Rishi Sunak heaps praise on Elon Musk hours before bromance date night

02 November 2023 , 16:51

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Rishi Sunak heaps praise on Elon Musk hours before bromance date night

Rishi Sunak has heaped praise on Elon Musk at a press conference which closed the UK's two-day AI Safety Summit.

The US West Coast-loving tech geeks will meet in London for a fireside chat about the risks of artificial intelligence this evening. The multi-millionaire Prime Minister sits down with the multi-billionaire owner of Twitter/X after the UK’s AI Safety Summit finishes at former codebreaking headquarters at Bletchley Park, Buckinghamshire.

Asked about his in-conversation sit down, the PM said Mr Musk was one of the "leading actors in AI". He added that he was "delighted" the Tesla chief executive, who founded of OpenAI (which developed the ChatGPT system), had attended the summit. "I think Elon Musk is someone who has for a long time spoken about AI. He is an investor and entrepreneur and has developed AI companies," Mr Sunak said.

"As one of the leading actors in AI, it's important that he was engaged in this summit, and I'm delighted that he was attending and participating yesterday. And actually it was probably around a decade ago that he first started talking about some of the risks that AI could pose and the importance of governments and others doing what is necessary to mitigate against those." But the PM dodged a question on why the conversation with Mr Musk was being pre-recorded and not live-streamed, and whether he was concerned about what the tech guru might say on air.

Rishi Sunak answered questions from the media at the close of the AI Safety Summit in Bletchley Park

In his speech, Mr Sunak celebrated the first global summit on AI, which saw representatives from across the globe including US Vice-President Kamala Harris discuss the benefits and concerns of AI. The PM said: "We agreed and published the first ever international statement about the nature of all those risks. It was signed by every single nation represented at this summit, covering all continents across the globe, including the United States and China."

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He said the nations at the summit had also made a "truly landmark agreement" for governments across the world to work together on "testing the safety of new AI models before they are released" by big tech companies.

Mr Sunak added: "The late Stephen Hawking once said, 'AI is likely to be the best or worst thing to happen to humanity.' If we can sustain the collaboration that we have fostered over these last two days, I profoundly believe that we can make it the best, because safely harnessing this technology could eclipse anything we have ever known."

Earlier today Science and Technology Secretary Michelle Donelan admitted a Doomsday scenario as portrayed in the hit 1984 Arnold Schwarzenegger sci-fi film was the main worry about AI. "That is a risk that is much more hypothetical in nature, that naturally is the one that I am most concerned about because it is the one that would result in the gravest ramifications," she told Times Radio. Told that was the "Terminator scenario", she added: "Well, that is one potential area where it could lead but there are several stages before that."

Asked whether a Terminator-style rise of the machines is possible, the Prime Minister said: "People developing this technology themselves have raised the risk that AI may pose and it's important to not be alarmist about this; there's debate about this topic. People in the industry themselves don't agree and we can't be certain. But there is a case that it may pose a risk on a scale like pandemics and nuclear war, and that's why, as leaders, we have a responsibility to act to take the steps to protect people, and that's exactly what we're doing."

Ben Glaze