LAST year, a who's who of world leaders, corporate executives and academic experts gathered at Britain's Bletchley Park for the world's first global AI Safety Summit, hoping to reach consensus on the regulation of a technology some warned posed a threat to humanity.
Tesla mogul Elon Musk and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman rubbed shoulders with some of their fiercest critics, while China co-signed the Bletchley Declaration alongside the United States and others, signalling a willingness to cooperate despite mounting tensions with the West.
Six months later, the second AI Safety Summit, a primarily virtual event co-hosted by Britain and South Korea on May 21 and 22, will take place as hype around artificial intelligence's potential gives way to questions over its limitations.
"There are radically different approaches.
"It will be difficult to move beyond what was agreed at Bletchley Park," said Martha Bennett, a senior analyst at research and advisory firm Forrester, referring to the historic but necessarily broad agreement on AI safety.
Thornier questions around the use of copyright material, data scarcity and environmental impact also look unlikely to attract such a star-studded congregation.
While it's an event comparable to Bletchley, some key attendees have turned down invitations to Seoul.
As the first summit closed in November, British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak promised subsequent events would be held every six months so governments could keep tabs on the technology.
Since then, attention has turned from existential risk to the resources needed to fuel AI's development, such as the vast amount of data required to train large language models, and the electricity powering a growing number of data centres.
OpenAI CEO Altman has suggested the future of AI depends on an energy breakthrough.
In February, the Wall Street Journal reported he was also seeking to raise as much as US$7 trillion to boost the production of computer chips, a component currently in short supply.
But pinning the future of AI on scientific breakthroughs and lucrative financing efforts may not be the best move, experts warn.
"The failure of the technology to live up to the hype is inevi-table," said Professor Jack Stilgoe, an expert in technology policy at University College London.
"People will find surprising and creative uses for this technology, but that doesn't mean the future is going to look like how Elon Musk or Sam Altman imagine it."
Shares in tech giant Meta sank 13 per cent last week after it announced it would double down on AI, although the pay-offs from big investments by Google and Microsoft were cheered by markets.
The South Korea summit was always billed as a mini summit in anticipation of the next in-person gathering in Paris.
But far fewer leaders and ministers are set to attend, according to sources familiar with the matter, even with the French government postponing the next gathering to 2025.
A spokesperson for the European Union did not rule out the bloc's presence, but confirmed its chief tech regulators — Margrethe Vestager, Thierry Breton and Vera Jourova — would not be attending.
The United States Department of State confirmed it would send representatives to Seoul, but did not say who.
"Nothing will ever live up to a first gathering of its kind," said Linda Griffin, public policy lead at Mozilla, the organisation behind the Firefox web browser.
Similarly, pioneering AI research unit Google DeepMind said it welcomed the summit, but declined to confirm its attendance.
Geoffrey Hinton, a former Google researcher and AI "godfather", told Reuters he had declined an invitation to the event, citing an injury that made it difficult to fly.
A British government spokes-man said: "The AI Seoul Summit will build on the momentum of Bletchley Park to deliver further progress on AI safety, innovation and inclusivity, moving us all closer to a world where AI is improving our lives across the board."
The writer is from Reuters