As many people have heard, an international AI safety summit was held on the first and second of November in 2023 by UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak in Bletchley Park, Buckinghamshire. 

In July of 1941, Alan Turing cracked the German Enigma code and changed the course of World War II, making Bletchley Park a very fitting place to discuss the technological threats of our present day. The summit brought together many countries and large corporations, including OpenAI, Microsoft, Meta, Google, the US, to discuss the dangers of AI and to figure out ways to help with relieving the risks of its use.

There were five main objectives of the meetings:

1. To gain a shared understanding of the risks presented by AI and the need for counter-measures
2. To create a process for international collaboration on AI safety
3. To install measures that individual organizations can take to increase AI safety
4. To establish areas for potential collaboration on AI safety research
5. And to showcase how guaranteeing the safe development of AI will enable it to be used for good globally

The summit gained the name ‘The Godfather of AI’ as Geoffrey Hinton, a 75-year-old British Canadian who has spent 50 years developing AI, left Google to sound the alarm for how AI may soon be able to outperform humans. Since 2013, he has divided his time between working for Google and at the University of Toronto. He left Google in May of 2023 due to concerns about AI safety and its rapid growth. 

With AI becoming such a big part of global news, you may be wondering “What is the issue? I’ve talked with AI before and nothing went wrong.” According to Stanford University , “AI systems prove to be increasingly beneficial in real-world applications, they have broadened their reach, causing risks of misuse.” Because of increased use globally, more people will have access to potentially unregulated information on topics that can be used for harm. While many people believe that an AI algorithm would be less biased than humans, Amazon found that their AI hiring tool was trained on “historical data” and, as a result, was systematically biased against women. Amazon discarded this hiring tool in 2018.

Looking into the future, it seems like AI will be making the headlines for many years to come, whether it be for good or bad, as the technology continues to evolve and expand.