**Paris (AFP)** – US Vice President JD Vance will join top tech players in Paris next week at an artificial intelligence summit billed by France as a “wake-up call” for Europe in the global race for AI. Vance, whose attendance was confirmed Tuesday by a French diplomatic source, joins China’s Vice Premier Ding Xuexiang and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi as the highest-profile representatives from 80 countries who will mingle with players from across the sector on February 10 and 11. The event will take place in the French capital’s sumptuous Grand Palais, built for the 1900 Universal Exhibition.
In the run-up, French President Emmanuel Macron will visit research centres applying AI to science and health on February 4, before hosting scientists and Nobel Prize winners at his Elysee Palace residence on Wednesday. A wider science conference will be held at the Polytechnique engineering school on Thursday and Friday. “The summit comes at exactly the right time for this wake-up call for France and Europe, and to show we are in position” to take advantage of the technology, an official in Macron’s office told reporters.
In recent weeks, Washington’s announcement of $500 billion in investment to build up AI infrastructure, along with the release of a frugal but powerful generative AI model by Chinese firm DeepSeek, has focused minds in Europe. The two superpowers are currently in the midst of a trade war. France must “not let this revolution pass it by,” Macron’s office said.
Attendees at the summit will include Sam Altman, head of OpenAI—the firm that brought generative models to public consciousness in 2022 with the launch of ChatGPT. Google boss Sundar Pichai and Nobel Prize winner Demis Hassabis, who leads the company’s DeepMind AI research unit, will also attend, alongside Arthur Mensch, founder of French AI developer Mistral. The Elysee has stated there are “talks” ongoing about hosting DeepSeek founder Liang Wenfeng, and it remains unclear whether X owner Elon Musk—who has his own generative initiative, xAI—has accepted an invitation. Confirmed guests from Europe include European Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz.
The tone of the AI summit will be “neither catastrophising, nor naive,” according to Macron’s AI envoy, Anne Bouverot. Hosting the conference is also an opportunity for Paris to showcase its own AI ecosystem, which consists of around 750 companies. Macron’s office has indicated that the summit will see the announcement of “massive” investments similar to his annual “Choose France” business conference, at which 15 billion euros ($15.4 billion) of inward investment were pledged for 2024.
Beyond the economic opportunities, AI’s impact on culture—including artistic creativity and news production—will be discussed in a side event over the weekend. Debates open to the public, such as this one, are aimed at showcasing “positive use cases for AI” to “stoke confidence and speed up adoption” of the technology, according to France’s digital minister Clara Chappaz. For now, however, the French public remains sceptical about AI, with 79 percent of respondents in a recent survey by Ifop expressing they were “concerned” about the technology.
Paris also hopes the summit can help launch its vision for a more ethical, accessible, and less resource-intensive AI. Currently, “the AI under development is pushed by a few large players from a few countries,” Bouverot noted, while France aims “to promote more inclusive development.” Indian Prime Minister Modi has been invited to co-host the Paris summit as part of efforts to bring governments on board.
One of the summit’s objectives is the establishment of a public-interest foundation, for which Paris aims to raise 2.5 billion euros over five years. This effort would be “a public-private partnership between various governments, businesses, and philanthropic foundations from different countries,” noted Macron’s office. Paris hopes to chart various efforts at AI governance around the world during the summit and gather commitments for environmentally sustainable AI—although no binding mechanism is planned for now.
“There are lots of big principles emerging around responsible, trustworthy AI, but it’s not clear or easy to implement for the engineers in technical terms,” observed Laure de Roucy-Rochegonde, director of the geopolitical technology centre at the French Institute for International Relations (IFRI).
© 2024 AFP
