U.K.'s AI Safety Summit Ends With Limited, but Meaningful, Progress

On an ordinary weekday in November, Bletchley Park plays host to a mixture of elderly pensioners and bands of unruly schoolchildren, visiting to learn about the codebreakers--including computing pioneer Alan Turing--who were based here during World War II, and helped the Allied Forces defeat the Nazis. But this is no ordinary week, and these are no ordinary visitors. On Wednesday and Thursday, delegates from 27 governments around the world, as well as the heads of top artificial intelligence companies, gathered for the world's first AI Safety Summit at this former stately home near London, now a museum. The high-profile event, hosted by the Rishi Sunak-led U.K. government, caps a year of intense escalation in global discussions about AI safety, following the launch of ChatGPT nearly a year ago. The chatbot displayed for the first time--to many users at least--the powerful general capabilities of the latest generation of AI systems.