AI does not understand traditional borders, needs regulation: Rishi Sunak

London: Artificial intelligence (AI) regulation, a topic that has been much debated, is poised to see decisive progress in the UK. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, while inaugurating the tenth edition of the London Tech Week on Monday, said the UK will take the lead in regulating AI. This is one of the three big missions Sunak listed, including focus on researching and building AI safeguards as well as deploying AI solutions including a £900 million investment in compute technology and £2.5 billion in quantum.

“AI doesn’t respect traditional national borders. So, we need global cooperation between nations and labs,” said Sunak. The UK will also host the first-ever summit on global AI safety, later this year. “I want to make the UK not just the intellectual home, but the geographical home of global AI safety regulation,” Sunak added.

AI companies are already making the first moves towards safeguards and regulation. “AI will play a critical role in shaping the future of our economy and society,” said Demis Hassabis, CEO and co-founder, Google Deepmind.

This definitive call for global regulation for AI comes at a time when more and more consumer-facing products as well asenterprise solutions relyon machine learning and generative AI. For consumers, the most exciting development has been the rise in AI chatbots, which now see millions of active users globally — examples include OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Microsoft’s Bing AI chatbot with Google’s Bard being the latest arrival.

AI is one of the big themes at this year’s London Tech Week, alongside virtual reality, augmented reality, climate tech, and fintech. India will play a big role, something the UK too would require, in the formation of AI regulations globally. The official figures peg the import of tech from India at £20.8 billion at the end of Q4 2022, an increase of 35%, or £5.4 billion, compared with 2021.

An illustration of the interest in AI, is the fact that Bing AI chatbot clocked 100 million users within the first week, when Microsoft released it earlier this year.

“Realising the potential of world-leading digital hubs like the UK and India, we can together create a culture of innovation, pave the way for next generation of technological advancement and global challenges together,” Harjinder Kang, UK’s Trade Commissioner for South Asia, told HT.

It is history that Sunak is taking inspiration from, referencing a letter written by Charles Babbage in the 1830s to the then Chancellor, thanking him for funding the difference engine, which is how the journey of the modern computers started.

Sunak hopes AI companies and the academia will work together to develop AI standards and safeguards. “We’re going to do cutting edge safety research here in the UK,” he said. The estimated investment earmarked for an AI task force is £100 million. Even within Europe, UK attracts more tech investment than France and Germany combined, a position the country wants to leverage.

“We’re dedicating more funding to AI safety than any other government,” said Sunak.

AI companies are already making progress, with confirmation that AI companies Frontier Labs, Google DeepMind, OpenAI and Anthropic, will give priority access to models for research and safety purposes, for evaluations and to better understand the risks of these systems.

“Now it is essential for both the public and private sectors to tackle this monumental challenge,” said Joanna Shields, CEO of Benevolent AI, talking about the need for regulation as well as safeguards for AI.

Any and all regulation, as well as the development of safeguards for AI, will cover not just chatbots but the larger generative AI space, including text to image tools, including the likes of Midjourney, Stability Diffusion and the recently announced Adobe Firefly integration within the popular Photoshop tool.

According to the latest estimates by Precedence Research, the generative AI market will be worth $118.06 billion globally, by the year 2032. This, up from an estimated $13.71 billion in 2023

However, generative AI-based solutions have been in the focus lately, for allowing users the tools to create fake images. Further pushing the case for regulation have also been the struggles of conversational AI, which often generates misinformation as part of search results.