The G20 Meeting of Ministers of Technology held on September 1-2 in Chapel Hill, North Carolina (USA), co-chaired by the US Department of Commerce and the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, concluded with the achievement of a common consensus statement between all member economies.
The joint statement affirmed that emerging technologies possess great potential in opening up prosperity, improving labor productivity and expanding development opportunities for all people.
Notably, G20 countries agreed to recognize that artificial intelligence (AI) will become a powerful tool to support policymakers in streamlining international trade, simplifying administrative procedures and reducing unnecessary non-tariff barriers between trading partners.
According to G20 ministers, the reasoning ability of AI combined with high-performance scientific computing systems can greatly improve the method of comparing and contrasting commodity and service standards between countries.
The conference document identified six general guiding principles: policy framework to promote innovation; technology for opportunities and prosperity; development of highly skilled technical labor force; intellectual property policy for AI; AI standardization and AI serving standardization; industrial innovation; supply chain investment.
The conference also agreed on the Carolina Principles on Emerging Technology, calling for investment in basic research, strengthening the roadmap for commercialization and promoting the application of reliable technology.
US Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick assessed that reaching consensus at the G20 is a miracle, creating confidence for business investors, promoting domestic production and protecting intellectual property rights.
In addition to policy discussion sessions, the conference also held a series of in-depth dialogues with the world's leading technology leaders such as Jensen Huang (NVIDIA), Elon Musk (Tesla, SpaceX), Sam Altman (OpenAI), Mark Zuckerberg (Meta), Demis Hassabis (Google DeepMind), Tom Brown (Anthropic) and Alex Karp (Palantir).
According to AFP, at the dialogue session, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang directly called on G20 ministers to consider AI as an essential infrastructure and promote the construction of data centers. He also rejected concerns that AI would eliminate jobs, and warned governments not to issue regulations tightening AI based only on theoretical risks.
At the end of the conference, the G20 officially adopted the AI Prosperity Goals and the AI Prosperity Treaty to promote digital human resource training and expand public-private partnerships.
