Rishi Sunak has taken up senior part-time advisor roles at tech giant Microsoft and artificial intelligence start-up Anthropic. The former prime minister has been told he must not lobby ministers on behalf of the companies by the Advisory Committee on Business Appointments (Acoba), an independent watchdog which oversees the activities of former government figures. Sunak - who remains the MP for Richmond and Northallerton - will donate payments for the jobs to a charity he recently founded, the watchdog said. During his premiership, Sunak made tech regulation a significant priority, setting up an AI safety summit in 2023. In letters of advice sent to Sunak by Acoba and published on Thursday, his role at Microsoft was described as providing high-level strategic perspectives on geopolitical trends.

Elon Musk appears to have many obsessions. The world's richest man is evangelical about electric vehicles, space travel and Donald Trump. Another of his interests may yet have profound consequences for the UK: British politics. The billionaire is reported to be thinking of becoming the biggest donor in history with a rumoured 80m payment to Nigel's Farage's Reform UK party. Like so many who embraced Trump's bellicose brand of rightwing populism, Musk was radicalised by his frustration at lockdowns, according to Musk watchers.

What does success look like for the second global AI summit? As the great and good of the industry (and me) gathered last week at the Korea Institute of Science and Technology, a sprawling hilltop campus in eastern Seoul, that was the question I kept asking myself. If we're ranking the event by the quantity of announcements generated, then it's a roaring success. In less than 24 hours – starting with a virtual "leader's summit" at 8pm and ending with a joint press conference with the South Korean and British science and technology ministers – I counted no fewer than six agreements, pacts, pledges and statements, all demonstrating the success of the event in getting people around the table to hammer out a deal. The first 16 companies have signed up to voluntary artificial intelligence safety standards introduced at the Bletchley Park summit, Rishi Sunak has said on the eve of the follow-up event in Seoul.

Knowledge editing aims to inject knowledge updates into language models to keep them correct and up-to-date. However, its current evaluation strategies are notably impractical: they solely update with well-curated structured facts (triplets with subjects, relations, and objects), whereas real-world knowledge updates commonly emerge in unstructured texts like news articles. In this paper, we propose a new benchmark, Unstructured Knowledge Editing (UKE). It evaluates editing performance directly using unstructured texts as knowledge updates, termed unstructured facts. Hence UKE avoids the laborious construction of structured facts and enables efficient and responsive knowledge editing, becoming a more practical benchmark. We conduct extensive experiments on newly built datasets and demonstrate that UKE poses a significant challenge to state-of-the-art knowledge editing methods, resulting in their critical performance declines. We further show that this challenge persists even if we extract triplets as structured facts. Our analysis discloses key insights to motivate future research in UKE for more practical knowledge editing.

This month, the British prime minister, Rishi Sunak, convened government representatives, AI companies and experts at Bletchley Park – the historic home of Allied code-breaking during the second world war – to discuss how the much-hyped technology can be deployed safely. The summit has been rightly criticised on a number of grounds, including prioritising input from big tech over civil society voices, and fixating on far-fetched existential risks over tangible everyday harms. But the summit's biggest failure – itself a direct result of those biases – was that it had nothing meaningful to say about reining in the dominant corporations that pose the biggest threat to our safety. The summit's key "achievements" consisted of a vague joint communique warning of the risks from so-called frontier AI models and calling for "inclusive global dialogue" plus an (entirely voluntary) agreement between governments and large AI companies on safety testing. Yet neither of these measures have any real teeth, and what's worse, they give powerful corporations a privileged seat at the table when it comes to shaping the debate on AI regulation.

In an event following the UK's AI Safety Summit, entrepreneur Elon Musk spoke with UK prime minister Rishi Sunak about future AIs most likely being "a force for good" and someday enabling a "future of abundance". That utopian narrative about a future superhuman AI – one that Musk claims would eliminate the need for human work and even provide meaningful companionship – shaped much of the conversation between the pair. But their conversation's focus on an "age of abundance" glossed over the current negative impacts and controversies surrounding the tech industry's race to develop large AI models – and did not get into specifics on how governments should regulate AI and address real-world risks. "I think we are seeing the most disruptive force in history here, where we will have for the first time something that is smarter than the smartest human," said Musk. "There will come a point when no job is needed – you can have a job if you want for personal satisfaction, but the AI will be able to do everything." Musk also acknowledged his longstanding position of frequently warning about the existential risks that superhuman AI could pose to humanity in the future.

Artificial intelligence models must be better understood and subject to testing before any mandatory legislation to oversee the industry can be introduced, UK prime minister Rishi Sunak told the AI Safety Summit at Bletchley Park – but he also said that such efforts must be accelerated. Sunak announced the establishment of a UK AI safety institute last week that will engage with technology companies on a voluntary basis to ensure that their models are safe to roll out to the public. But the body won't have official regulatory powers and companies won't be compelled to submit to whatever testing protocols they set up. In a press conference that marked the end of the summit, Sunak said that regulation will ultimately be needed, but should be based on evidence. Large technology companies working on AI have agreed to engage with the new organisation, he said.

Speaking ahead of the event in London, US Vice President Kamala Harris said that world leaders "must address the full spectrum of AI risks to humanity" and listed examples of faulty algorithms in healthcare, the use of AI in making "deepfakes", misinformation and biased facial recognition.

The UK government's AI Safety Summit, which claims to be "bringing together the world to discuss frontier AI", has come under fire for a lack of diverse perspectives among its delegates, with critics dismissing it as little more than a photo opportunity. Prime minister Rishi Sunak is hosting a group of 100 representatives from business, politics and academia at Bletchley Park on 1 and 2 November to discuss the risks of so-called "frontier" AI models – defined as "highly capable general-purpose AI models that can perform a wide variety of tasks and match or exceed the capabilities present in today's most advanced models". But the government has not publicly revealed the list of delegates, and campaigners have criticised the narrow range of voices in attendance. Mark Lee at the University of Birmingham says the summit is a stage-managed "photo opportunity" rather than a chance for open discourse, and that it is focusing on the wrong problems. "We need an open debate," he says.

Britain is to open its first artificial intelligence summit, bringing together heads of state and tech giants at a technological landmark near London. The two-day summit begins on Wednesday as concerns grow that the emerging technology may pose a danger to humanity. The meeting will focus on strategising a global, coordinated effort to address the risks and misuse of AI tools. The summit is led by UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, who has called AI "the defining technology of our time". The summit will take place on Wednesday and Thursday.