A summit on artificial intelligence will be held in France next week in a wake-up call for Europe, which is struggling with AI challenges from the US and China.
Representatives from 80 countries will gather in the French capital on 10 and 11 February at the opulent Grand Palais, built for the 1900 World’s Fair.
Ahead of the event, President Emmanuel Macron yesterday visited research centres applying AI to science and healthcare, and today received scientists and Nobel Prize winners at his residence in the Elysee Palace.
A wider scientific conference will be held tomorrow and on February 7 at the Polytechnique engineering school.
“The summit comes at just the right time for France and Europe to wake up and show that we are in a position to take advantage of this technology,” an official from Macron’s office told reporters.
In recent weeks, Washington has announced $500 billion in funding for artificial intelligence infrastructure, and Chinese company DeepSeek has released a low-cost but powerful generative AI model that has caught the attention of Europeans.
France must “not let this revolution pass it by,” Macron’s office said.
AI Summit guests
The summit will be attended by Sam Altman, head of OpenAI, the company that took generative models to the public level by launching ChatGPT in 2022.
Google boss Sundar Pichai and Nobel Prize winner Demis Hassabis, who heads DeepMind AI’s research division, will also attend, as will Arthur Mensch, founder of French AI developer Mistral.
The Elysee Palace said “negotiations” were underway to host DeepSeek founder Liang Wenfeng, and has not yet clarified whether X owner Elon Musk, who has his own generative initiative xAI, has accepted the invitation.
It is also unclear who will attend from the US and China, with the French presidency saying only “very high-level” representatives will attend. However, US Vice President JD Vance will attend an artificial intelligence summit, a French diplomatic source said on Tuesday.
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 catastrophic nor naive,” Macron’s AI spokeswoman Anne Bouverot told AFP.
The conference is also an opportunity for Paris to showcase its own AI ecosystem of some 750 companies. In addition to economic opportunities, a side event over the weekend will discuss the impact of AI on culture, including artistic creation and news production.
According to French Digital Minister Clara Chappaz, debates like this one, open to the public, are designed to showcase “positive use cases of AI” to “build confidence and accelerate adoption” of the technology.
At the moment, the French public is sceptical about AI, with 79 per cent of respondents in a recent poll saying they were “concerned” about the technology. Paris also hopes the summit can help kick-start its vision for more ethical, affordable and less resource-intensive AI.
