As the AI world gathers in Seoul, can an accelerating industry balance progress against safety?

This week, artificial intelligence caught up with the future – or at least Hollywood's idea of it from a decade ago. "It feels like AI from the movies," wrote the OpenAI chief executive, Sam Altman, of his latest system, an impressive virtual assistant. To underline his point he posted a single word on X – "her" – referring to the 2013 film starring Joaquin Phoenix as a man who falls in love with a futuristic version of Siri or Alexa, voiced by Scarlett Johansson. For some experts, that new AI, GPT-4o, will be an unsettling reminder of their concerns about the technology's rapid advances, with a key OpenAI safety researcher leaving this week following a disagreement over the company's direction. For others the GPT-4o release will be confirmation that innovation continues in a field promising benefits for all. Next week's global AI summit in Seoul, attended by ministers, experts and tech executives, will hear both perspectives, as underlined by a safety report released before the meeting that referred to potential positives as well as numerous risks.