内容摘要：This year China has sent a lower-level delegation and scrapped its speech. In the absence of a strong Chinese presence, the dialogue has been dominated by criticism and questions of Beijing posed by the US and its allies.

This year China has sent a lower-level delegation and scrapped its speech. In the absence of a strong Chinese presence, the dialogue has been dominated by criticism and questions of Beijing posed by the US and its allies.

One reason he thinks it possible is that no-one, not even the people who developed these systems, knows exactly how they work. That's worrying, says Prof Murray Shanahan, principal scientist at Google DeepMind and emeritus professor in AI at Imperial College, London."We don't actually understand very well the way in which LLMs work internally, and that is some cause for concern," he tells the BBC.

According to Prof Shanahan, it's important for tech firms to get a proper understanding of the systems they're building – and researchers are looking at that as a matter of urgency."We are in a strange position of building these extremely complex things, where we don't have a good theory of exactly how they achieve the remarkable things they are achieving," he says. "So having a better understanding of how they work will enable us to steer them in the direction we want and to ensure that they are safe."The prevailing view in the tech sector is that LLMs are not currently conscious in the way we experience the world, and probably not in any way at all. But that is something that the married couple Profs Lenore and Manuel Blum, both emeritus professors at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, believe will change, possibly quite soon.

According to the Blums, that could happen as AI and LLMs have more live sensory inputs from the real world, such as vision and touch, by connecting cameras and haptic sensors (related to touch) to AI systems. They are developing a computer model that constructs its own internal language called Brainish to enable this additional sensory data to be processed, attempting to replicate the processes that go on in the brain."We think Brainish can solve the problem of consciousness as we know it," Lenore tells the BBC. "AI consciousness is inevitable."

Manuel chips in enthusiastically with an impish grin, saying that the new systems that he too firmly believes will emerge will be the "next stage in humanity's evolution".

Conscious robots, he believes, "are our progeny. Down the road, machines like these will be entities that will be on Earth and maybe on other planets when we are no longer around"."It's not right to claim that the government 'has done nothing for years' regarding the relocation of concessions outside of national parks," he says. "Under the current administration, efforts have been made not only to understand the problem, but also to advance it.

"The relocation process itself is usually quite complex, bureaucratic, and takes a considerable number of years, considering the difficulty of relocating these concessions to new areas suitable for aquaculture."Matt Craze is the founder of UK and Chile-based Spheric Research, which studies global seafood markets. He says that Chile's salmon industry would invest more money "if they felt that there was a better regulatory framework, and the government gave some certainty about the areas where they can farm".

Yet with a general election due in Chile later this year, the uncertainty may continue at least in the short term.Russia has continued to make billions from fossil fuel exports to the West, data shows, helping to finance its full-scale invasion of Ukraine – now in its fourth year.