Trump's AI ambition and China's DeepSeek overshadow an AI summit in Paris - Tech

Al-Ahram Weekly

09-02-2025

The geopolitics of artificial intelligence will be in focus at a major summit in France where world leaders, executives and experts will hammer out pledges on guiding the development of the rapidly advancing technology.
It's the latest in a series of global dialogues around AI governance, but one that comes at a fresh inflection point as China's buzzy and budget-friendly DeepSeek chatbot shakes up the industry.
US Vice President JD Vance, making his first trip abroad since taking office, will attend the Paris AI Action Summit starting Feb. 10, while China's President Xi Jinping will be sending his special envoy, signaling high stakes for the meeting.
Here's a breakdown:
Summit basics
Heads of state and top government officials, tech bosses and researchers are gathering in Paris for the two-day summit cohosted by French President Emmanuel Macron and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
The event aims to address how to harness artificial intelligence's potential so that it benefits everyone, while containing the technology's myriad risks.
European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen is attending, along with officials and CEOs from 80 countries, including German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Microsoft President Brad Smith and Google CEO Sundar Pichai.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who attended the inaugural 2023 summit at former codebreaking base Bletchley Park in England, and DeepSeek founder Liang Wenfeng have been invited, but it's unclear if either will attend.
Panel talks and workshops at the Grand Palais venue on Monday will be followed by a dinner at the Elysee presidential palace for world leaders and CEOs. Leaders and company bosses are expected to give speeches at Tuesday's closing session.
What's at stake?
More than two years after ChatGPT's debut, generative AI continues to make astounding advances at breakneck speed.
The technology that powers all-purpose chatbots is transforming many aspects of life with its ability to spit out high-quality text, images or video, or carry out complex tasks.
The 2023 summit in the UK resulted in a non-binding pledge by 28 nations to tackle AI risks. A follow-up meeting hosted by South Korea last year secured another pledge to set up a network of public AI safety institutes to advance research and testing.
AI safety is still on the agenda in Paris, with an expert group reporting back on general purpose AI's possible extreme dangers.
But this time organizers are expanding the discussion to more countries, and widening the debate to a range of other AI-related topics. Like previous editions, this summit won't produce any binding regulation.
'The summit comes at a time when many are trying to position themselves in the international competition,' Macron told reporters, according to La Provence newspaper. 'It's about establishing the rules of the game. AI cannot be the Wild West.'
The deliverables
Organizers are working on getting countries to sign a joint political declaration gathering commitments for more ethical, democratic and environmentally sustainable AI, according to Macron's office. But it's unclear whether the US would agree to such a measure.
Another big goal is securing an agreement for a public-interest partnership for AI. Paris seeks to raise 2.5 billion euros ($2.6 billion) for the public-private partnership involving governments, businesses and philanthropic groups that will provide open-source access to databases, software and other tools for 'trusted' AI actors, Macron's office said.
Macron's team wants to shift the focus away from the race to develop better-than-human artificial intelligence through sheer computing power and, instead, open up access to data that can help AI solve problems like cancer or long COVID.
'We now have this incredible opportunity to figure out not only how we should mitigate the potential harms from artificial intelligence, but also how we can ensure that it's used to improve people's lives,' said Martin Tisné, the summit's envoy for public interest AI.
Trump's team
US President Donald Trump has spoken of his desire to make the US the 'world capital of artificial intelligence' by tapping its oil and gas reserves to feed the energy-hungry technology.
Meanwhile, he has moved to withdraw the US, again, from the Paris climate agreement and revoked former President Joe Biden's executive order for AI guardrails.
Trump is replacing it with his own AI policy designed to maintain America's global leadership by reducing regulatory barriers and building AI systems free of 'ideological bias.'
The US position might undermine any joint communique, said Nick Reiners, senior geotechnology analyst at the Eurasia Group.
'Trump is against the very idea of global governance,' Reiners said.
'It's one thing to get countries to agree that AI should have guardrails and that AI safety is something worth caring about. But they've widened the scope to talk about the future of work and the environment and inclusivity and so on, a whole range of concepts. So it's hard to imagine getting a widespread agreement on such a broad range of subjects.'
China's role
Chinese leader Xi is sending Vice Premier Zhang Guoqing, who's been elevated to the role of Xi's special representative.
It's a big step up from the 2023 Bletchley meeting, when the Chinese government sent the vice minister of science and technology. It signifies that Xi wants China to play a bigger role in global AI governance as Trump pulls back, Reiners said.
DeepSeek 's release last month stunned the world because of its ability to rival Western players like ChatGPT. It also escalated the wider geopolitical showdown between Beijing and Washington over tech supremacy.
Trump said DeepSeek was a 'wake-up call' for the US tech industry and his AI advisor David Sacks accused DeepSeek of training its model on stolen OpenAI data.
The DeepSeek chatbot app now faces investigations, and in some cases, bans in the US and a number of other countries over privacy and security concerns.
Yet the rise of DeepSeek, which built its open source AI model at a fraction of the cost and with fewer chips, also puts China's interests in line with France's.
French organizers said 'the summit aims at promoting an ambitious French and European AI strategy" as advances in the sector have been led by the US and China. Macron hopes to make room for others, including French startup Mistral, which also uses an open source AI model.
'DeepSeek is being seen as a kind of vindication of this idea that you don't have to necessarily invest hundreds of billions of dollars in in chips and data centers,' Reiners said.
Transatlantic tensions
Another showdown could involve Brussels, which has long been a thorn in the side of US-based Big Tech companies, cracking down with antitrust penalties against the likes of Google, Apple and Meta.
Trump lashed out at last month's World Economic Forum with 'very big complaints' about the EU's multibillion-dollar fines, calling them a tax on American companies.
More recently, the EU's artificial intelligence regulation has met resistance from the companies.
The European Union recently unveiled a non-binding "code of practice' for its AI Act but Meta's top lobbyist said the company, which owns Facebook and Instagram, won't sign up.
The EU guidelines, intended to standardize how the AI Act's regulations are applied across the 27-nation bloc, are 'unworkable' and the continent's regulatory environment is 'pushing Europe to the sidelines,' Chief Global Affairs Officer Joel Kaplan told a Brussels event.
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