The February 10-11 AI Action Summit in Paris will address, among other things, how to equitably distribute AI’s benefits globally, concerns about control of AI by a few dominant players, the role of opensource and building responsible and trustworthy AI.

Attendees at the summit, which will gather nearly 100 nations and be co-hosted by the French and Indian governments, will include Chinese Vice Premier Zhang Guoqing and U.S. Vice-President J.D. Vance.

The Summit hopes to move the conversation on from fear about the harm the technology might do, the focus of  the inaugural AI Safety Summit hosted by the UK government at Bletchley Park in November 2023 in the UK, and instead emphasize how general-purpose AI has immense potential for education, medical applications, research advances in fields such as chemistry, biology, or physics, and generally increased prosperity.

But AI’s dark side will nonetheless be top of mind.

Governments, leading AI companies, civil society groups and experts gathered for the AI Action Summit will be presented with an International AI Safety Report spearheaded by Turing prize winner Yoshio Bengio and compiled with the help of expert representatives nominated by 30 countries, the OECD, the EU, and the UN, as well as several other world-leading experts. The report covers already established harms such as bias, scams, extortion, psychological manipulation, generation of non-consensual intimate imagery and child sexual abuse material, deepfakes and targeted sabotage of individuals and organizations as well as future threats such as large-scale labor market impacts, AI-enabled biological attacks, and society losing control over Artificial General Intelligence (AGI).

As model capabilities continue to advance amid mounting global instability, fueling the race between the U.S. and China, but also opening new opportunities for startups around the world, the need for international collaboration on a series of other risks including the global AI R&D and compute divide, market concentration, environmental risks, privacy risks, copyright violations and safeguarding intellectual property, has never been higher.

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iGenius.ai, a European AI scale-up valued at more than $1 billion, develops opensource large language models that respect strict data security rules to ensure that corporate clients can safeguard their intellectual property. The company’s AI platform is used by some of the world’s largest organizations including financial services company Allianz,electric utility company Enel, Intesa Sanpaolo, one of the top banking groups in Europe, global shipbuilding group Fincantieri and several governments, including Italy’s.

“We are attracting customers in the U.S.,” says Uljan Sharka, co-founder and CEO of the Italian scale-up. “We tell them if you want the best models go to Silicon Valley. If you want good performance and large language models you can trust you can talk to us.”

Sharka is one of dozens of AI entrepreneurs invited to the global AI Action Summit which will take place in Paris February 10 and 11.
 

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