Bye.

But yeah, again, thank you so much for your time, Minister Tang, and for being so kind to help me with these questions. I’ll stay in touch for sure. And yeah, super grateful for all your help today.

I think I could be in my little bubble, but I feel it’s the most important questions of our times right now to get this right. Hopefully, things go well.

Yes, certainly. I cannot agree more.

Okay.

Oh, yes, that would be amazing. I would be delighted and I’d love to stay in touch for sure. I will be in touch for this research as well. But otherwise, it’s been such a delight having this conversation. I certainly learned a lot. I know your time is limited, ...

Unfortunately, in terms of timeline, we will not have our results ready in time for review for the Summit, although there were some conversations that we had early on about this. But yeah, I guess more generally, there’s a lot of work that’s going on at OpenAI in engaging with ...

Yeah, so we’ve been in touch with officials in the UK. I should say within OpenAI, lots of conversations happening. And several folks also flying into Bletchley Park as well for the discussions.

But I guess one thing that we’re hoping to get out of the study itself is to understand how do various officials think about these risks, which ones are high or severe risks, etc. I guess I’ll have better answers maybe once we have some results from the study.

So, in that sense, I think that AI safety, is still the broader bucket. And I think we probably should still continue seeing it in that lens. And of course, misalignment is definitely a big component to it as well, considering the potential for catastrophic risks that it entails. But ...

I guess there is a lot of thinking going on still and it’s work in progress. But generally speaking, the risks that are coming from AI are so wide and even for this study, when we were contextualizing the seven risks, we were not sure what is a good way ...

I guess we’re just trying to gauge how the different conversations are happening in the space and just kind of translating and contextualizing it.

I’m curious to understand how are policy officials across these countries thinking about it? Getting answers to this can really in the future help in potential efforts at global coordination in governing AI and any such efforts. And it could make some conversations easier as well. But yeah, basically, that’s ...

So yeah, the idea is just to gauge where do these perspectives stand on a spectrum across these different communities? And of course, there’s so many differences across these countries as well. And any future efforts at governing AI would require this cross-country collaboration. But if everyone’s speaking a different ...

Mm-hmm. Yeah, so I think that this is such an important question and also there are not too many answers to it. The conversations happening in DC versus the Silicon Valley, for example, about how AI risks in general are perceived is vastly different.

Oh, so right now I’m based in Delhi at the moment.

Yeah, that’s probably the plan. I’ll be reaching out to you to share the preview of these findings and also to ask you if you’d like to get acknowledged in the limited circulation of this that we’ll be having for this paper.

This research, unfortunately, might not get published openly because it just involves a lot of coordination with government officials across the countries. And there’s some confidentiality clauses. But at the same time, this will be shared with all individuals that have helped us in informing the study, of course. It ...

I guess for now, do you have any questions for me? I guess in terms of next steps, at least for our research, currently we’re in the process of outreach across the various countries. And by December we’re hoping that we have some of our initial findings, which may be ...

That’s perfect. I will definitely be doing this and reaching out to TWAICOE, and looking forward to learning more.

And in that sense, I was hoping if you have any recommendations for any entities or individuals that I can get in touch with and what is a good way to do so. Any suggestions?

Yeah, I guess I’ve touched upon most of the important questions I had. I just had one last request. I was hoping to get in touch with other policy officials in Taiwan to get just a sense of Taiwan’s policymaking and how it’s perceiving risks. Gathering diverse viewpoints will really ...

Okay.

Certainly. Yeah, that’s actually such a helpful contextualization. I know we are running out of time.

Sure, sure.

I was just curious to see, how would you describe the current state of Taiwan’s AI ecosystem? Like, what do you think are the key strengths and challenges in that sense?

Yeah, this is great. I haven’t seen anything like this anywhere else. And it’s great to hear this, and the amazing work that you guys are doing.

I know you’ve mentioned briefly about the work through the council. But generally, I guess, how is it for Taiwan? How much does government engage with civil society, academia, and industry stakeholders in shaping AI policies and guidelines? And what are the ways in which it does so more commonly?

For example, in the US, it happens more in the form of consultation at some stages of the policymaking process. But in India, for example, the government tends to have what they call as knowledge partners for every report that they publish.

I guess moving on, one other question that I had, and I know you’ve touched upon this a little bit already. So, for a project. Just to set context, we’re primarily looking to engage with officials or civil servants that are involved in the process of AI policymaking or studying ...

Yeah, that’s super interesting. It’s interesting to see that the flip side of it is that it’s definitely true. Human beings as the tool versus AI as the tool.

Could you give more context on why you see AI not as a tool and why do you think the biggest risk associated about generative AI actually depends only on people, you know, how people end up using it?

Yeah, certainly. I guess another statement in the same section that I’d love to get your insights from, the statement basically says that AI is a tool and the biggest risk associated with generative AI is how people choose to use the models. I know you’ve indicated that you strongly ...

In your responses, you indicated that managing AI risks will eventually require the creation of a new international governing body. Could you provide more context into that? Like, what do you think a new international governing body, what kind of roles do you see it undertaking, why it’s needed, generally ...

Yeah, I guess in the list of questions that I’ve shared with you, there was a few statements that were listed, and everyone thinks very differently about them. And we wanted to just get a general sense of where perspectives stand.

Perfect. I will definitely be following up on this. This sounds amazing.

Perfect. I wonder if this work is something that as policy researchers, we can continue to stay posted about this council’s work. And it looks like there’s a lot of conversations happening…

I guess maybe I could just broadly look at Taiwan’s AI ecosystem, do these conversations also occur across other ministries?

Yeah, certainly. That is really helpful to know. And also, pardon my ignorance about your ministry’s work on discussing this already. It’s certainly very helpful to know that these discussions happen so much more commonly.

I was just curious, how do you define AGI? And, how do you think AGI exists today/could exist in the world?

The topic does come up for policy officials with varying frequency is what we understand. As you indicated in your responses, these conversations occur almost daily in your work. But generally speaking, you know, conversations specifically about AGI really depend upon how AGI itself is defined. And everyone sees it ...

We’re just curious, beyond these policy documents, do these conversations occur, specifically around AGI?

Yeah. That’s actually really helpful and very interesting perspective. I think one thing we noticed across various country documents discussing AI risk is that very few actually officially discuss some of the long-term existential risks. Actually, none except the UK have discussed it officially in their policy documents.

Got it. And I’m guessing in that sense, in the current scenario, keeping the speed of AI development the same in some sense, while at the same time working towards more safety questions in the way that they are progressing is what you think would be the right way.

There is a spectrum of arguments here. I was just curious, what do you think about this? Would you prefer the pace of AI development? Should it speed up? Should it stay the same? Should it slow down, temporarily pause or stop? I was hoping to get more context on ...

So basically, there’s this one worry, especially we’ve seen over the past few months, some individuals generally have been thinking that AI development is happening too fast, and have proposed putting a pause in order to deal with it. Some others think pauses don’t help and may not be as ...

Yeah, it’s great to know that. I’m excited to explore all the resources that you’ve shared. That sounds great. I guess one of the questions in relation to some of the responses that you provided to the questions that I had shared in the PDF.

But yeah, generally speaking, I should say a majority is mostly government officials. And this ends up being more or less federal government agencies across countries, but also it really differs because every country has their own way of organizing their strategy discussions.

But at the same time, I should say that on a case-by-case basis, we’re also speaking with individuals from civil society, from academia that have a credible influence on the policy making in that country.

Yeah, I guess mostly the idea is we’re looking at officials that are involved in the policy making process in some sense, or policy informing process or influencing process. Generally speaking, this ends up being mostly individuals working in government across these countries.