Elon Musk Plans Live Interview With Rishi Sunak On AI

Elon Musk is expected to attend this week’s artificial intelligence (AI) summit at Bletchley Park, Milton Keynes, with UK prime minister Rishi Sunak saying he would conduct a live interview with the entrepreneur after Thursday’s session.

“In conversation with Elon Musk. After the AI Safety Summit. Thursday night on X,” Sunak wrote in a post on X, formerly Twitter, which Musk bought a year ago.

About one hundred world leaders, including US vice president Kamala Harris, are expected to attend the two-day event to discuss the risks and opportunities of artificial intelligence technology, which has grown rapidly over the past year due in large part to the wild popularity of OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

Musk, along two of the three “godfathers” of modern AI, Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio, signed an open letter in May warning of the “risk of extinction” from AI and calling for a pause in training advanced systems.

AI ‘godfathers’

Hinton and Bengio are also scheduled to attend the event, but the third “godfather”, Yann LeCun, who is now chief AI scientist at Facebook parent Meta, has called fears that AI could wipe out humanity “preposterous”.

Meta’s president of global affairs, the former UK deputy prime minister Nick Clegg, is to attend the summit, along with representatives of Google’s AI unit DeepMind, OpenAI and other tech firms.

Sunak and UK technology secretary Michelle Donelan are to attend, along with the US’ Harris, European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen and Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni, although the French and Canadian leaders are not attending.

The UK government has controversially invited China to send representatives, but deputy prime minister Oliver Dowden told the BBC last week that it wasn’t certain who would be attending.

Concrete steps

“It is the case they’ve accepted, but we will wait to see everyone who actually turns up at the summit,” he said.

The Telegraph last week cited unpublished documents as saying that Yi Zeng, a professor from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, was scheduled to lead a private discussion on the risk that AI tools could “unexpectedly develop dangerous capabilities”. Several other Chinese scientists were also invited to attend, the report said.

The summit’s first day, on Thursday, is to focus on potential risks from AI while the second day on Friday is scheduled to look at concrete steps that can be taken to address those risks.

Sunak has said he plans to call for an AI equivalent of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and to hold further regular international AI summits along the lines of the G7, G20 and Cop conferences.