They could even escape human control.
"I don't want to be alarmist [...] some experts think it will never happen at all. But [...] if they did manifest themselves, the consequences would be incredibly serious. [...] We could look the other way, but we think it's better to face up to this reality, because it's the best thing to do to protect the British people," explained Sunak on Thursday, October 26, from the site of the Royal Society of London, one of the world's oldest learned societies. For the 43-year-old leader, who did part of his studies at Stanford University in California and maintains a good network in Silicon Valley, claiming to be "pro-technology," it's not just a matter of scaremongering in an already anxiety-inducing climate.
With this summit, which he has instigated and devoted much energy to, the Conservative leader hopes to put the UK firmly on the map with regard to the field of artificial intelligence, as generative models advance at breakneck speed with obvious economic and geopolitical implications. The two giants of AI are China and the US – the latter home to the sector's leading companies (Google DeepMind, OpenAI, Amazon) – but Sunak stressed on Thursday that the UK is "the best place in Europe to raise capital, all of the leading AI companies choosing the UK as their European headquarters. [...] And AI presents huge opportunities for those who know how to control its risks."
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