Jensen Huang, chief executive of Nvidia, was among top industry leaders attending.
Nvidia is a central player in AI infrastructure, supplying chips to leading AI model developers including OpenAI and Meta.
It is also the world’s most valuable company, with a stock market value of around $5.15tn.
Huang told the room he believed safety was “paramount”, adding that companies should hold back a product and “keep engineering” if it was not safe enough.
The Nvidia boss also highlighted the value of open models – systems which give users direct access to the software – as a way to “ensure that people and countries are not left behind”.
He said these systems must also be protected so “researchers, universities, start-ups and countries” can develop applications “none of us would have imagined alone”.
“Let us lead with responsible optimism, build AI safely and securely, open it to more people, expand our ambition and solve the problems that matter to the world,” Huang added.
Meanwhile Sir Demis Hassabis, who co-founded the UK AI lab DeepMind – later acquired by Google – offered a more cautious view on the pace of development.
He said artificial general intelligence – systems it is believed could be as good as or better than humans at multiple tasks – was “probably only a few short years away” and could have an impact “ten times that of the Industrial Revolution”.
The chance of something going wrong was “definitely non-zero”, Sir Demis added.
But he advocated for “a sensible middle way”, saying humanity could address risks if collectively given the space and time to mitigate them.
“The future is not yet written,” he told the King’s delegates.
Sarah Friar, OpenAI’s chief financial officer, said AI had the potential to solve some of society’s “hardest problems” – but agreed its growing capabilities raised questions about safety and “how we ensure it always serves people”.
“We need to address those questions together,” she said.
“No one company or government can do that alone and I’m grateful to His Majesty for convening this discussion at such an important moment.”