British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak held a meeting this Wednesday with tech executives of OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and Anthropic to discuss ways in which society can best benefit from Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies and how to mitigate the risks posed by AI. In the perspective of the Prime Minister, OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Google DeepMind’s Demis Hassabis, and Anthropic’s Dario Amodei all brought their insights to bear on these questions and debated how AI could be used for the betterment of global society.
OpenAI is an AI research and technology development firm based in San Francisco, co-founded by Altman in late 2015 together with Elon Musk with the aim of preventing a potential “AI arms race”. Google DeepMind is a pioneering AI research lab based in London, acquired by Google in 2014. It’s Chief Executive, Demis Hassabis, have made headlines recently with their deep learning project AlphaFold, a project that achieved substantially improved results in the field of protein folding. Anthropic is an AI firm, headed by Dario Amodei, developing applications for real-world problems such as virtual assistants and automation of manual processes.
During the meeting, the parties discussed potential measures to protect society from the threats posed by AI, such as disinformation, national security concerns and existential anxieties. The tech leaders explored options for self-regulation of AI labs, as well as international collaborations in the area of safety and regulatory matters. Ultimately, the UK government proposed taking responsibility for AI governance, allocating areas of interest to existing regulatory bodies in the fields of human rights, health and safety, and competition.
By joining forces, the tech crew of OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and Anthropic alongside the Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, hope to ensure that AI technologies are employed for the public good and to bring together the best of their expertise to protect the world from the potential risks associated with Artificial Intelligence.
