Rishi Sunak to hold live-streamed talks with Elon Musk after AI global safety summit

Rishi Sunak will meet Elon Musk this week for a live interview about artificial intelligence in the wake of the AI Safety Summit.

The summit at Bletchley Park in Buckingham, which begins on Wednesday, will bring together world leaders and ministers to work towards a global framework on regulating cutting-edge AI.

It will be attended by leaders including Italy’s Giorgia Meloni, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and US Vice President Kamala Harris, as well as tech executives from the companies developing the most powerful models.

After the summit concludes on Thursday, Mr Sunak and Mr Musk – the owner of X, formerly Twitter – will have a “conversation” on AI which will be broadcast online.

In the run-up to the gathering at Bletchley Park, where British codebreakers were based during World War II, the Government is making a series of announcements designed to convince the public that AI can be beneficial to their everyday lives while the dangers are kept under control.

Artificial intelligence tech which helps doctors diagnose lung cancer more quickly will be rolled out across 64 NHS trusts in England under a £21m plan to expand access to the tools, the Health Secretary said.

Steve Barclay added: “AI is already being used in the NHS to halve treatment times for stroke patients and to assist doctors in analysing brain scans, reducing the time between admission and treatment by more than one hour – saving valuable staff time and improving patient recovery.”

Meanwhile Suella Braverman, the Home Secretary, has worked with 27 companies and organisations on a plan to restrict the spread of child sex abuse imagery generated by AI.

She said: “The pace at which these images have spread online is shocking and that’s why we have convened such a wide group of organisations to tackle this issue head-on.”

The US administration has used the week of the summit to issue its own new guidelines on AI, including an unprecedented rule that tech firms at the forefront of AI development must “share their safety test results and other critical information”.

It said: “These measures will ensure AI systems are safe, secure, and trustworthy before companies make them public.”

And all members of the G7 group of wealthy large democracies agreed they would finalise a multilateral deal on AI co-operation by the end of this year.

Mr Sunak’s Frontier AI Taskforce, established in the summer to oversee the most powerful models which some experts believe could threaten the future of humanity, warned on Monday that “in the first half of 2024, we expect a small handful of companies to finish training models that could produce another significant jump in capabilities beyond state-of-the-art in 2023”.

The Taskforce said: “As these AI systems become more capable they may significantly augment risks. An AI system that advances towards expert ability at writing software could increase cybersecurity threats.

An AI system that becomes more capable at advancing biology could escalate biosecurity threats.” It admitted that attracting top researchers was “the hardest challenge we have faced”, given the funding available for top AI scientists in the private sector, but promised “prestige and learning opportunities” in its latest recruiting drive.

Separately a group of top experts including Yoshua Bengio, one of the pioneers of generative AI who has advised the UK Government, issued an open letter calling for the AI Safety Summit to produce an international treaty with strict safeguards on new technological breakthroughs.