Sixteen world leaders in AI, including Google, Microsoft, IBM, and OpenAI, have committed to deactivate their own technology if it shows signs of causing a dystopian outcome.
The commitments were signed on the day of the inauguration of the AI Seoul Summit 2024, held this week in South Korea. The event is a sequel to last year’s Artificial Intelligence Security Summit, in which 28 countries and the EU signed the Bletchley Declaration, a shared vision to address risks related to Artificial Intelligence, but without specific or practical commitments.
Before this year’s event, British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol wrote an opinion article in which they stated: “The pace of change will continue to accelerate, so our work must also accelerate.”
A summit to prevent creating Skynet
The Seoul Summit resulted in a series of AI Border Security Commitments, under which signatories will publish security frameworks on how they will measure the risks of their AI models.
This includes defining when risks become intolerable and what measures the signatories will take at that time. And if the mitigations do not keep the risks below the thresholds, the signatories have committed to “not develop or deploy a model or system at all”.
Other signatories include Amazon, Anthropic, Cohere, G42, Inflection AI, Meta, Mistral AI, Naver, Samsung Electronics, Technology Innovation Institute, xAI, and Zhipu.ai.
All of this sounds great… but the details have not been finalized yet. And they won’t be until an “AI Action Summit” is held in early 2025.
The signatories of the Seoul document have also committed to exchanging their cutting-edge AI models and systems, sharing information, investing in cybersecurity and safeguards against internal threats to protect unreleased technology, incentivizing the discovery and reporting of vulnerabilities by third parties, labeling AI content, prioritizing research on the social risks posed by AI, and using AI for the greater good.
Among the attendees at the session were governments – the G7 plus Singapore, Australia, the UN, the OECD and the EU – along with industry representatives.
