Bonjour! Greetings from Paris, where the French government is currently hosting government officials from dozens of nations for what it is calling the AI Action Summit. The Summit is the successor to two prior international gatherings, the first convened by the U.K. government and held at Bletchley Park, in England, in November 2023, and the second held by the South Korean government in Seoul in May 2024.
But it would be hard to overstate the difference in vibe between those previous two meetings and this one. The Bletchley Summit was a decidedly sober affair, with just 29 governments represented and top executives from the handful of AI labs, such as OpenAI, Google DeepMind, and Anthropic, at the cutting-edge of AI technology. The conversation was dominated by what some would call AI “doomerism”—or how to head off the most catastrophic risks from powerful AI. It led to a commitment by the countries present to identify AI risks and work together to head them off. Then in Seoul, 16 leading AI companies agreed to publish frameworks for how they would seek to identify and mitigate AI safety risks, and under what circumstances they might decide not to develop models.
