The Artificial Intelligence Summit in New Delhi ended on Friday 20 February with a joint declaration by leaders and heads of state on AI, co-signed by the EU, which recognises that “the promises of AI can only be fully realised if its benefits are shared by humanity”.
A number of European initiatives were launched at the Summit, including the establishment of a European Legal Gateway Office to connect European companies with Indian ICT talent, and the launch of the ‘Frontier AI Grand Challenge’, an EU-wide competition aimed at “stimulating the development of large-scale, sovereign European AI models”.
Two new calls for expressions of interest were also opened this week, both as part of the ‘Apply AI’ strategy (see EUROPE 13726/20). The first being to integrate healthcare organisations from across Europe into the network of advanced AI-based screening centres, and the second to bring together participants and experts at a forum on advanced AI.
As well as being a major global gathering of the world’s leading AI innovators and experts, this summit represents an opportunity for the EU - and India - to open up the possibility of a more sovereign third way between China and the United States.
They also rejected outright the idea of global governance of AI, despite the wishes of giants in the sector such as Sam Altman, the head of OpenAI: “The democratisation of AI is the best way to ensure the prosperity of humanity,” he said, adding that “the concentration of this technology in a single company or a single country could lead to ruin.”
“That’s not to say that we won’t need regulation or protective measures. We obviously need them, and urgently. (...) We believe that the world may need a body (...) for the international coordination of AI,” capable of “reacting rapidly to changing circumstances,” he said. (Original version in French by Isalia Stieffatre)