AI summit brings lawmakers, tech executives to Paris

The Artificial Intelligence Action Summit kicked off on Monday in France’s Grand Palais museum. The governments of France and India co-organized the event gathering international leaders and executives from tech giants including OpenAI, Google, Meta, and Microsoft. Members of academic, artistic, and nonprofit groups will also be in attendance, according to the summit.

What will the attendees discuss? Attendees will discuss the public interest in AI and the impacts AI can have on the workplace, government investment, ethics, and regulations, according to the summit’s website. The two-day summit follows similar international summits in London and South Korea.

Mozilla President Mark Surman said past international summits framed the open nature of AI as a threat to user safety. He described this latest summit as a fresh look at combining AI’s inherent transparency with safety objectives to create products to curb activity like hate speech and online sex abuse material. Google CEO Sundar Pichai spoke on his company’s advancements in AI, specifically using it to develop self-driving cars and generate maps to battle wildfires in Los Angeles. This period will go down in history as the golden age of innovation, Pichai said.

French President Emmanuel Macron emphasized France’s focus on using clean energy to power AI development rather than burning fossil fuels to generate the significant amount of energy necessary to power data centers. Macron also teased European Union Commission President Ursula von der Leyen unveiling the European AI strategy on Tuesday. The strategy will simplify regulations and add depth to investments and computing capabilities, Macron said.

Dig deeper: Read my previous report on England mounting the first international AI summit in 2023.