World leaders and tech figures are meeting in Paris for a two-day artificial intelligence summit on Monday, aiming to discuss and determine the future direction of the rapidly developing industry.
Hosted by French President Emmanuel Macron, the AI Action Summit will welcome OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, US Vice President JD Vance and Chinese Vice Premier Zhang Guoqing.
“We’re living a technology and scientific revolution we’ve rarely seen,” President Macron said Sunday on national television France 2.
France and Europe must seize the “opportunity” because AI “will enable us to live better, learn better, work better, care better and it’s up to us to put this artificial intelligence at the service of human beings,” he said.
The summit, which gathers major players such as Google, Microsoft and OpenAI, aims at fostering AI advances in sectors like health, education, environment and culture.
A global public-private partnership named “Current AI” is to be launched to support large-scale initiatives that serve the general interest.
The Paris summit “is the first time we’ll have had such a broad international discussion in one place on the future of AI,” said Linda Griffin, vice president of public policy at Mozilla. “I see it as a norm-setting moment.”
Nick Reiners, senior geotechnology analyst at Eurasia Group, noted an opportunity to shape AI governance in a new direction by “moving away from this concentration of power amongst a handful of private actors and building this public interest AI instead.”
However, it remains unclear if the US will support such initiatives. French organisers also hope the summit will lead to major investment announcements in Europe.
France is to announce AI private investments worth a total of 109 billion euros ($113 billion) over the coming years, Macron said, presenting it as “the equivalent” of Trump’s Stargate AI data centres project.
India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi is co-hosting the summit with Macron, in an effort to involve more global actors in AI development and prevent the sector from becoming a US-China battle.
India’s foreign secretary, Vikram Misri, stressed the need for equitable access to AI to avoid “perpetuating a digital divide that is already existing across the world.”
Industry figures expressed hope that the Paris summit could provide some direction to the industry, as well as some global coordination when it comes to regulation.
“The Paris AI Action Summit is a pivotal moment to move beyond abstract debates about AI and focus on concrete, global actions,” Mitchell Baker, chairwoman of Mozilla, told The Independent.
