France pitches AI summit as wake-up call for Europe

France hosts top tech players next week at an artificial intelligence summit meant as a “wake-up call” for Europe as it struggles with AI challenges from the United States and China. Players from across the sector and representatives from 80 nations will gather in the French capital on Feb.10 and 11 in the sumptuous Grand Palais, built for the 1900 Universal Exhibition. In the run-up, President Emmanuel Macron on February 4 visited research centres applying AI to science and health, before hosting scientists and Nobel Prize winners at his Elysee Palace residence. 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 and the release of a frugal but powerful generative AI model by Chinese firm DeepSeek have focussed minds in Europe. 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 come, alongside Arthur Mensch, founder of French AI developer Mistral.

The Elysee has said there are “talks” on hosting DeepSeek founder Liang Wenfeng, and has yet to clarify whether X owner Elon Musk — who has his own generative initiative, xAI — has accepted an invitation. Nor is it clear who will attend from the United States and China, with the French presidency saying only “very high level” representatives will come. 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 catastrophizing, nor naive,” Macron’s AI envoy Anne Bouverot told AFP.

Hosting the conference is also an opportunity for Paris to show off its own AI ecosystem, which numbers around 750 companies.

Macron’s office has said the summit would see the announcement of “massive” investments along the lines of his annual “Choose France” business conference, at which 15 billion euros ($15.4 billion) of inward investment were pledged in 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 that one, are aimed at showing off “positive use cases for AI” to “stoke confidence and speed up adoption” of the technology, said France’s digital minister Clara Chappaz.

For now the French public is sceptical of AI, with 79 percent of respondents telling pollsters Ifop they were “concerned” about the technology in a recent survey. Paris says it also hopes the summit can help kick off its vision of a more ethical and accessible and less resource-intensive AI.

At present, “the AI under development is pushed by a few large players from a few countries”, Bouverot said, whereas France wants “to promote more inclusive development”.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been invited to co-host the Paris summit, in a push to bring governments on board. One of the summit’s aims is the establishment of a public-interest foundation for which Paris aims to raise 2.5 billion euros over five years.

The effort would be “a public-private partnership between various governments, businesses and philanthropic foundations from different countries”, Macron’s office said. Paris hopes at the summit to chart different efforts at AI governance around the world 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,” said Laure de Roucy-Rochegonde, director of the geopolitical technology centre at the French Institute for International Relations (IFRI).

Agence France-Presse