The UK is to be the headquarters of the world’s first AI Safety Institute as the country takes the lead in examining and testing new types of artificial intelligence, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak announced in a speech in London on Thursday.

Ahead of hosting the first Global AI Safety Summit next week, the British Indian leader who completed one year in office this week said that he genuinely believes that technologies like AI (Artificial Intelligence) will bring a transformation “as far-reaching as the industrial revolution, the coming of electricity, or the birth of the internet”. But like those waves of advancements and the many positives that they offer, there are also "new dangers and new fears" that need to be tackled head on.

“Get this wrong, and AI could make it easier to build chemical or biological weapons. Terrorist groups could use AI to spread fear and destruction on an even greater scale. Criminals could exploit AI for cyber-attacks, disinformation, fraud, or even child sexual abuse,” warned Sunak.

He even touched upon the "most unlikely and extreme” fears around AI which is sometimes referred to as “super intelligence" or humanity losing control of the technology altogether.

“This is not a risk that people need to be losing sleep over right now. I don’t want to be alarmist. And there is a real debate about this – some experts think it will never happen at all. But however uncertain and unlikely these risks are, if they did manifest themselves, the consequences would be incredibly serious,” said Sunak.

“And when so many of the biggest developers of this technology themselves warn of these risks, leaders have a responsibility to take them seriously, and to act. And that is what I am doing today,” he said.

Announcing the new AI Safety Institute, he noted: “It 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." He went on to confirm investment of “almost a billion pounds” in a supercomputer "thousands of times faster than the one you have at home" and further investment of 2.5 billion pounds in "quantum computers", which can be exponentially quicker than even the supercomputer.

The speech comes in preparation for the Global AI Safety Summit to be held on November 1 and 2 at Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire – the home of modern computing where celebrated British mathematician Alan Turing’s team is said to have clinched the Enigma code around eight decades ago to turn the tide of World War II.

Sunak said: “We’re bringing together the world’s leading representatives from civil society to the companies pioneering AI and the countries most advanced in using it. And yes – we’ve invited China.

“I know there are some who will say they 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. That might not have been the easy thing to do, but it was the right thing to do.” The speech came as the UK government published a new paper into the capabilities and risks from AI for the first time, including an assessment by the UK intelligence communities. The publication will serve as a discussion paper at next week’s summit.

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