Why PM Modi, JD Vance and Sam Altman are attending Paris AI Summit? What’s at stake for India?news24

Prime Minister Narendra Modi will leave for France today to attend and co-chair the Artificial Intelligence (AI) Action Summit with French President Immanuel Macron. The two-day summit will be held at the Grand Palais in Paris and will be attended by over 1,500 guests, including more than 100 world leaders.

The Paris AI Summit comes at a time when the AI rivalry between the West and China is at a tipping point, with low-cost DeepSeek AI competing with leading Western alternatives such as ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude.

The summit will also be an opportunity for France and India to showcase their soft power in an area that is likely to be a game changer in the not too distant future. Following the AI Action Summit, President Maron also announced an investment of €109 million in artificial intelligence projects in France over the coming years, comparing it to the size of the US Stargate project.

“The first battle for Europeans is to invest, invest, invest…If we regulate before we innovate, we won’t have any innovation and people will say, ‘We have great regulation in Europe, but we don’t have a single player.’” President Macron was quoted as saying by Bloomberg. 

Who will attend the Paris AI summit? 

The AI Summit in Paris will be graced by many global leaders including Chinese Vice Premier Zhang, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, Canada Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotaki, President of the European Commission Ursula Von Der Leyen and UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres.

US Vice President JD Vance will also be present at the summit, marking Donald Trump’s deputy’s first foreign trip since the new administration took over on 20 January. 

Apart from the political leaders, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, Microsoft President Brad Smith and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman are scheduled to give talks at the AI Action Summit. 

While xAI Chief Elon Musk and DeepSeek founder Liang Wenfeng have both been invited to the Paris Summit, it isn’t yet clear if the two tech leaders will be attend the gathering. 

What are the likely outcomes of the France AI summit? 

The first such AI summit was held in the UK in 2023 and resulted in a 28 page non-binding agreement between the participants to tackle risks related to AI. In a follow up summit the next year in South Korea, a pledge was taken to set up a network of public AI safety instistutes for advancing research and testing, AP reported. 

While the risk posed by AI will still be a high priority at the Paris Summit, France is hoping to get all the participating governments to agree on commitments regarding the development of ethical, democratic and environmentally sustainable AI. 

“It’s about establishing the rules of the game. AI cannot be the Wild West.” President Emmanuel Macron recently told France’s La Provence newspaper.

What will be India’s position in the AI debate? 

PM Modi is likely to lend their support to the open source AIs such as France’s Mistral AI, US’ Meta AI and China’s DeepSeek over the close source models honed by companies like OpenAI, Google and Anthropic. 

Recently, Indian IT Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw had already praised DeepSeek after the low-cost AI managed to compete with the likes of ChatGPT and Gemini. Vaishnaw had said that the privacy related concerns of DeepSeek can be handled by hosting it on Indian servers. 

“DeepSeek is open source; we will host it on Indian servers soon… It is an open-source model. Like LLaMA (LLM by Meta), which is open source, this too can be hosted on Indian servers,” Vaishnaw had recently said.

Indian foreign secretary Vikram Misri while speaking about the AI Summit last week said, “Artificial Intelligence is bound to have and is already having profound impact across all sectors of the economy, polity, society, and governance. And therefore, summits such as the AI Action Summit are both significant and timely.”