Lords Communications and Digital Committee to hold evidence sessions focusing on the opportunities and risks of Large Language Models
Friday 15 September 2023
The House of Lords Communications and Digital Committee will next week hold two evidence sessions on Large Language Models.
The first session with industry leaders will focus on the benefits of LLMs to the UK economy and society.
The second session with businesses and academic experts will focus on immediate risks, examine the case for catastrophic risk, and explore wider challenges the technology poses.
The evidence sessions will start at 2:30pm on Tuesday 19 September in Committee 4 of the House of Lords. The session can be watched live and on demand at Parliament TV.
The witnesses giving evidence to the Committee will be:
2:30pm
- Dr Peter Waggett, UK Director of Research, IBM
- Dr Zoë Webster, Director of Data and AI Solutions, BT
- Francesco Marconi, Co-founder, Applied XL
- Nathan Benaich, Founder, Air Street Capital
3:30pm
- Professor Stuart Russell OBE, Professor of Computer Science, University of California, Berkeley
- Professor Phil Blunsom, Chief Scientist, Cohere
- Lyric Jain, Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Logically
- Chris Anley, Chief Scientist, NCC Group
In the first session the Committee will ask the witnesses how businesses are adapting to LLMs and looking to take advantage of the opportunities they provide. This will include discussion on whether the UK investment landscape is set up to support the development of the technology in this country, the extent of economic benefits, barriers to progress, and the effect LLMs are likely to have on jobs.
In the second session questions will focus on risks from AI including an exploration of limited, catastrophic and existential risks, disinformation, cybersecurity, societal and economic harm; how well these risks are understood; and how they can be mitigated by government and industry.
