questionable decision-making at Web Summit 2024: potential safety concerns addressed?
At the Web Summit 2024, held in Lisbon, one of the world's major digital events, debates on the regulation of artificial intelligence (AI), particularly Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), took centre stage. The event emphasised the challenges of balancing innovation with safety and ethical concerns.
A key theme was explainability and transparency, as AI systems, especially advanced ones like AGI, often operate as "black boxes," making it difficult to understand how decisions are made. This opacity raises concerns about unintended consequences, necessitating regulation that mandates explainability and transparency to prevent harm to individuals and society.
The European Union's AI Act, effective from August 2024, is the most comprehensive framework so far. It sets strict rules on unacceptable AI uses, transparency, and compliance, including extraterritorial reach affecting global companies aiming to access EU markets. However, this has caused friction with businesses and governments outside Europe, who worry about the act’s complexity and impact on innovation.
Safety and control over AGI development is another core debate. Legislators are considering harm-based approaches and risk categorization to address worst-case scenarios like bias, misuse, and autonomous decision-making failures. There is also discussion about regulating access to frontier AI models to prevent bad actors from weaponizing or misusing AGI technologies.
Industry pushback and calls for postponement have been noted, with some European business leaders arguing that the current regulatory proposals could stifle innovation and impose heavy burdens on companies. The need for a global AI governance framework, possibly through an international AI agency, was emphasized to harmonize standards, avoid regulatory fragmentation, and manage big tech's influence.
Security and defence concerns were also addressed, with AI regulation touching on national security. Beyond civilian use, AI regulation also needs to consider the implications for critical sectors like defence.
The Portuguese Prime Minister, Luis Montenegro, announced the Portuguese LLM, a tool designed to help citizens in education, access to public services, and administrative procedures. The event also featured a debate between Max Tegmark, President of the Future Of Life Institute, and Thomas Wolf, CEO of HuggingFace, focusing on the regulation of artificial intelligence.
Thomas Wolf predicted 2025 as a significant year for robotics, with rapid evolution in the field. He is known for developing open-source AI, ensuring everyone can access it. The Web Summit 2024 will continue to feature ongoing debates about the intersection of technology and responsibility.
In March 2023, the Future Of Life Institute published an open letter signed by thousands of academics, calling on AI creators to pause the deployment of this technology. The debate between Tegmark and Wolf during the opening night of the Web Summit 2024 centred on this very issue.
[1] European Commission (2023). AI Act. Retrieved from https://ec.europa.eu/info/law/better-regulation/have-your-say/initiatives/12622-Artificial-Intelligence-Act [2] European Parliament (2023). Regulation proposal for artificial intelligence (AI). Retrieved from https://www.europarl.europa.eu/legislative-train/theme-85079/procedure/document/RTD-2023-0004(COD) [3] European Data Protection Supervisor (2023). AI Act. Retrieved from https://edps.europa.eu/data-protection/our-work/projects/ai-act/ [4] BusinessEurope (2023). AI Act. Retrieved from https://www.business europe.eu/committees/digital/artificial-intelligence-act/
- As the Web Summit 2024 highlighted, the European Union's AI Act, effective from August 2024, emphasizes the importance of technology innovation, particularly in the realm of artificial intelligence (AI), while prioritizing safety, transparency, and ethical concerns.
- In the debates at the Web Summit 2024, concerns were raised about the potential impact of heavy regulation, such as the EU's AI Act, on the future progress and advancement of AI technology, specifically AI systems powered by artificial-intelligence.
