Paris, Feb 10: Major world leaders are meeting for an AI summit in Paris, where challenging diplomatic talks are expected as tech titans fight for dominance in the fast-moving technology industry.
Heads of state, top government officials, CEOs and scientists from around 100 countries are participating in the two-day international summit from Monday.
High-profile attendees include US Vice President JD Vance, on his first overseas trip since taking office, and Chinese Vice Premier Zhang Guoqing.
“We’re living a technology and scientific revolution we’ve rarely seen,” French President Emmanuel 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.
Vance’s debut abroad
The summit will give some European leaders a chance to meet Vance for the first time. The 40-year-old vice president was just 18 months into his time as Ohio’s junior senator when Donald Trump picked him as his running mate.
Vance was joined by his wife Usha and their three children – Ewan, Vivek and Mirabel – for the trip to Europe. They were greeted in France on Monday morning by Manuel Valls, the minister for Overseas France, and the US Embassy’s charge d’affaires, David McCawley.
Before the trip, Vance made it clear that he intended to use the opportunity for frank discussions with European allies.
“At the AI Summit, the main reason I’m going is actually to have some private conversations with the world leaders who are also going to be there,” Vance told Breitbart News.
“I think there’s a lot that some of the leaders who are present at the AI summit could do to, frankly – bring the Russia-Ukraine conflict to a close, help us diplomatically there – and so we’re going to be focused on those meetings in France.” On Tuesday, Vance will have a working lunch with French President Emmanuel Macron, with discussions on Ukraine and the Middle East on the agenda. Vance, like the US president, has questioned US spending on Ukraine and the broader approach to isolating Russian President Vladimir Putin. Within six months of taking office, Trump promised to end the fighting.
Vance also addressed what he views as a concerning trend in Europe regarding free speech, a topic he raised last year during his attendance at the Munich Security Conference. “Unfortunately, you’ve seen in Europe a really significant, and I think, frankly, an evil trend towards censorship,” he said. “And you hear a lot about America’s moral leadership. One of the things that America’s moral leadership is going to be about during President Trump’s term is free speech. We want people to be able to speak their minds, and we believe that free and open debate is actually a good thing. Unfortunately, a lot of our European friends have gone the wrong direction there.”
Fostering AI advances
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” will 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”. (AP)
