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.

Kara Frederick, tech director at the Heritage Foundation, discusses the need for regulations on artificial intelligence as lawmakers and tech titans discuss the potential risks. The U.S. and other countries signed an agreement to collaborate and communicate on "frontier" artificial intelligence (AI) that will aim to limit the risks presented by the technology in the coming years. "We encourage all relevant actors to provide context-appropriate transparency and accountability on their plans to measure, monitor and mitigate potentially harmful capabilities and the associated effects that may emerge, in particular to prevent misuse and issues of control, and the amplification of other risks," the Bletchley Declaration, signed by 28 countries, including the U.S., China and members of the European Union. The international community has wrangled with the problem of AI, trying to balance the obvious and emerging risks associated with such advanced technology against what Britain's King Charles III called the "untold benefits." The Bletchley Declaration therefore lays out two key points: "identifying AI safety risks" and "building respective risk-based policies across our countries to ensure safety in light of such risks."

In the weeks leading up to the UK's AI Safety Summit, held on 1 and 2 November, prime minister Rishi Sunak repeatedly stressed the potential risks that artificial intelligence could pose to society. Then, on the second morning of the event, he told reporters that people must avoid "alarmist" claims – just before warning that AI could be as dangerous as nuclear war. It is safe to say there were mixed messages. But the summit was, of course, intended to disperse this fog of confusion: to examine the risks of AI, provide space for representatives of nations around the world to talk with business leaders and technology experts, and ultimately plan for a future that avoids disastrous pitfalls. The main takeaway was the new Bletchley Declaration, signed by 28 nations, including China and the US, and the European Union.

This week, UK prime minister Rishi Sunak is hosting a group of more than 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, began 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 key outcome of the first day of the AI Safety Summit yesterday was the Bletchley Declaration, which saw 27 countries and the European Union agree to meet more in the future to discuss the risks of AI. The UK government was keen to tout the agreement as a massive success, while impartial observers were more muted about the scale of its achievement.