Many prominent participants have announced their arrival at the AI Action Summit this Monday and Tuesday (February 10th and 11th) in Paris.
Heads of state and government, leaders of international organizations and companies, scientists, artists and representatives of civil society will gather. The summit will be held at the Grand Palace, one of the venues for last year's Olympic Games.
French President Emmanuel Macron will host the event alongside Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Chinese Vice Premier Ding Xuexiang will also attend.
For US Vice President J. D. Vance, the visit to Paris will be his first foreign trip since taking office. The White House confirmed his participation.
Artificial intelligence comes from another continent
The artificial intelligence (AI) sector is currently dominated by American corporations – with Chinese companies following suit. France and Europe, on the other hand, are lagging significantly behind.
For example, the American corporation Amazon will invest about one hundred billion dollars in artificial intelligence infrastructure this year. The demand from IT clients for resources in this sector is so great that AWS, Amazon's cloud services division, is already experiencing capacity problems, said Amazon CEO Andy Jesse. In the last quarter alone, the company invested more than 25 billion euros in its infrastructure.
Just a few weeks ago, China's DeepSeek caused a stir in the world of artificial intelligence. The company's large language model appears to be just as powerful as its American competitor, but was developed much cheaper and with fewer technical resources.
Unlike ChatGPT, a chatbot from the American company OpenAI, DeepSeek's algorithm is not secret, but is freely available (open source).
"While it's difficult to predict the future of DeepSeek as a company, the structural effects appear to be quite far-reaching," investor Sanjot Malhi said, according to Reuters.
One of the key questions raised by DeepSeek is whether it is even worth investing billions of dollars in artificial intelligence in the US.
DeepSeek released details about the AI model on the very day that US President Donald Trump announced a project called Stargate, in which OpenAI and other technology companies plan to invest around $500 billion to develop AI infrastructure.
And Europe?
France is also planning its own AI project: Paris is set to host the largest AI campus in Europe, according to official announcements. The heart of the project will be a huge center with its own powerful energy system.
Investments of "30 to 50 billion euros" are planned, with the United Arab Emirates also participating in the financing, according to the Elysee Palace.
At the same time, the American company OpenAI is expanding its presence in Europe. After London, Dublin, Paris, Brussels and Zurich, Munich will become the first German city with an office.
"As a country known for its technical know-how and industrial innovation, it is no surprise that Germany is a world leader in the use of artificial intelligence," said OpenAI founder Sam Altman during a visit to Germany.
According to data from the daily newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Germany is the country in Europe with the most ChatGPT subscribers and one of the three leading countries in the world in this regard.
Germany is also among the top three countries outside the US in terms of the number of business users paying for AI services. Most importantly, Germany has the second highest number of developers (after the US) integrating ChatGPT into other applications.
More or less regulation?
There is no longer any regulation of the development of artificial intelligence in the US. President Trump repealed regulations introduced by his predecessor Joe Biden shortly after taking office.
In Europe, however, calls for government regulation are growing louder. Before the Paris summit began, around 100 scientists from 30 countries warned that the new technology could lead to a "loss of control" with dramatic consequences.
Ahead of the summit, researchers presented the first international report on the safety of artificial intelligence, which also included collaboration between experts from the UN, the EU, and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).
German physicist Axel Naumann, who lives and works in Switzerland, is also advocating for the development of ethical and sustainable artificial intelligence – as well as analyzing its impact on innovation, transparency and trust.
European values
Europe needs its own open source infrastructure, Naumann told DW. The goal, he points out, is to "show European companies and institutions that it makes sense to invest together and enjoy the fruits of open source together."
But this requires investments, for example in “adjusting administrative processes, customizing products, promoting open source, and advising policy and industry.”
He formulates his vision for Europe's digital future as follows: "The vision must be that Europe sovereignly stores and processes its own data, that our software ecosystem reflects our values."
In the future, it must no longer happen that Europe simply joins others and then pays for licensing rights.
Europe must, says Nauman, "refocus in a coordinated manner on the joint development of open source products."
The key point, however, is this: "For that, we need infrastructure that has yet to be built."
Bonus video:
