Yoshua Bengio commissioned by the UK to Chair the “State of the Science” Report on the capabilities and risks of frontier AI
As host of the AI Safety Summit, the UK has commissioned Yoshua Bengio, Mila’s Founder and Scientific Director, Full Professor at Université de Montréal, Canada CIFAR AI Chair and Turing Award winner, to Chair the “State of the Science” Report on the capabilities and risks of frontier AI. This comes as part of the commitment in the Bletchley Declaration of 1 November 2023 by the countries represented to international cooperation and building a shared scientific and evidence-based understanding of frontier AI risks. The countries represented at Bletchley Park have also agreed to support the development of this report.
Professor Bengio will be supported by a diverse group of leading AI academics, composed of an appropriate number of individuals with the necessary variety of expertise, and advised by an Expert Advisory Panel comprising representatives from countries attending the Summit and other partner countries.
The intention of the “State of the Science” Report is to facilitate a shared science-based understanding of the risks associated with frontier AI and to sustain that understanding as capabilities continue to increase, through its narrowly defined scope to review the latest, cutting-edge, research on the risks and capabilities of frontier AI models.
Rather than producing new material, it will summarise the best of existing research and identify areas of research priority, providing a synthesis of the existing knowledge of frontier AI risks. It will not make policy or regulatory recommendations but will instead help to inform both international and domestic policy making.
The Report will be published ahead of the next AI Safety Summit. In focusing on frontier AI, it is also intended to help inform and complement other international initiatives, such as those led by the United Nations, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and the Global Partnership for AI (GPAI). Its analysis and international, independent and inclusive science-based approach will inform the activity of the United Nations’ Artificial Intelligence Advisory Board.
As the host of this AI Safety Summit, the UK will stand up the Secretariat to support the Chair and Expert Panel.
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“Throughout the AI Safety Summit, I was encouraged to see how seriously different governments, companies and civil society groups are taking the issues surrounding the rapid development of frontier AI systems. It is crucial that these key stakeholders come together to think about how to mitigate the risks they pose to our democracies and societies,” said Yoshua Bengio, Full Professor at Université de Montréal, Founder and Scientific Director of Mila – Quebec AI Institute and Canada CIFAR AI Chair. “In order to start collaborating on an international scale, it is essential to establish the scientific lay of the land on the risks and capacities of these systems, which will serve as a common basis for the next steps. I am honoured to have been appointed by the UK Government to lead the elaboration of the “State of the Science” Report which is a very important exercise to achieve that goal,” he added