SEOUL, May 20 (Reuters) - South Korea and the United

Kingdom will co-host the second global AI summit in Seoul this

week, as the breathtaking pace of innovation since the first AI

summit in November leaves governments scrambling to keep up with

a growing array of risks.

UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and South Korean President

Yoon Suk Yeol will oversee a virtual summit on Tuesday, amid

calls for better regulation of artificial intelligence despite

sharp disagreements over how the technology may affect humanity.

"Although positive efforts have been made to shape global AI

governance, significant gaps still remain," Sunak and Yoon said

in a joint opinion article published in the UK's i newspaper and

South Korea's JoongAng Ilbo, entitled 'Only global AI standards

can stop a race to the bottom'.

The November event was billed as the AI Safety Summit but

the scope of the challenges has expanded since then. The

meetings beginning Tuesday are now billed as the AI Seoul Summit

and will discuss three priorities, AI safety, innovation and

inclusion, according to the summit's website.

"Risks such as large-scale labour market impacts, AI-enabled

hacking or biological attacks, and society losing control over

general-purpose AI could emerge," although there is debate about

the likelihood, a global AI safety report released on Friday

said.

"But... it will be the decisions of societies and

governments that will determine the future of AI," said the

report backed by experts from more than 30 countries.

The report gives a nod to the widening front of risks from

the rapidly evolving technology - not only existential risks to

humanity, but AI inequality, data scarcity, use of copyright

material, and the environmental impact due to the vast amount of

electricity used by AI data centres.

During the UK-hosted November summit, Tesla's Elon Musk and

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman rubbed shoulders with some of their

fiercest critics, while China co-signed the "Bletchley

Declaration" on collectively managing AI risks alongside the

United States and others.

This time around, it was as yet unclear who will attend the

virtual summit on Tuesday, or an in-person session chaired by UK

and South Korean ministers on Wednesday.

A separate South Korea-hosted AI forum on Wednesday expects

attendees including Jack Clark, co-founder of AI safety and

research company Anthropic, and executives from OpenAI, Google

DeepMind, Microsoft ( MSFT ), Meta and IBM ( IBM )

according to the event's website.