<div id="readability-page-1">Governments, industry and the public are in “common ignorance” about the present and future of artificial intelligence, making both international collaboration and coordination between industry and policymakers necessary, experts have said. In a panel discussion at the inaugural Hong Kong Global AI Conference at the University of Hong Kong (HKU) on Saturday, Alibaba Group Holding policy lead Fu Hongyu said that China was now at the front lines of global efforts to introduce guardrails surrounding the fast-changing technology. “We are in a dilemma that can be called common ignorance,” he said. “We do not know what is going on and where the technology is going.” Fu’s warning comes as powerful new AI models have triggered concerns that they could be used to mount massive cyberattacks or cause widespread social harm. In the US, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell called an emergency meeting last week with the heads of major US banks to discuss the risks surrounding AI start-up Anthropic’s latest model, Mythos, as well as potential future models, Bloomberg reported. With Chinese models widely considered to be around three to six months behind their US counterparts, Beijing’s position on AI governance had always been the need to balance AI development and safety, said Fu, director of AI governance at Alibaba’s research institute, AliResearch. Alibaba owns the South China Morning Post. Last week, leading agencies including the National Development and Reform Commission and the Ministry of Public Security rolled out new rules barring AI companion apps from providing minors with “intimate relationships” such as virtual family members.   The move came a week after Beijing mandated Chinese companies engaging in AI activities to set up internal ethics review committees to better ensure that the technology is deployed in “controllable” and “explainable” ways. Amid high uncertainty about the future of AI, Chinese industry and the government were working closely together to find solutions to cutting-edge issues, according to Fu, describing the model as “cooperative governance”. “For example, one of the officials [behind the new AI ethics review regulation] sent me a message and asked my opinion about whether the regulation will put too much pressure on the companies, and how to help small companies who cannot afford to set up AI ethics review boards,” he said. The Hong Kong Global AI Governance Conference, which kicked off on Friday, saw 38 leading scholars and industry leaders from the US, China, India and other countries gather to discuss AI governance issues such as the technology’s impact on higher education and healthcare. Most of the speakers agreed on the need to rein in the power of Big Tech and also lower the temperature on AI geopolitical competition. However, there were also disagreements between panellists on hot-button issues such as the risks of open-sourcing powerful AI models and AI’s impact on human rights – both topics that continue to hamper US-China collaboration in AI governance. Dr Brian Wong, an assistant philosophy professor at HKU and one of the organisers of the conference, said that Hong Kong’s value proposition in global AI governance “lies in the fact that we can feature a healthy set of debates about contentious topics”.  “The city has a crucial role in promoting better understanding of AI governance issues between East and West,” he told the SCMP. “But first, it must start building up laboratories, research institutions and think tanks that take AI governance seriously.” George Chen, partner and co-chair of digital practice at The Asia Group, said that Hong Kong could be a good place for Chinese and US researchers to meet and debate various AI governance issues as long as it remained a “neutral” territory. He pointed to the recent roll-out of Google’s Gemini in Hong Kong, the first major US generative AI service to be made available in Greater China, as a promising sign of greater convergence between the two countries in AI. “I totally understand if the Chinese internet authorities want to take a more conservative approach in terms of AI safety. But for Hong Kong, given the user base is relatively small, we can try a lot of things,” Chen said. According to Alibaba’s Fu, China’s governance focus had recently shifted from longer-term risks surrounding large language models to the more immediate harms of AI agents and applications. While leading experts including Turing Award winner Geoffrey Hinton have warned about the catastrophic risks of AI such as human extinction, China was tackling AI safety issues “in a more realistic way”. “Two years ago, we were also following these AI safety concepts surrounding catastrophic risks,” he said. “But we’ve now seen AI diffusing so quickly, so we are monitoring the real-world impacts of AI applications on our jobs, our work and our human psychology.”</div>

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<p>At the Hong Kong Global AI Conference, experts highlighted a "common ignorance" regarding AI's future, emphasizing the need for collaboration between governments and industry. Alibaba's Fu Hongyu noted China's leadership in AI governance, balancing development and safety. Recent regulations in China aim to ensure ethical AI use, while discussions at the conference addressed the geopolitical implications of AI. The event featured diverse opinions on AI's risks and governance, with Hong Kong positioned as a neutral ground for US-China dialogue on these issues.</p>

‘Common ignorance’: how China took the lead in global efforts to govern AI