Scientists Call For International Cooperation on AI Red Lines
Beijing, China - On March 10th-11th 2024, leading global AI scientists convened in Beijing for the second International Dialogue on AI Safety (IDAIS-Beijing), hosted by the Safe AI Forum (SAIF), a project of FAR AI, in collaboration with the Beijing Academy of AI (BAAI). During the event, computer scientists including Turing Award winners Yoshua Bengio, Andrew Yao, and Geoffrey Hinton and the Founding & current BAAI Chairmans HongJiang Zhang and Huang Tiejun worked with governance experts such as Tsinghua professor Xue Lan and University of Toronto professor Gillian Hadfield to chart a path forward on international AI safety.
The event took place over two days at the Aman Summer Palace in Beijing and focused on safely navigating the development of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) systems. The first day involved technical and governance discussions of AI risk, where scientists shared research agendas in AI safety and potentially regulatory regimes. The discussion culminated in a consensus statement recommending a set of red lines for AI development to prevent potential catastrophic and existential risks from AI. In the consensus statement, the scientists advocate for prohibiting the development of AI systems that can autonomously replicate, improve, seek power or deceive their creators, or those that enable building weapons of mass destruction and conducting cyberattacks. Additionally, the statement laid out a series of measures to be taken to ensure those lines are never crossed.
On the second day, the scientists met with senior Chinese officials and CEOs, including Kaifu Lee Lee, the founder of 01.ai. The scientists presented the red lines proposal and discussed existential risks from artificial intelligence, and officials expressed enthusiasm about the consensus statement. Discussion focused on the necessity of international cooperation on this issue.
Yoshua Bengio said “The IDAIS meeting in Beijing was an extraordinary opportunity to bring together experts from China and the West on the challenge of AGI-level AI safety”, and that “in order to reap the benefits of AI and avoid future catastrophic outcomes of AGI the leading countries in AI need to collaborate to better understand and mitigate those risks.”
About the International Dialogues on AI Safety
The International Dialogues on AI Safety is an initiative that brings together scientists from around the world to collaborate on mitigating the risks of artificial intelligence. This second event was held in partnership between the Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence and the Safe AI Forum, a fiscally sponsored project of FAR AI. Read more about IDAIS here.