AIFA comments @ The Guardian on Seoul AI Summit

AIFA president Roeland Decorte was asked to comment by The Guardian newspaper on the exclusion of startups from the Seoul AI Summit on his way to the House of Lord roundtable on AI regulation under a potential future Labour government.

Decorte expressed concern that if the Seoul Summit, like the UK AI Safety Summit, continues with the tradition of defining “frontier AI” as only foundation models and excluding focused models (which has been used by organisers as a reason to engage primarily with big tech rather than AI startups), the Summit runs the danger of missing out on regulating or discussing the real future AI economy.

Read his comments here or below:

The summit was criticised for leaving key voices out of the conversation. No Korean civil society groups were present, with the host country representing itself only through academia, government and industry, while only the largest AI businesses were invited to take part.

Roeland Decorte, president of the AI Founders Association, warned that the discussions risked “focusing only on flashy large-scale models, of which only a handful will come to dominate and which can only be created currently by the biggest players at a financial loss” as a result.

“The question is, in the end, do we want to regulate and build for a future mature AI economy that will create a sustainable framework for the majority of companies operating in the space,” he added.