PM Rishi Sunak said UK will set up World's first AI safety Institute

British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak delivers a speech on AI at Royal Society, Carlton House Terrace on Oct. 26, 2023 in London, England.

The world is evolving. We are developing new technologies. Artificial Intelligence is getting better each day. With its advancements, the risks posed by Artificial Intelligence are also increasing. 

As we witness the rapid developments in the field of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, we also need to consider the potential risks that Artificial Intelligence and its uses pose.

United Kingdom's Prime Minister Rishi Sunak on Thursday addressed these concerns and warned of the risk of Artificial Intelligence. The warning comes as the UK is preparing for a global summit where policies of safety around technologies will be discussed. The UK wants to take a global role and emerge as a leader in the implementation and regulations of technologies.

Sunak said in a speech that AI “will bring a transformation as far-reaching as the industrial revolution, the coming of electricity, or the birth of the internet” — while adding that there are risks attached to that proposition.

The prime minister said that AI could make it easier to build chemical or biological weapons and that criminals could exploit the technology.

“In the most unlikely but extreme cases, there is even the risk that humanity could lose control of AI completely through the kind of AI sometimes referred to as super intelligence,” Sunak said.

Sunak’s speech came as the British government gears up to host the AI Safety Summit next week. The event aims to bring together countries and companies to discuss the risks around AI. It will take place in Bletchley Park — the home of the codebreakers who cracked the code that ended World War II.

On Wednesday, the U.K. government released a report called “Capabilities and risks from frontier AI,” in which it explains frontier AI as “highly capable general-purpose AI models that can perform a wide variety of tasks and match or exceed the capabilities present in today’s most advanced models.”

This definition includes some of the large language models that underpin applications such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard chatbot.

PM Sunak announced that the U.K. will set up the world’s first AI safety institute to evaluate and test new types of AI to understand the risks.

At the AI Safety Summit next week, PM Sunak said he will propose to set up a “truly global expert panel nominated by the countries and organizations attending to publish a state of AI science report.”

The U.S. and China are broadly seen as the two leaders in AI, serving as home to some of the world’s leading companies in the space. The U.K. has some notable AI firms, such as Alphabet-owned DeepMind, as well as strong tech-geared universities. But Britain is seen as a distant third contender, behind China and the U.S.

Britain is trying to position itself as a leader in the area of AI safety and is trying to lead the charge to police the technology.

Sunak said China has been invited to the summit next week.

“Now, I know there are some who will say that [China] should have been excluded. But there can be no serious strategy for AI without at least trying to engage all of the world’s leading AI powers,” Sunak said.

China and the U.S. have been engaged in a battle for technology supremacy, with Washington looking to restrict Beijing’s access to key technologies related to AI. Meanwhile, China has been introducing a slew of regulations around AI over the past year and a half, as Beijing looks to keep a close watch on the development of the technology.

The efforts of the UK to become a leader in making regulations of AI and other modern technologies come despite the UK having made no significant achievements in the fields. 

It is necessary to regulate new technologies, so their misuse can be avoided. Governments of all countries are working and collaborating to work out this issue.

The Government of India has tightened its regulations for tech and other big companies in the last 2 years.