AI Action Summit felt like the AI Fashion Week; only with a lesser sense of style & little element of surprise.
Warning: contains high amounts of tea and irony.
The AI Action Summit came at a particular time and context: the Trump administration and tech giants hard-launch their relationship, the Chinese start-up Deepseek causes the US tech giants a blessure narcissique, and the EU sees its regulatory power challenged not only by the US but also by one of its own, like France, who has become Sam Altman’s bff (see Altman’s op-ed on Le Monde).
Based in Paris since 2016, I am used to Paris becoming the center of media attention with Paris Fashion Week, lately with the Olympics, and so on. The local Parisian experiences this period with slight annoyance due to the disruption of their daily lives, with influencers taking photos with a croissant in front of their neighborhood bakery and an intense FOMO (fear-of-missing-out).
Paris, in my opinion, has substantial symbolic capital and is a marketing success. But this time, it wasn’t the PFW exclusive parties, sensationalist fashion shows, or the likes of Kardashians fuelling the FOMO on Instagram or TikTok for me; BUT my LinkedIn connections who are always “thrilled”, “delighted”, “honoured” for something.
With its tech bros, nerds & incels, stuck-up policymakers, social justice warrior academics; we all wanted to feel something; especially relevant. With this aspiration, I registered for all the side events à droite à gauche and felt uncool again: I wasn’t invited to any exclusive parties and VIP events…
Macron embraced the deepfakes & said “plug, baby plug”
It seems like the dominant paradigm shifted from regulation to innovation (see this paper debunking the false choice between regulation and innovation I found out via
’s newsletter). Whether it’s recent concerns about the profitability of the genAI bubble that made investors anxious or the AI race between the US & China accelerated by Deepseek and tariffs, the “regulation vs innovation” rhetoric seems to have yielded a series of investments: Ursula von der Leyen’s InvestAI of €200 billion, and Macron’s $112 billion following Trump’s Stargate of $500 billion.Just as people started to feel unimpressed with the promised potentials of AI worldwide, the summit was sort of a runway show, a spectacle to appease the tech oligarchs & attract investment. Bad news for multilateralism and competing standards, guidelines, and frameworks developed by international organizations.
Quid of the critics?
I am part of a paradoxical group: the AI ethicists, civil society, policy people. People whose livelihood depends on AI. In theory, if there are no issues with AI, my job doesn’t exist. It’s this paradox that also drives the anxiety: you need to be in the room but if you are too disruptive very likely you won’t. Many civil society folks didn’t make it to Le Grand Palais neither la Station F to party with Sam Altman yesterday.
Conversations on standardization, international cooperation and global AI governance felt bleak as nobody addressed the elephants in the room. Equity & inclusivity discourse lost its à la mode status with the death of virtue signalling and reactionary anti-woke sentiments. Business people socialized with business people while policy people met their peers. Siloed interest groups, suspending questions on whether the EU digital playbook will be reinforced or let itself be bullied by the big tech & the European innovation-advocates.
All in all, this series of events felt like the fashion week of AI: useful to catch the signals & connect with others but one huge media campaign with selfies flooding the LinkedIn feeds. Just as hype-driven as the fashion industry with occasional attempts at self-reflection but without the nice looks.
For informative takes on the conversations that happened, check your LinkedIn or a more-detailed debrief watch the last episode of Computer Says Maybe: