China’s vice sci-tech minister Wu Zhaohui said the country was willing to “enhance dialogue and communication in AI safety with all sides”
China’s vice sci-tech minister Wu Zhaohui said Beijing will cooperate with global counterparts — including the U.S. — to find common ground on frameworks for safe and responsible artificial intelligence (AI) development.
His comments were delivered at the U.K.’s AI safety summit, which officially started Wednesday at Bletchley Park, England.
Wu Zhaohui said the country was willing to “enhance dialogue and communication in AI safety with all sides.”
China will contribute to an “international mechanism (on AI), broadening participation, and a governance framework based on wide consensus delivering benefits to the people, and building a community with a shared future for mankind,” he added, according to an official event translation.
The remarks come at a time when Beijing is locked in a technology dispute with the U.S.
China has been pushing through its own rules governing generative AI, a distinct form of artificial intelligence that is trained on vast quantities of data to create new, human-like written and visual content in response to human inputs.
Governments in the U.K., EU, and the U.S. are developing their own regulatory regimes for AI.
China and 27 other countries signed a major agreement on artificial intelligence Wednesday, known as the “Bletchley Declaration,” which promotes a “shared understanding of the opportunities and risks posed by frontier AI and the need for governments to work together to meet the most significant challenges.”
As part of this, nations agreed to an urgent requirement to understand and collectively manage potential risks through a new joint global effort, the U.K. government said.
The U.S. and China have been at loggerheads over technology for some time. That battle intensified this year, with the U.S. Department of Commerce announcing new trade restrictions on sales of Nvidia’s advanced H800 and A800 chips to China.
That has placed considerable pressure on China’s generative AI developers, many of which rely on Nvidia’s chips.