Paris, Feb. 12 (Xinhua) — Topic: Paris Summit Offers a Pulse on the New Trends in Artificial Intelligence Development
By Luo Yu of Xinhua News Agency
From February 10 to 11, the AI Action Summit was held in Paris. Inside the Grand Palais, the main venue, political and business leaders from multiple countries gathered for heated discussions on global AI governance. In the “Station F” startup park in southeastern Paris, thousands of AI entrepreneurs and innovators were busy showcasing the latest applications of AI and negotiating commercial partnerships. At the Shangri-La Hotel along the Seine River, experts and scholars from China, the United States, Canada, and other countries engaged in in-depth exchanges regarding AI technologies and their applications.
This event was not merely a display of cutting-edge technological exploration but also a profound outlook on future development trends. Currently, the depth and breadth of AI technology are continuously expanding, evolving toward richer, more efficient, and application-oriented directions. Particularly at the technical core level, the “slimming revolution” of large models is breaking through computing power constraints. As one expert put it, these models are undergoing a transformation from “clumsy athletes” to “agile dancers.”
“The future development of AI will trend toward terminalization and lightweighting. Large models need further miniaturization and lower energy consumption to be deployable on mobile phones and wearable devices, with personal agents and digital assistants serving as typical application scenarios,” said Liang Zheng, professor at the School of Public Policy and Management at Tsinghua University and deputy dean of the Institute for AI International Governance at Tsinghua. “With advancements in technologies such as multimodal learning and reinforcement learning, the large-scale deployment of service robots, autonomous vehicles, and drones will become possible.”
AI hardware and software innovations are also advancing at a stunning pace. Xu Wei, professor and deputy dean of the Interdisciplinary Institute for Information Science at Tsinghua University, believes that short-term visible trends include “expanding existing large language models into multimodal capabilities” and “integrating AI into various workflows.” On the other hand, the scientific research community is exploring new model architectures that surpass current large language models. The core of this lies in richer modeling capabilities, providing AI with a deeper understanding and expression of the world.
This summit placed particular emphasis on promoting open access to AI resources and lowering the threshold for developing countries to acquire AI technology. In this regard, China’s large language models have stood out. Represented by DeepSeek, they exhibit characteristics of openness, low energy consumption, and transparency, becoming a new paradigm for inclusive global benefits. The French newspaper Le Monde reported that DeepSeek’s debut was stunning; relying on less computing power and data consumption, as well as lower training costs, it achieved performance comparable to the latest products from the United States. This achievement is of extremely significant importance in promoting AI development in countries other than China and the U.S., and in advancing the inclusivity and broad accessibility of AI applications.
Outside and inside the conference venues, the open-source mindset of Chinese enterprises received high praise. Maxim Carrel, a data scientist at Scalian, a French digital systems company whose firm is dedicated to promoting small-scale, specialized open-source AI, stated: “We are chasing the best AI. For example, we are testing Alibaba’s Tongyi Qianwen model; it is excellent—both efficient and low in energy consumption.” Dan Carpenter, sales vice president of a British AI cloud service enterprise, described DeepSeek as a “surprise” and expressed hope that “the more open-source companies like this exist, the better.”
In the current era of rapid AI development, voices from the Global South are often overlooked. At the summit, multiple experts repeatedly emphasized the inclusivity of AI governance, calling for greater representation of the Global South and other groups in AI governance dialogues. Sean O’Hegarty, a senior researcher at Cambridge University, stated: “Many Chinese scholars emphasize the importance of using technology to help achieve sustainable development goals. It is crucial to ensure that experts from the Global South have representation in AI governance dialogues. AI development should fully consider the developmental needs of Southern countries, involve their experts, understand their requirements, and empower them with a voice in global decision-making.”
How to better benefit humanity through AI and realize “AI for Good” was a hot topic during the summit. A prevailing view is that promoting AI for Good requires ensuring that AI development always aligns with fundamental human interests and value standards. This necessitates joint promotion of development, joint protection of security, and shared benefits. At this summit, multiple countries and international organizations, including France, China, India, and the European Union, jointly signed a declaration vowing to ensure that artificial intelligence is open, inclusive, transparent, ethical, safe, reliable, and trustworthy. This serves as a positive response to calls for AI for Good.
The Paris AI Action Summit comprehensively showcased the diverse innovation and open, inclusive development trends of AI, while also highlighting the urgent need to strengthen global collaboration and build an inclusive governance framework. Facing infinite opportunities and numerous challenges, this reporter deeply felt that the international community should join hands, uphold the development philosophy of AI for Good and inclusivity, continuously deepen innovative cooperation, jointly improve the global AI governance system, and ensure that artificial intelligence truly becomes a great force benefiting all humanity.