Entrepreneur says ‘focus on the big guys’ at AI safety summit
British entrepreneur and artificial intelligence (AI) whizz, Mustafa Suleyman, has said it is more important to focus on controlling big tech before smaller companies.
“Focus on the big guys,” he said, “we have all the resources, we’re building the largest models and I think that’s a sensible place to start.
“There are a lot of near term risks that aren’t getting as much immediate attention but the first step for everybody to focus on are the big companies.”
Suleyman added that the conversation is evolving towards open source – where code is made publicly available for anyone to use – especially as smaller models and companies get “increasingly powerful”.
But “that’s a real conundrum” he said.
“There are positives, such as enabling innovation, academic experimentation and helping small startups to progress. At the same time, though, it allows anyone to have a huge impact in the world, “potentially unlike anything we’ve ever seen.”There are positives, such as enabling innovation, academic experimentation and helping small startups to progress. At the same time, though, it allows anyone to have a huge impact in the world, “potentially unlike anything we’ve ever seen”.
His comments came at Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s AI Safety Summit, held at Bletchley Park on 1 and 2 November, where Elon Musk is among those in attendance.
Also gathered at the summit is a hoard of politicians, policymakers and tech company representatives. They are discussing how to mitigate the ‘existential threats’ of frontier AI, which includes large language models such as Chat GPT.
“It feels like a historic moment,” said Suleyman, speaking to a small audience of journalists at the summit, “and some of the meaty topics are actually being discussed, like which capabilities are going to be regulated over the next five to 10 years, what is the status of open source and most importantly, what trajectory are we on and how quickly are things improving.”
Suleyman co-founded DeepMind, an AI research lab, alongside tech bro Demis Hassabis in 2010. The company was snapped up by Google in 2014 for a reported £400m.
Last year he founded Inflection AI, a tech company developing machine learning and generative AI models.