DeepSeeking AI Action Summit

Even though America signed the 2015 Paris Climate Summit, they continued to feel uneasy about it. Ten years on, Paris just hosted an important summit on artificial intelligence (AI).

- Atanu Biswas

And at this historic AI Action Summit in Paris, the US and the UK didn't sign the declaration on “inclusive and sustainable” AI.

In fact, French President Emmanuel Macron announced that Europe will reduce regulations to facilitate the growth of AI in the continent. However, “excessive regulation of the AI sector could kill a transformative industry”, US Vice President JD Vance warned against the European Union’s (EU) regulatory approach. In particular, he urged Europeans to view the new AI frontier with optimism rather than trepidation.

America’s recent uneasiness regarding AI might have been driven by China’s DeepSeek, which is currently dominating the AI landscape. DeepSeek appeared about two weeks before the summit and overshadowed it as well. In fact, the discussions and reactions from different parties—the summit as a whole—might have been entirely different in the absence of DeepSeek. Even while ideas like “AI sovereignty” have been around for a while, everyone, even American leaders, understood in the years before DeepSeek that the rest of the world would have to rely on the monopolistic American Big Tech industry.

Then came DeepSeek. One of America’s main concerns was that it implied China had surpassed American know-how in AI. Moreover, we all knew, wrongly though, that hefty investments are necessary for AI innovation. In the process, Big Tech aspires to get bigger. One of Donald Trump’s first few announcements in his second term was that OpenAI, Oracle, and SoftBank have together pledged a $500-billion investment to create AI infrastructure under a joint venture called “Stargate”. However, now that China has stormed into AI innovation with DeepSeek, its low-tech, low-cost alternative to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, other countries dared to leap forward.