Paris AI summit, co-chaired by PM Modi, begins today: here is what to know

The Summit of Heads of State and Government will then take place on February 11, at the Grand Palais. The idea is to discuss the key common actions to take on AI.

AI and the global governance challenge

Analysts say the Paris summit, where Macron has taken a personal initiative, is important for Europe because the development of powerful AI is now increasingly perceived as a race between the tech majors of America and the state power of China.

In his widely cited report on the challenges to Europe’s economy, Mario Draghi, the former president of the European Central Bank, highlighted red tape and laws that prevent the European technology sector from competing with America and China in this new field. Brussels is seen to be trailing in this race, with little chance of catch-up. The Paris summit comes with this in the background.

The summit also comes close on the heels of Washington announcing a mega AI project, with the likes of OpenAI, Softbank, Oracle, Microsoft and Nvidia coming together to build AI infrastructure in that country. An investment of $500 billion is expected to be made in a new company, Stargate Project, to catalyst this expansion of AI capabilities over the next four years.

But the elephant in the room is likely to be China, and the astounding advances made by the country in AI despite efforts by Washington to thwart this progress. A Chinese company has recently showcased a new large language model (LLM) — a foundational AI model trained on large amounts of data — that is being touted to be almost on par with OpenAI’s new o1 ‘reasoning model’ in math, coding, and reasoning benchmarks.

The model released by China’s DeepSeek has shown that training an AI model may not be as expensive an endeavour as previously thought, with foundational models possible at a fraction of the cost of what it took companies like OpenAI and Google.

Chinese tech major Alibaba too released a new AI model in November, which is said to rival OpenAI’s GPT-o1 series models in reasoning capability.

Approaches on regulation

All these developments come as policymakers across jurisdictions have stepped up regulatory scrutiny of generative AI tools, but have taken varying approaches. The concerns being flagged fall into three broad heads: privacy, system bias and violation of intellectual property rights.

The policy response has been different across jurisdictions, with the European Union having taken a predictably tougher stance by proposing a regulation that segregates AI as per use case scenarios, based broadly on the degree of invasiveness and risk. The UK is seen to be on the other end of the spectrum, with a decidedly ‘light-touch’ approach that aims to foster, and not stifle, innovation in this nascent field.

The US approach so far has slotted somewhere in between, which could see further deregulation now. China too has released its own set of measures to regulate AI.

India has maintained that the weaponisation represented by social media must be overcome and steps should be taken to ensure AI represents safety and trust, even as the technology represents a big opportunity.