Paris AI Summit Day One
Cycling back from the Grand Palais, Paris’s streets were gridlocked thanks to road closures caused by the AI Summit. The disruption, attendees joked, was mimicking what’s to come with AI.
But as Faculty’s Marc Warner told the Tony Blair Institute, ‘deals will be done here’ because the summit has, with a much wider remit than the Bletchley original, become the centre of AI hype and a genuine gathering point for the whole industry.
What it hasn’t done, however, is covered the cracks in divergent international positions.
Here are five questions people are asking themselves:
- Can Europe establish itself as the AI superpower it ought to be? Success stories such as Mistral are the exception, and will the major new investments announced here turn out to really be new money?
- Summit sources are briefing that who signs the final communique doesn’t matter, because of important announcements on monitoring the impact of AI via new observatories, and on commitments to open source. Is that just what they have to say with the US and the UK unlikely to sign it?
- Which is the biggest elephant in the room – the likelihood of AGI in 3-5 years, the impact of AI on energy use, or the challenges some maintain could come from AI destroying humanity? All of these are getting relatively little attention compared to expectations.
- With policymakers inevitably reacting rather than leading the AI revolution, what is the best course to try to take? Attracting investment and focusing on skills feels like the only option, but neither is likely to be sufficient for countries currently lagging.
- What’s the best way to encourage adoption? Literacy, identifying game-changing data sets and also working out how to reshape tasks so AI is most useful – all of these have interesting roles to play, but nobody has neat answers here in Paris.
Tomorrow, JD Vance and other political leaders will make the weather – hopefully an improvement on the metaphorical and literal cold rain here so far.
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