It has been announced that world leaders at the next AI summit will focus on the impact on the environment and jobs, including possibly ranking the greenest AI companies.
Among the proposals being considered are rating AI companies in terms of their ecological impact, while other areas being looked at include the effect on the labor market, giving all countries access to the technology and putting more states under the wing of global AI governance. initiatives.
France will host the next global summit on February 10 and 11, and international politicians are expected to attend along with executives and technology experts. Anne Bouverot, Paris special envoy for AI, said discussions would include measuring the technology’s impact on the environment.
“We will definitely push for more transparency for all players, and maybe one way to do that is to have a ranking or leaderboard,” he said, adding that such a system would highlight companies that are not transparent about their impact. environmental. “You can say very clearly, ‘Well, we can’t rank this company because we don’t have the data.'”
The effect of AI on the environment has been highlighted by major technology companies, which say the development of the technology is hampering their ability to meet climate goals. Both Google and Microsoft have said their AI strategies – which rely on energy-intensive data centers to develop and operate AI models – are jeopardizing corporate emissions reduction goals.
The conference in France will be the biggest AI gathering since the UK’s AI Safety Summit at Bletchley Park last November, which ended with a deal between major tech companies and governments to test the most powerful AI models. The Bletchley meeting began with a joint statement from the UK, US, EU, Australia and China that AI poses a potentially catastrophic risk to humanity.
Bouverot added that the debate around AI had changed since Bletchley. “The global discourse on AI has already changed,” he said. “We hear much less about the existential risks of AI, or the so-called high risks. We hear about a possible bubble. We hear what the latest developments are. That’s part of what we’re trying to do, help change that narrative. So maybe it’s less fascinating, but it’s more concrete.”
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The French summit, which follows a smaller gathering in Seoul in May, will be called the AI Action Summit and preliminary work will focus on five themes: Implementing AI in public, including ensuring all countries have access to technology; adapt the world of work to AI; trust, including creating agreements on security approaches; innovation, such as addressing the issue of using copyrighted works in AI models; and global AI governance.