Open Source AI Set to Take Center-Stage in Paris AI Action Summit
The Paris AI Action Summit is set to kick off next week in France. The AI summit will be hosted by France and India on February 10 and 1, Reuters reported. As the summit draws closer, the world is waiting to see whether US President Donald Trump strikes a deal with China and about 100 other countries to promote safe development of AI.
Focus on Open Source AI
The summit will focus on areas where France, which is the EU’s second biggest economy, has an edge. Discussions will also focus on powering data centers with clean energy and AI open-source systems. The conversation on open source AI comes barely weeks after Chinese AI search assistant DeepSeek triggered a market sell-off.
Last month, DeepSeek overtook ChatGPT as the most preferred free app on the Apple App Store in the US. The AI assistant is powered by the DeepSeek-V3 model. DeepSeek developers attributed its high ranking to its open-source model leaderboard that rivals many closed-source advanced models globally.
The upcoming artificial intelligence summit comes close to a year after the world’s biggest powers came to terms with the dangers that AI technology poses at Bletchley Park in the UK. This year, representatives from around the world will be meeting in Paris to discuss ways of putting the technology to work. Other topics on the summit agenda include sovereignty in the global AI market and mitigation of labor disruption.
Big tech executives including those from Microsoft, OpenAI, and Alphabet are set to participate in the AI summit.
The Trump Factor
It remains unclear whether the US will build consensus on AI with other countries during the event. Since he assumed office on January 20, US President Donald Trump has revoked tech policies established by the Biden administration and set in motion US Paris Climate Agreement withdrawal. The US congress has called on the president to consider AI chip export controls to counter China.
The US and Chinese are negotiating a non-binding communique bearing principles of AI stewardship. An agreement by the two countries on these principles will mark significant progress on the matter. The French government said the AI summit will serve as a platform for amplifying voices from different countries on the emerging technology.
“We are showing that AI is here, that companies must adopt it, that it is a vector of competitiveness for France and for Europe,” an official from the French Presidency said.
AI Regulation
AI regulation dominated the previous AI summits due to safety concerns. This will not be on the agenda in this year’s summit. Instead, European countries are eager to have conversations about frameworks for guiding AI policy as opposed to rules that are likely to slow their national initiatives down.
Such rules are responsible for slowing US companies down. France, for instance, is evaluating ways to implement the newly enforced EU AI Act without discouraging innovation.
Duringountries want to focus on finding ways to distribute the benefits of AI technologies to developing nations through financially viable models like China’s DeepSeek and French Mistral startups.
Last month, DeepSeek demonstrated that it could compete with US AI heavyweights like OpenAI at a fraction of the cost.
