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The UK’s November 1-2 AI Safety Summit, a first-of-its-kind gathering of global leaders, is accelerating tech titans’ efforts to control the technology’s trajectory by influencing how it will be governed. It’s a high-stakes game that could determine not only AI’s impact on society but the sector’s winners and losers.

A lot of money is on the line. U.S. tech giants added $2.4 trillion to their market capitalizations in a year defined by the hype around generative artificial intelligence, according to a new report from venture capital firm Accel. Accel, in its annual Euroscape report, said the share price values of big technology firms such as Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet and Amazon rose by an average of 36% year over year. At press time the Financial Times reported that OpenAI is in talks with investors about selling shares at a valuation of $86 billion, roughly three times what it was worth six months ago, A stock sale at the level OpenAI is targeting would make the San Francisco-based group behind the ChatGPT chatbot one of the world’s most highly valued private companies.

The AI Safety Summit will focus on prevention and mitigation of harms from AI technology at the ‘frontier’ of general purpose AI, as well as in some cases specific narrow AI which can possess potentially dangerous capabilities.
The summit will also be faced with a larger question: who should control A.I. and who should make the rules that powerful artificial intelligence systems must follow?
In the run-up to the summit tech leaders were busy this week broadcasting their viewpoints from conference stages, in newspaper pages and on the Internet.

These efforts are in addition to more backdoor routes aimed at influencing policy makers. Politico published an expose October 13 that revealed how an organization backed by Silicon Valley billionaires and tied to leading artificial intelligence firms is funding the salaries of more than a dozen AI fellows in key U.S. congressional offices, across federal agencies and at influential think tanks. The organization is closely tied to a powerful influence network that’s pushing Washington to focus on the technology’s long-term risks — a focus critics fear will divert Congress from addressing risks that today’s AI systems already pose, including their tendency to inject bias, spread misinformation, threaten copyright protections and weaken personal privacy.
Read on to learn more about this story and the week's most important technology news impacting business.

Marvel Labs has invented a way to 3D print durable goods – everything from coffee mugs to sinks, faucets, light fixtures, bicycles, and furniture - out of biomass that usually ends up in landfills like used coffee grounds, wood waste and seaweed.

The U.S. startup’s eye-catching products (see the photo of a sink designed by Marvel Labs partner Sandheiden made from 3D printed seaweed) are not just an interesting intersection of artistry and science; they promise to advance sustainability in the manufacturing industry and nearshoring.

It is an entirely new way to doing things and the benefits include unprecedented reductions in costs, carbon emissions and labor, says CEO and co-founder Jake Miller, who has over 19 years of experience in new product development and manufacturing in a variety of industries.

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Every year hundreds of millions of workers around the globe suffer workplace injuries: slips and falls, strains and sprains, vehicle collisions and crashes. Voxel, an AI startup using computer vision to transform safety and operations in the workplace, is working with industrial and manufacturing businesses to reduce that number by analyzing video feeds and determining potential safety threats on the factory floor. Its AI can alert employers to real-time accidents and spot behaviors that might increase risk.

Voxel's tech has led to a 77% reduction of injuries in customers’ workforces and up to a 90% improvement in monitored safety behaviors in the workplace, according to the company. Voxel is targeting warehouses, retail, manufacturing, the energy sector as well as ports. Customers include Fortune 500 firms like Americold Logistics, Office Depot, Michael’s, Dollar Tree, Clorox, and PPG Industries.

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Amount of money insurance marketplace Lloyd's of London is warning that a major cyber attack on a systemic payments system could cost the world economy. Lloyd’s has published a systemic risk scenario that models the global economic impact of a hypothetical but plausible cyber attack on a major financial services payments system, resulting in widespread disruption to global business and potential global economic losses in the trillions, reports Finextra. The three countries that experience the highest five-year economic loss from the scenario are the United States $1.1 trillion, followed by China $470 billion and Japan $200 billion. The recovery time for individual countries or regions depends on the structure of their economy, exposure levels and resilience. The risk of a cyber attack is the most cited risk in the latest Bank of England's Systemic Risk Survey for the second half of 2023, with 80% of firms mentioning it, the highest proportion of respondents citing cyber risk ever recorded in the survey.