PARIS – Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is in Paris at present, the place he is scheduled to participate in occasions main as much as the worldwide summit on synthetic intelligence that begins Monday.
He is set to take part in a roundtable dialogue on AI hosted by Canada’s ambassador to France and attend a reception with members of the AI group, earlier than ending the day at a personal dinner with the French president.
Consultants say the AI Motion Summit is an opportunity to show Canada’s power with regards to synthetic intelligence.
Florian Martin-Bariteau, analysis chair in expertise and society on the College of Ottawa, mentioned “it is essential to place Canada and to remind those who Canada has one thing to say.”
Martin-Bariteau mentioned Canada has been a frontrunner in AI governance, citing the 2017 Montreal declaration on accountable AI.
In 2020, Canada and France additionally collectively launched the World Partnership on Synthetic Intelligence, which is now being built-in with the OECD. On the time, the Canadian authorities described it as a world collaboration involving “tasks targeted on making certain AI is human-centred by design and fostering public belief in its use.”
Trudeau is scheduled to talk at a closing ceremony of a casual ministerial assembly associated to that partnership Sunday.
Each initiatives predate the emergence of widely-available generative AI that has invigorated the dialog round AI security and regulation up to now few years.
Because the launch of ChatGPT introduced the difficulty into the forefront, there have been two worldwide conferences, largely targeted on AI security and danger. The primary passed off at Bletchley Park within the U.Ok. in 2023, and the second in Soeul, South Korea, in 2024.
The 2-day summit in Paris can have a broader focus, taking a look at questions together with AI and the general public curiosity, the way forward for work, innovation and tradition.
The Paris assembly will probably be co-chaired by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and French President Emmanuel Macron, whereas U.S. Vice President JD Vance and China’s Vice Premier Ding Xuexiang are additionally anticipated to attend.
France says almost 100 heads of state and authorities and nearly 1,000 civil society stakeholders from about 100 international locations are anticipated to participate.
Rowan Wilkinson, a analysis analyst for the digital society program at Chatham Home within the U.Ok., mentioned Trudeau’s attendance demonstrates and helps present Canadian coverage efforts and mentioned the nation’s “tutorial excellence on this subject additionally must be embraced.”
“The summit is a chance for Trudeau to sign his dedication to this transformative expertise and Canada’s function on the worldwide stage,” she mentioned.
However whereas Canada’s analysis power in AI has been well known, critics have taken difficulty with some facets of the nation’s AI efforts, together with that it has been gradual to commercialize the expertise.
And whereas the Liberal authorities has lauded its AI regulation invoice, some mentioned the federal government was too gradual to get it via Parliament, and the invoice now seems more likely to die on the order paper forward of an anticipated spring election.
Martin-Bariteau mentioned heads of state might difficulty a joint assertion on the summit, and that international locations are likely to observe up such statements on the nationwide stage.
He mentioned the joint assertion on AI security issued on the first assembly in Bletchley Park in the UK was one of many successes of that 2023 summit, and many of the international locations who signed on are actually “constructing capability on the nationwide stage.”
The international locations represented at that assembly additionally requested Yoshua Bengio, one of many Canadian “godfathers” of AI, to guide efforts to place collectively a world report on AI security. The report, which includes enter from 96 AI specialists from around the globe, was targeted on general-purpose AI and was launched in late January.
It says a few of AI’s potential harms are well-known, together with using expertise for scams, non-consensual intimate pictures, little one sexual abuse materials, the chance of bias in system outputs and privateness violations.
It says as general-purpose AI positive aspects extra capabilities, extra dangers are rising, together with “large-scale labour market impacts, AI-enabled hacking or organic assaults, and society dropping management over general-purpose AI.”
Wilkinson mentioned Bengio’s report is “a well timed, complete reminder of the dangers and capabilities of general-purpose AI programs and can seemingly be a conversation-starter over the summit.”
On the 2024 AI summit in Seoul, world leaders agreed to construct a community of publicly backed security institutes to advance analysis and testing of the expertise. Canada introduced the launch of the Canadian Synthetic Intelligence Security Institute in November.
Nicolas Papernot, co-director of the institute’s analysis program, mentioned its work will probably be grounded in Bengio’s report because it pursues questions on bias, the robustness of AI programs and their predictions and the potential for privateness breaches.
Papernot mentioned the Canadian institute is “in contact with lots of these parallel institutes. The concept is basically to have a shared agenda for analysis.”
This report by The Canadian Press was first printed Feb. 9, 2024.
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