The UK recently held a well-publicized AI Safety Summit focusing on the risks presented by AI. A less well-publicized alternative summit also happened at the same time called AI Fringe. I’m not British, but as someone who keeps up with tech industry news I was intrigued by a convention that was seemingly competing with an official government event and was curious as to who organized it.
According to their FAQ, AI Fringe was planned by a firm called Milltown Partners in collaboration with groups on the list of partner organizationson their website. Unfortunately, this list has 25 different groups on it, making it difficult to determine who originally came up with the idea for the summit. Some investigation into the details of the event and the history of Milltown Partners provides some clues, however.
The Original Milltown Partners
In their own words, Milltown Partners is a “global advisory firm working with influential organisations and individuals on the communications and public policy challenges that define their reputations”. In short, they are a PR company that does reputation management.
The firm was founded in 2013 by three people:
- Patrick “Paddy” Harverson previously worked as a spokesman for Prince Harry, the Prince of Wales, and the Duchess of Cornwall from 2004-2013.
- David-John D-J Collins served as Vice President of Communications and Public Policy for Google for 7 years before co-founding Milltown. The Guardian once described him as a “Google God” and “one of the most powerful people in technology PR”.
- Before Milltown, Oliver Rickman held a string of PR positions at Google, culminating in being the Head of Strategic Planning & Campaigns for Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and Asia-Pacific. He left Milltown Partners in 2016 to return to Google, this time as director of marketing and public affairs for their DeepMind AI laboratory where he worked until leaving for Stripe in February 2023.
Beyond the two of the three founders of Milltown Partners being ex-Google employees, there’s a number of other connections between AI Fringe and Google DeepMind. The AI 101 informational page on AI Fringe’s website includes artificial general intelligence (AGI) and risk (of the existential variety) as two of their 14 glossary terms; existential risk from AGI is a concept that many at DeepMind are very concerned about, despite the fact that there’s no evidence that creating AGI is even possible in the near future. Nine of the speakers at AI Fringe also work for DeepMind, far more than any other company.
Milltown Partners’ Partners
Milltown Partners clearly has many close ties to Google DeepMind, but some of the groups whose reputations they’ve chosen to defend are even more surprising.
Mohammed bin Salman
Milltown Partners made the news in 2018 when they were revealed to be one of several PR firms that worked with the royal family of Saudi Arabia. While Milltown refused to confirm if they had worked on behalf of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in the wake of news implicating him in the assassination of Jamal Khashoggi, an article from The Telegraph about fellow news outlet The Independent indicates that Milltown was involved with the Crown Prince earlier in that same year. The story goes on to detail how a Saudi investor by the name of Sultan Mohamed Abuljadayel appointed D-J Collins to the board of The Independent, adding that he was nicknamed “Mr. Saudi” by a friend.
Alleged Libyan Money Laundering
In addition to their ties to Saudi Arabia, Milltown was also implicated in a defamation lawsuit in 2015. The complaint from an employee of Dutch hedge fund Palladyne alleges that he was abruptly fired after he realized that his employers appeared to be laundering about $700 million USD on behalf of Ismael Abudher, son-in-law of former Libyan prime minister Shukri Ghanem. The lawsuit personally accuses Paddy Harverson of supplying quotes to Bloomberg as an unnamed source in order to defend Palladyne after Bloomberg previous broke the news of the company’s alleged fraud.
Being filed in America, Milltown’s involvement in the lawsuit was dismissed due to lack of jurisdiction, but Dutch authorities have continued investigating Palladyne. Interestingly, a 2019 article detailing the Dutch investigation into Palladyne was published by The Independent.
AI Fringe billed their event with the tagline of “AI for everyone”. While may have been true in the strictest sense, the fact that this tagline was written by a company with close ties to DeepMind that specializes in reputation management raises a lot of doubts in my mind about their sincerity, especially given the nature of their previous work. Despite Milltown being co-founded by marketing executives from one of the biggest tech companies in the world, AI Fringe’s Twitter account has reposted severaltweets from speakers at the summit decrying the influence of big tech in AI. From the looks of it, Milltown Partners seems to have succeeded in whatever PR goals it had for its clients in organizing AI Fringe.