Downing Street has insisted Rishi Sunak is not being snubbed by other world leaders, despite many of them not being expected to attend his summit on artificial intelligence at Bletchley Park this week. No 10 said the government was pleased with the responses it had had to invitations to the summit, which Sunak announced earlier this year as he strives to put the UK at the forefront of international AI regulation. But the prime minister is likely to be joined by relatively few of his international counterparts, with many sending more junior ministers or officials instead. Among those who have chosen not to attend are Joe Biden, the US president who is sending Kamala Harris, the vice-president, instead, and Emmanuel Macron, the French president. Justin Trudeau, the Canadian prime minister, is sending his science minister, François-Philippe Champagne, although may attend the second day virtually, sources have said.

This article is from Big Technology, a newsletter by Alex Kantrowitz. Sam Altman sat comfortably between Satya Nadella and Sundar Pichai at a White House gathering of top A.I. CEOs in May--with one noticeable gap in the guest list. With Alphabet, Microsoft, and OpenAI in attendance, it was impossible to miss Mark Zuckerberg's absence. And that appeared to be no accident. The meeting, one administration official said, "was focused on companies currently leading in the space."

President Joe Biden has unveiled the most sweeping actions ever taken to control artificial intelligence to ensure the tech cannot be transformed into a weapon. The order, unveiled Monday, will require developers like Microsoft, OpenAI and Google to conduct safety tests and submit results before launching models for the public. These results will be analyzed by federal agencies, including Homeland Security, to address threats to critical infrastructure and chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear and cybersecurity risks. Biden believes the government was late to address the dangers of social media, and now US youth are grappling with related mental health issues. Monday's executive order is an'urgent' move to rein in the technology before it warps basic notions of truth with false images, deepens racial and social inequalities, provides a tool to scammers and criminals and is used for warfare.

Tech companies will be required to share test results for their artificial intelligence systems with the US government before they are released, under an executive order issued by the White House. The government will also set stringent testing guidelines under the order which was published on Monday, ahead of a landmark AI safety summit in the UK on 1 and 2 November. "As we advance this agenda at home, the administration will work with allies and partners abroad on a strong international framework to govern the development and use of AI," said the order. Companies developing AI models that pose a threat to national security, economic security or health and safety must share their safety test results with the government. The government will set guidelines for so-called red-team testing, where assessors emulate rogue actors in their test procedures.

In South Africa, there are drones monitoring weeds; in Mauritius, there are computers crunching health data for better outcomes for patients; and in Nairobi, surveillance systems impose a modicum of order on the chaotic traffic. The bright new future of artificial intelligence in Africa is part of the bright new future of the continent as a whole, advocates say. "One thing is clear: Africans have a goldmine at our fingertips. A rapidly growing population of 1.4 billion people, 70% under the age of 30, combined with huge growth in AI investments, creates a potent recipe … We will not sit back and wait for the rest of the world to reap our rewards," wrote Mahamudu Bawumia, the vice-president of Ghana and head of the government's economic management team, in the Guardian earlier this year. Growing alarm about the threats posed by uncontrolled innovation in artificial intelligence has prompted global leaders to hold the first ever safety summit.

My new science fiction/science fact article for Science Robotics is out on why deep ocean robotics is hard. Especially when trying to bring up a sunken submarine 3 miles underwater, which the CIA actually did in 1974. It's even harder if you're trying to bring up an alien spaceship- which is the plot of Harry Turtledove's new sci-fi novel Three Miles Under. Though the expedition was 50 years before the OceanGate Titan tragedy, the same challenges exist for today's robots. The robotics science in the book is very real, the aliens, not so much.

President Biden on Monday will sign what the White House is calling a "landmark" executive order that contains the "most sweeping actions ever taken to protect Americans from the potential risks of AI systems." Among them is requiring that artificial intelligence developers share their safety-test results – known as red-team testing – with the federal government. "In accordance with the Defense Production Act, the Order will require that companies developing any foundation model that poses a serious risk to national security, national economic security, or national public health and safety must notify the federal government when training the model, and must share the results of all red-team safety tests," the White House says. "These measures will ensure AI systems are safe, secure, and trustworthy before companies make them public." "The National Institute of Standards and Technology will set the rigorous standards for extensive red-team testing to ensure safety before public release," the White House continued.

In the weeks since Hamas launched its October 7 surprise attack on Israel, the ensuing conflict has generated an unprecedented wave of disinformation, an "algorithmically driven fog of war" that has tripped up major new organizations and left social media companies floundering. Yet, amid all of the deceptive images and video moving around on social media, the content generated by artificial intelligence tools has remained relatively peripheral. Even as some wondered if the Israel-Hamas war would be the first conflict dominated by false generative AI images, the technology has had a more complex and subtle impact. "There are definitely AI images circulating but not to the degree where I think it's playing a central role in the spread of information," says Layla Mashkoor, an associate editor at the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab, which studies online disinformation. Primarily, Mashkoor says, AI-generated disinformation is being used by activists to solicit support--or give the impression of wider support--for a particular side.

The executive order comes just days before Harris is expected to promote the United States' vision for AI regulation at Britain's AI Summit, a two-day event that will gather leaders from around the world to talk about how to respond to the most risky applications of the technology. The executive order signals that the Biden administration is taking a different approach than the United Kingdom, which to date has signaled a light-touch posture toward AI companies and is focusing its summit on long-term threats of AI, including the possibility that the technology overpowers humans.

The Biden Administration unveiled its ambitious next steps in addressing and regulating artificial intelligence development on Monday. Its expansive new executive order seeks to establish further protections for the public as well as improve best practices for federal agencies and their contractors. "The President several months ago directed his team to pull every lever," a senior administration official told reporters on a recent press call. "That's what this order does, bringing the power of the federal government to bear in a wide range of areas to manage AI's risk and harness its benefits ... It stands up for consumers and workers, promotes innovation and competition, advances American leadership around the world and like all executive orders, this one has the force of law." These actions will be introduced over the next year with smaller safety and security changes happening in around 90 days and with more involved reporting and data transparency schemes requiring 9 to 12 months to fully deploy.