Paris AI Action Summit: From DeepSeek to Europe's path, here’s everything you need to know

Government and tech leaders will descend on the French capital on Monday for a highly anticipated two-day artificial intelligence (AI) summit.

Set in Paris’s 125-year-old Grand Palais, France will host big-name tech bosses such as OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman and world leaders including US Vice President JD Vance.

While there are several set themes for the summit, one of the main talking points will be the Chinese AI company DeepSeek, which rattled the AI bubble by releasing what it said was a foundational model that is cheaper and more energy efficient. 

The summit will provide a global stage for France to show off its AI ambitions, with President Emmanuel Macron saying last year that he wanted the city of light to become the city of AI. 

Euronews Next takes a look at what to expect.

Who will be there?

The tech heavyweights in attendance also include Google's Sundar Pichai; Anthropic’s CEO Dario Amodei; the so-called "Godmother of AI" Dr Fei-Fei Li; one of the "Godfathers of AI" Yann LeCun; and Arthur Mensch, the CEO of French AI champion Mistral AI.

It is unclear if DeepSeek’s CEO Liang Wenfeng will be attending. 

Companies such as Nvidia, Mozilla, IBM, and others will also attend the summit.

As for world leaders, the EU’s technological sovereignty chief Henna Virkkunen will be attending, as well as Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

It is rumoured that one of China’s most senior leaders Ding Xuexiang could also be attending.

The main themes

Unlike the AI Safety Summit in the United Kingdom, the French AI summit, officially called the AI Action Summit, will not focus as much on the doom and gloom of AI, French officials told Euronews Next last year.  

Instead, it aims to look at the opportunities of AI, such as for treating diseases or making life easier for humans. 

Official themes include AI for public interest, global AI governance, the future of work, and innovation and culture. There will also be a focus on sustainability. 

Open-source AI technology will be a key theme, following DeepSeek’s success in this way of working. 

"Foremost in my mind is not to repeat what I see as the mistakes that we made with social media in the late 2000s and early 2010s," said Martin Tisné, thematic envoy for public interest AI at the AI Action Summit.

"Right now we have a chance, when the AI market is very fluid, to really start from ground zero," he told a press conference on Thursday.

"AI is at an inflexion point where it could go two ways. Either a focus around more proprietary models, or an open approach focused around open models - which I think looks very different in terms of competition between companies, and the involvement of society writ large," he said. 

'The European approach'

While the world will be watching as China and the US have both made massive investments in developing AI technology in what is looking like a global AI race, there will also be a focus on the path Europe will take. 

According to Daron Acemoglu, an institute professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Nobel Prize-winning economist, the European approach to AI will become much more successful through demonstration which is not just through regulation but through companies that are complying with the rules being at the frontier.

"OpenAI or Anthropic’s path is not the only one," he told a press conference on Thursday. 

"There is a path that is more pro-human, pro-worker - more concerned with safety, privacy, and usability - without concentrating all the power, data, and compute resources in the hands of just a few players".

Regulation is expected to be a strong talking point as the first provisions of the EU AI Act came into force on February 2, which includes measures such as banning social scoring, internet or CCTV material scraping for facial recognition databases, and harmful AI-based manipulation.

As the EU’s rules slowly enter into force, by August transparency obligations for AI models from companies such as ChatGPT will start applying, which will call for more disclosure of training data.

"Navigating our regulations here [in Europe] just feels like solving a puzzle where the pieces are changing," Tanuja Randery, managing director for Amazon Web Services (AWS) Europe told Euronews Next.

She said this is one of the challenges for European businesses that are using AI.

Nearly 3 million European businesses have adopted AI for the first time in the last year, according to a report released on Saturday by AWS.

It is a figure that is on track to meet Europe’s digital ambitions, as set out in the European Commission’s Digital Decade initiative. 

However, AWS warned that there are factors that the bloc must improve upon if Europe wants to make the most of AI technology. 

"The problem is not the technology, it’s the lack of digital skills," Randery said.