Guterres said the United Nations General Assembly had confirmed 40 members for the group, called the Independent International Scientific Panel on Artificial Intelligence.

"Science-led governance is not a brake on progress" but can make it "safer, fairer, and more widely shared", he told the AI Impact Summit in New Delhi.

"The message is simple: Less hype, less fear. More facts and evidence."

The advisory body -- aiming to be to AI what the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is to global warming -- was created in August.

Its first report is expected to be published in time for the UN Global Dialogue on AI Governance in July.

The panel aims to help governments regulate AI as the fast-evolving technology sparks global concern over job losses, misinformation and online abuse among other problems.

"AI innovation is moving at the speed of light -- outpacing our collective ability to fully understand it -- let alone govern it," Guterres said.

"We are barrelling into the unknown."

"When we understand what systems can do -- and what they cannot -- we can move from rough measures to smarter, risk-based guardrails," he said.

Guterres this month gave a list of experts he had proposed to serve on the UN's AI panel.

They included journalist and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Maria Ressa of the Philippines, and Canadian artificial intelligence pioneer Yoshua Bengio.

"Our goal is to make human control a technical reality -- not a slogan," he said.

That "requires clear accountability -- so responsibility is never outsourced to an algorithm".

Later on Friday dozens of world leaders and ministers are expected to deliver a statement outlining how the world should handle artificial intelligence, wrapping up the five-day summit focused on the technology.