By Paul Sandle, Martin Coulter
BLETCHLEY PARK, England (Reuters) -China agreed to work with the United States, European Union and other countries to collectively manage the risk from artificial intelligence at a British summit on Wednesday aimed at charting a safe way forward for the rapidly evolving technology.
Some tech executives and political leaders have warned the rapid development of AI poses an existential threat to the world if not controlled, sparking a race by governments and international institutions to design safeguards and regulation.
In a first for Western efforts to manage its safe development, a Chinese vice minister joined U.S. and EU leaders and tech bosses such as Elon Musk and ChatGPT's Sam Altman at Bletchley Park, home of Britain's World War Two code-breakers.
More than 25 countries present, including the United States and China, as well as the EU, signed a "Bletchley Declaration" saying countries needed to work together and establish a common approach on oversight.
The declaration set out a two-pronged agenda focused on identifying risks of shared concern and building scientific understanding of them, while also developing cross-country policies to mitigate them.
Wu Zhaohui, China's vice minister of science and technology, told the opening session of the two-day summit that Beijing was ready to increase collaboration on AI safety to help build an international "governance framework".
"Countries regardless of their size and scale have equal rights to develop and use AI," he said.
Fears about the impact AI could have on economies and society took off in November last year when Microsoft-backed OpenAI made ChatGPT available to the public.
Using natural language processing tools to create human-like dialogue, it has stoked fears, including among some AI pioneers, that machines could in time achieve greater intelligence than humans, leading to unlimited, unintended consequences.
Governments and officials are now trying to chart a way forward alongside AI companies which fear being weighed down by regulation before the technology reaches its full potential.
"I don't know what necessarily the fair rules are, but you've got to start with insight before you do oversight," the billionaire Musk told reporters, adding that a "third-party referee" could be used to sound the alarm when risks develop.
While the European Union has focused its AI oversight on data privacy and surveillance and their potential impact on human rights, the British summit is looking at so-called existential risks from highly capable general-purpose models called "frontier AI".