STORY: :: Google Deepmind CEO says regulating AI is
‘important’ but ‘tricky in the current environment’
:: February 9, 2025
:: Paris, France
:: Demis Hassabis, Nobel Laureate and Google Deepmind CEO
“I think it’s important to regulate AI., but it’s important to get the regulations right and that’s hard, when such that the technology itself is not fully understood and it’s so fast moving. And it also needs to be international because AI is going to affect all countries, the whole world, as a technology, it needs to be… there needs to be sort of international cooperation around that. And that’s also tricky in the current environment.”
“I mean, just briefly on DeepSeek, it’s an impressive piece of work and I think it’s probably the best work I’ve seen come out of China. But it’s important to understand that, despite the hype, there’s no actual new scientific advance there. It’s using known techniques. Actually, many of the techniques we invented at Google, and at DeepMind, things like AlphaZero and some of the reinforcement learning, they use.”
The AI Action Summit, which kicks off on Monday (February 10) at Paris’ Grand Palais, will discuss how to safely embrace artificial intelligence at a time of mounting resistance to heavy-handed red tape that businesses say stifles innovation.
The summit will also aim to find common ground between U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration, China and nearly 100 other nations on how to regulate AI.
An official for the French presidency said the summit will give voice to countries around the world, not only the likes of U.S. and China.
Mitigating labor disruption and promoting sovereignty in a global AI market are also on the agenda.
Google Senior Vice President James Manyika said global conversations on AI were usually “focused on the risks and complexities and not enough on the opportunities,” citing AI’s potential to help developing countries in education, climate change and health care.
A non-binding communiqué of principles for the stewardship of AI, bearing U.S., Chinese and other signatures, has been under negotiation and would mark a big achievement if reached, said the people involved in the summit, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
Instead in focus is how to distribute AI’s benefits to developing nations, via cheaper models made by the likes of France’s startup Mistral and China’s DeepSeek. The Hangzhou-based company rocked global markets last month by showing it could vie with U.S. heavyweights on human-like reasoning technology, at lower costs.
Hannabis said the hype over DeepSeek was “a little bit exaggerated” as there was “no actual new scientific advance”, but said it demonstrated “extremely good engineering”.
