Susana SchwartzAI takes center stage at United Nations NY headquarters
At the United Nations General Assembly in New York today, an “AI and Human Development” event centered on the foundational thesis put forth by UN Secretary-General António Guterres, “Technology must serve people, and not the other way around.” Speakers emphasized the need to move beyond economic parameters in examining how AI may alter the core social and cultural fabric of humanity.
Later today, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, and HuggingFace CEO Clément Delangue (soon to be acquired by Nvidia) will address the United Nations Security Council. OpenAI’s Altman is also expected to attend the state dinner at the White House tomorrow, along with China’s President Xi Jinping, and CEOs of Google, Microsoft, Nvidia, Apple, Amazon, xAI, and Facebook.
Discussions will revolve around the possibility of sharing benchmarks and measurements of AI capabilities, as well as evaluating AI safeguards.
Since this week’s kickoff of the 81st General Assembly, there have been calls for oversight from world leaders and UN officials, most of whom have warned of the dangers posed by AI’s rapid advances, and the use of AI in autonomous weapons. Many in attendance advocated for a multilateral AI risk management framework that would be backed by independent oversight.
Other speakers have focused on the need for more diverse representation in AI – of the world’s languages, cultural contexts, and indigenous knowledge frameworks. For example, UN Deputy Secretary-General Amina J. Mohammed talked of an international, human-rights-based framework that would protect human dignity over a reckless “race to the bottom” for technical dominance. She noted that across the forums in Rome, Cairo, Xi’an, and Mexico City, participants universally demanded human-rights guardrails.
Notably, U.S. President Donald Trump disagreed on the calls for multilateral frameworks, stating that he “totally rejects any attempt to construct a globalist scheme to control AI.“ He asserted that the U.S. wants to encourage the technology rather than rein it in.
He also announced he would be “renaming AI,” which he now will refer to as “super intelligence.
Susana Schwartz
Technology Editor
RCRTech
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