Your weekly update on how AI is changing our lives. Our experts keep it clear and simple, so you can stay ahead of the game. This week we are focussing on AI regulation and 'Frontier AI'. Don't forget to explore our Archive and Share & Subscribe with your friends!
Do you feel safer yet? It’s been a bumper week for policy wonks, with politicians around the globe thrashing out new policies on AI safety; in the US, President Biden issued an Executive Order on the subject, while various heads of state convened in the UK to sign the Bletchley Declaration. With so much activity, there’s little doubt that we’re being protected from something; as ever with AI, however, nobody can quite agree on what the threat is.
The Executive Order attempts to solve this conundrum with broad strokes, outlining eight “policies and principles” that seek to ensure AI is governed “safely and responsibly.” It’s long on principle and short on policy, but has won praise from industry insiders for its focus on present-day issues such as threats to privacy, equality and workers' rights, rather than the more fantastical dangers that tend to dominate these discussions. Those plaudits were abruptly brought short, however, when a White House staffer admitted that President Biden was partly motivated by watching the latest Mission: Impossible movie, stating “If he hadn’t already been concerned about what could go wrong with AI before that movie, he saw plenty more to worry about.”
Another politician keen to be seen saving the world is beleaguered UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, who’s no doubt breathing a sigh of relief this weekend after his AI Summit at Bletchley Park was deemed a success. The summit had the potential to go very badly, not least due to early fears nobody would turn up, but a controversial decision to invite a delegation from the Chinese government imbued the conference with real significance. The result is the Bletchley Declaration on AI Safety, a global statement with similar intent to Biden’s Executive Order, but also a far greater focus on unspecified future threats posed by 'frontier AI.'
Like all the scariest threats, nobody’s entirely sure what form frontier AI will take, but even the harshest critics of AI doomerism found reasons to celebrate the summit. These include Yann LeCun, Meta’s Chief AI Scientist and the most anti-regulation of the three Godfathers Of AI. LeCun took to Twitter to praise the new “UK AI Safety Institute”, launched this week by Sunak; he believes it “is poised to conduct studies that will hopefully bring hard data to a field that is currently rife with wild speculations and methodologically dubious studies.”
If you can’t wait for the hard data, we’ve looked at all the wild speculation and dubious studies to help you make your own mind up: what exactly is frontier AI, and how concerned should you be about it?
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