The highly anticipated UK AI safety summit begins today

Today marks day one of the much-anticipated UK AI Safety summit, which will convene international governments, leading AI companies, and experts for two days of discussions. As detailed several weeks ago, Day 1 will center around roundtable discussions focused on comprehending Frontier AI risks and enhancing Frontier AI safety.

We now have a clearer understanding of the attendees, as the attendee list was closely guarded until yesterday. British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris, EU Chief Ursula von der Leyen, and U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres will all be in attendance. In total, representatives from 27 countries across Europe, Africa, Asia, North America, and South America will participate.

Additionally, 46 academic and civil society institutions will be present, including national universities such as Oxford and Birmingham (interestingly, Cambridge is not among them), as well as international institutions like Stanford and several other U.S. universities. China’s Academy of Sciences will also be represented. Organizations such as the Alan Turing Institute, the Ada Lovelace Institute, the Mozilla Foundation, and the Rand Corporation are also on the guest list.

Furthermore, 40 businesses and industry organizations will participate in the summit, including hyperscalers such as AWS, Google, and Microsoft, as well as several foundational model providers like OpenAI, Hugging Face, Inflection, and Anthropic. The UK Cybersecurity supplier Darktrace is among the attendees, along with semiconductor and GPU providers ARM, Nvidia, and Graphcore. Elon Musk will also attend on behalf of X AI and will join Prime Minister Sunak for a live discussion on X after the event.

Now, we await the outcomes of the event. Will it serve as a somewhat embellished public relations exercise for the UK government and many of the major tech providers, or will we witness meaningful actions? Let’s wait and see.