Yoon, British PM say AI Seoul Summit will discuss innovation, safety, inclusivity

A global summit on artificial intelligence to be co-hosted by South Korea and Britain this week will present global AI governance principles to foster innovation, safety and inclusivity, the two nations' leaders said Monday.

In a joint opinion article, President Yoon Suk Yeol and British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak said the upcoming AI Seoul Summit aims to build on the conversation from the first AI Safety Summit held in England last November to address risks and triumphs of the fast-evolving technology.

"When we meet with companies at the AI Seoul Summit, we will ask them to do more to show how they assess and respond to risk within their organizations. We will also take the next steps on shaping the global standards that will avoid a race to the bottom," said the opinion published on South Korea's JoonAng Ilbo and Britain's i-Newspaper.

"The AI Seoul Summit will help to create a vision for AI governance which deals with those gaps, while promoting the fundamental priorities of innovation, safety, and inclusivity," it wrote.

The AI Seoul Summit will kick off Tuesday with leaders of major countries and global tech firms attending, under the theme of "Building on the AI Safety Summit: towards an innovative and inclusive future."

The gathering will largely come in as two sessions, a virtual leaders' summit and a ministerial meeting, followed by an AI Global Forum involving key industry leaders and members of academia.

On Tuesday, Yoon and Sunak will co-host the virtual leaders' session, with the attendance of Group of Seven countries -- the United States, Canada, France, Germany, Italy and Japan -- as well as Singapore and Australia, Wang Yun-jong, presidential secretary for economic security, said in a briefing.

Representatives from the United Nations, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, as well as major tech companies, including ChatGPT maker OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, Meta, Samsung and Naver, were also invited to the summit, he added.

On Wednesday, the AI Global Forum will also take place, solely hosted by the South Korean government as proposed by Yoon during his keynote address to the UN General Assembly last year to launch a new AI global governance structure. (Yonhap)