China, the US, the EU and around 20 countries signed the Bletchley Declaration for the “safe” development of artificial intelligence (AI) in the UK on Wednesday. This happened at the first international summit on the rapid development of this technology.

“This historic declaration marks the start of a new global effort to strengthen public trust in AI by ensuring its safety,” said British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak on X (formerly Twitter).

The European Union and 28 countries meeting at Bletchley Park, north of London, agreed on the “urgent need to jointly understand and manage the potential risks” of AI through “a new global effort to ensure that AI is developed and deployed in a safe way. and responsible.”

Facing the growing potential of models like ChatGPT, the Bletchley Declaration “shows the world coming together for the first time to identify the problem and highlight the potential,” British Technology Minister Michelle Donelan told AFP.

The aim of the meeting “is not to lay the foundations for global legislation, but to chart a way forward,” he added.

Two international summits on AI will follow, in South Korea in six months and in France in a year.

Political leaders, AI experts and tech giants met for two days at the initiative of the UK, which wants to lead global cooperation in the field of AI.

Generative AI, capable of generating text, voice, or images in seconds based on a simple request, has made rapid progress in recent years, and the next generation of these models is coming this summer.

The British government has warned that while this offers great promise in medicine and education, it could also destabilize society, allowing weapons production and escape from human control.

In a published open letter, some of the “founding fathers” of this technology, such as Yoshua Bengio and Geoffrey Hinton, called for “the development and ratification of an international treaty on AI” to address “the potential catastrophic risks advanced systems pose to humanity.” humanity’.

The challenge is to define safeguards without stifling innovation by AI labs and tech giants. The EU and US, unlike the UK, have opted for regulation.