G7 HIROSHIMA PROCESS ON GENERATIVE ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (AI) | 3
© OECD 2023
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Generative AI has rapidly entered public discourse.
Generative AI has entered into public consciousness and is increasingly present in peoples’ everyday
conversations worldwide. The number of news articles and tweets related to ‘generative AI’ grew eight-fold
over just six months.
Growth in generative AI research, including its open-source code development, preceded the surge in
investments.
The widespread awareness and rapid uptake of generative AI have been enabled by steady, incremental
progress in both research and code development. Fundamental innovations such as the ‘Transformers’
architectures, contributions of the open-source community, alongside improvement in computing power have
paved the way for the proliferation of large language models as well as other type of generative AI models.
Scientific publications and open-source code development on generative AI have grown remarkably since
2017, and this trend accelerated in 2023. Venture capital investments in generative AI have skyrocketed and
were estimated at USD 12 billion globally in the first half of 2023 alone. Scientific publications and software,
including open-source code, related to generative AI have seen a parallel remarkable surge since 2017, with
this trend further accelerating in 2023.
Rapid advances in generative AI are driven by its expected potential to drive productivity gains and to
promote innovation and entrepreneurship, as well as to unlock solutions to global challenges.
In a questionnaire administered in Q3 2023, G7 members unanimously saw productivity gains, promoting
innovation and entrepreneurship and unlocking solutions to global challenges, as some of the greatest
opportunities of AI technologies worldwide, including for emerging and developing economies. G7 members
also emphasised generative AI’s potential role to help address pressing societal challenges, such as improving
healthcare and helping to solve the climate crisis, and to support progress towards achieving the Sustainable
Development Goals (SDGs).
Yet, generative AI’s potential benefits come with risks.
The capacity of generative AI to exacerbate the challenges of disinformation and manipulation of opinions is
considered by G7 members as one of the major threats stemming from generative AI, alongside risks of
intellectual property rights infringement and privacy breaches. Early efforts to track AI incidents found one
thousand distinct incidents and hazards related to generative AI, based on roughly 5 600 news articles dated
from January to July 2023.
As these risks evolve rapidly, their management and mitigation is at the top of the agenda for G7
governments.
Responsible use of generative AI, addressing disinformation, safeguarding intellectual property rights, and
governing generative AI are among the top priorities for G7 policymakers and require international cooperation
with like-minded partners. Other urgent and important issues emphasised by G7 members include privacy and
data governance, transparency, fairness and bias, human and fundamental rights, security and robustness of AI
systems, and impacts on the functioning of democracy.
G7 jurisdictions are evaluating their respective responses to generative AI, as well as the policy gaps.
Countries are leveraging existing and forthcoming legal and policy frameworks and developing guidelines or
regulation to address risks related to generative AI. National initiatives are also being strengthened to seize its
opportunities. New issues raised by generative AI appear to affect specific sectors in particular, such as
education, media, and the workplace.
G7 members are aligned on the need to provide effective tools for safety, quality control, and capacity
and trust building for generative AI.
