Britain will set up the world’s first artificial intelligence (AI) safety institute, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said on Thursday before he hosts a gathering next week of representatives of AI companies, political leaders, and experts.
The prime minister said the institute would be a world first and would test new types of AI for a range of risks from generating misinformation to posing an existential threat.
Announcing the move before next week’s global summit on AI safety at Bletchley Park, Sunak said the institute would “advance the world’s knowledge of AI safety”.
The institute “will advance the world’s knowledge of AI safety and it will carefully examine, evaluate and test new types of AI so that we understand what each new model is capable of, exploring all the risks from social harms like bias and misinformation through to the most extreme risks of all,” Sunak said in a speech in London.
He said it would explore “all the risks, from social harms like bias and misinformation through to the most extreme risks of all”.
A prototype of the safety institute, which the government hopes will become a vehicle for international collaboration on AI safety, already exists in shape of the UK’s frontier AI taskforce, which is scrutinizing the safety of cutting-edge AI models and was established this year.
Sunak said a pause in developing powerful models was not feasible. Asked after the speech if he would support a moratorium or ban on developing a highly capable form of AI known as artificial general intelligence, he said: “I don’t think it’s practical or enforceable. As a matter of principle, the UK has rightly been an economy and society that has encouraged innovation for all the good that it can bring. And I think that is the right approach.”