A godfather of AI is among hundreds of tech bosses and academics calling for an international treaty to avoid the technology's'catastrophic' risk to humanity. On the eve of the AI Safety Summit, Turing award winner Yoshua Bengio has signed an open letter warning the danger it poses'warrants immediate and serious attention'. It cites a survey that found over half of AI researchers estimate there is more than a 10 per cent chance advances in machine learning could lead to human extinction. Notably, among the signatories is one of China's leading AI academics, Professor Yui Zeng, a key representative of Beijing who is set to lead one of the sessions at the event in Bletchley Park. Government officials may well see his backing as a positive signal that China – whose invitation to the summit has proven highly controversial – is willing to cooperate on international regulation.

This week, UK prime minister Rishi Sunak is hosting a group of 100 representatives from the worlds of business and politics to discuss the potential and pitfalls of artificial intelligence. The AI Safety Summit, held at Bletchley Park, UK, begins on 1 November and aims to come up with a set of global principles with which to develop and deploy "frontier AI models" – the terminology favoured by Sunak and key figures in the AI industry for powerful models that don't yet exist, but may be built very soon. While the Bletchley Park event is the focal point, there is a wider week of fringe events being held in the UK, alongside a raft of UK government announcements on AI. Here are the latest developments. The global community has decided that the week of the UK summit is a ripe time to announce their own AI developments.

Fox News Flash top headlines are here. Check out what's clicking on Foxnews.com. Kamala Harris and British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak are reportedly to meet and discuss the wars in Ukraine and Israel during the vice president's trip to London this week to attend an artificial intelligence summit. Harris is expected to talk about the Israel-Hamas war and "consult on next steps in our support for Ukraine" with Sunak during a visit to London later this week, Reuters reported Monday, citing an unnamed White House official. The meeting comes days after a "60 Minutes" interview with Harris aired, in which the vice president addressed whether American forces might get involved on the ground in the Gaza Strip, where American hostages were taken during the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel.

This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic, Monday through Friday. Diana Henriques was first stricken in late 1996. A business reporter for The New York Times, she was in the midst of a punishing effort to bring a reporting project to fruition. Then one morning she awoke to find herself incapable of pinching her contact lens between her thumb and forefinger. Henriques's hands were soon cursed with numbness, frailty, and a gnawing ache she found similar to menstrual cramps.

Welcome to our October 2023 monthly digest, where you can catch up with any AIhub stories you may have missed, peruse the latest news, find out about recent events, and more. This month, we talk AI, bias, and ethics with Aylin Caliskan, learn more about probabilistic logic shields, knowledge bases, and sparse reward tasks, and find out why everyone should learn a little programming. AIhub ambassador Andrea Rafai met with Aylin Caliskan at this year's International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI 2023), where she was giving an IJCAI Early Career Spotlight talk, and asked her about her work on AI, bias, and ethics. In this interview they discuss topics including bias in generative AI tools and the associated research and societal challenges. In their IJCAI article, Safe Reinforcement Learning via Probabilistic Logic Shields, which won a distinguished paper award at the conference, Wen-Chi Yang, Giuseppe Marra, Gavin Rens and Luc De Raedt provide a framework to represent, quantify, and evaluate safety.

Kurt "The Cyberguy" Knutsson explains how facial recognition technology can help you find your perfect match. FIRST ON FOX: House lawmakers are eyeing legislation to make dating app users more aware of potential scammers who tricked victims out of more than $1 billion in a single year. Rep. David Valadao, R-Calif., is reintroducing his Online Dating Safety Act this week alongside Rep. Brittany Pettersen, D-Colo. If passed the bill would force dating apps and services to send users a fraud notification when they have interacted with someone banned from the app for using a fake identity or using the app to defraud others. Dating apps seen on the screen of an iPhone.

The UK's AI safety summit opens at Bletchley Park this week, and is the passion project of Rishi Sunak: a prime minister desperate for a good news story as his government looks down the barrel of a crushing election defeat. Sunak appears to want progress on AI to become his lasting legacy. Last week, he delivered a speech about the risks of AI if weaponised by terrorists and cybercriminals, and published a series of documents on "frontier AI", an industry term for generative AI tools such as ChatGPT and DALL-E. He even unveiled a UK AI safety institute. The slick – albeit very behind in the polls – Stanford MBA grad who likes to holiday in California had, to use a favoured phrase of his, "got to grips" with the problem.

The G7 has just agreed a (voluntary) code of conduct that AI companies should abide by, as governments seek to minimize the harms and risks created by AI systems. And later this week, the UK will be full of AI movers and shakers attending the government's AI Safety Summit, an effort to come up with global rules on AI safety. In all, these events suggest that the narrative pushed by Silicon Valley about the "existential risk" posed by AI seems to be increasingly dominant in public discourse. This is concerning, because focusing on fixing hypothetical harms that may emerge in the future takes attention from the very real harms AI is causing today. "Existing AI systems that cause demonstrated harms are more dangerous than hypothetical'sentient' AI systems because they are real," writes Joy Buolamwini, a renowned AI researcher and activist, in her new memoir Unmasking AI: My Mission to Protect What Is Human in a World of Machines.

The Pentagon placed 2,000 U.S. troops on a 24-hour notice to deploy. U.S. forces in western Iraq were targeted in another drone attack early Tuesday morning, according to a report, marking the latest in a string of assaults on American troops in the Middle East as the Israel-Hamas war continues. Two armed drones were used against Iraq's Ain al-Asad airbase, Reuters reported, citing a security source and a government source. The base hosts international troops that assist Iraq in defeating a terror group called the Daesh, or the Islamic State. No casualties or damage were reported.

In his speech Thursday, Sunak announced a new global AI Safety Institute in Britain that would "carefully examine, evaluate, and test new types of AI." He offered few specifics about how the agency would function, and whether there would be any legal requirements for companies to submit their models for assessments. Sunak said the British government has invested 1 billion pounds in supercomputing, 2.5 billion pounds in quantum computers, and he announced an investment of 100 million pounds into the use of AI to discover treatments for diseases.