France hosts top tech players next week at an artificial intelligence summit meant as a "wake-up call" for Europe as it struggles with AI challenges from the United States and China. Players from across the sector and representatives from 80 nations will gather in the French capital on Feb. 10 and 11 in the sumptuous Grand Palais, built for the 1900 Universal Exhibition.

Donald Trump has said that the launch of a chatbot by China's DeepSeek is a "wake-up call" for US tech firms in the global race to dominate artificial intelligence. The emergence of DeepSeek, which has built its R1 model chatbot at a fraction of the cost of competitors such as OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Gemini, wiped 1tn ( 800bn) in value from the leading US tech index on Monday. Nvidia, a leading maker of computer chips that has experienced explosive growth amid the AI boom, had 600bn wiped off its market value in the biggest one-day fall in US stock market history. "The release of DeepSeek, AI from a Chinese company, should be a wake-up call for our industries that we need to be laser-focused on competing to win," said Trump. He pointed to DeepSeek's ability to apparently deliver the same performance as existing AI models with far fewer resources, threatening the dominance of the US-led AI boom.

DeepSeek is powered by the open source DeepSeek-V3 model, which its researchers claim was trained for around 6m ( 4.2m) - significantly less than the billions spent by rivals. But this claim has been disputed by others in AI. Its emergence comes as the US is restricting the sale of the advanced chip technology that powers AI to China. To continue their work without steady supplies of imported advanced chips, Chinese AI developers have shared their work with each other and experimented with new approaches to the technology. This has resulted in AI models that require far less computing power than before.

President Biden on Thursday said calling Chinese President Xi Jinping a "dictator" has not undermined relations between the two countries. For more than eight decades, the United States has stood alone as the wealthiest, most innovative, and most economically prosperous nation in the world. Our preeminence has ushered in an era of unprecedented abundance and unparalleled opportunities for the American people and billions across the globe. Technology and innovation are driving forces behind our economic success. Every day, American entrepreneurs and tech companies are creating new products and services that create jobs, foster economic growth, and improve the way each of us work, live, and connect.

Yesterday, Microsoft Germany CTO Andreas Braun was quoted as saying that GPT-4 will be introduced next week and will include multimodal models. The report, which ran in the German news outlet Heise, instantly led to renewed online chatter about the possibility of GPT-4's debut, less than four months after the GPT 3.5 series, which ChatGPT is fine-tuned on, was released. Coincidentally, deep learning pioneer Yoshua Bengio, who won the 2018 Turing Award together with Geoffrey Hinton and Yann LeCun, also made comments yesterday about ChatGPT and the potential of multimodal models. In a virtual Q&A titled "What's Lacking In ChatGPT? Bridging the gap to human-level intelligence," Bengio said that current work on multimodal large neural nets, that have images or video as well as text, would "help a lot" with the'world model' issue -- that is, that models need to understand the physics of our world. He also warned that market pressures will likely push tech companies towards secrecy rather than openness with their AI models, and that the "media circus" around ChatGPT is a "wake-up call" about the potential of powerful AI systems to both do good for society as well as create significant ethical concerns.

Originally published on Towards AI. Join over 80,000 subscribers and keep up to date with the latest developments in AI. If you are building an AI startup, an AI-related product, or a service, we invite you to consider becoming a sponsor.

Recent reports say that Google co-founders are looking for ways to tackle the Open ChatGPT platform. This AI-driven platform is proving to be a threat to Google's search business. Since its inception back in November 2022, some people have turned to it to get answers to various questions. With its training, this AI-driven platform can answer even complex questions to the best of its ability. Sometimes its answers might be wrong, but this doesn't stop it from having a response to give users.

Here's a safe prediction about 2022: Digital transformation spurred by the shift to hybrid and remote work will continue, and in many cases accelerate. COVID-19 was a wake-up call for companies that dragged their heels on digitization. Suddenly, organizations large and small were forced to speed up their adoption of digital platforms to ensure they could operate efficiently. As we move past pandemic-triggered transformation into the next wave of digitization, I expect exciting developments in two areas of technology, both of which allow teams to operate smarter and faster: low-code platforms and hyperautomation. For many organizations, it marks a fundamental shift in the way they approach the workplace.

Companies that do not invest in digital technologies and reinvent will have to retire some of their businesses, an industry expert said. "Businesses that rely too heavily on manual work and resisted in investing in technology over the years, especially digital commerce, will be badly hit. If they haven't awakened yet to the call and continue as is, their survival is going to be a big challenge," Arup Roy, Research Vice-President at Gartner, said at the virtual Gartner IT Symposium/Xpo India. Organisations that were digitally sound in a pre-pandemic world could contain the impact on their business, he said and added that the pandemic situation was a wake-up call for many organisations to relook and revive their IT strategies and increase their spending on IT in 2021. "We have seen much of disruptions this year but the good news is that the businesses have responded quite well. The credit goes to the technology and CIOs offices. CIOs are leading their organisations through increasing turmoil," he said.

The global pandemic has been cited as a "wake-up call" for many things -- the environment, economic and social rights, and general global inequalities. However, scientist, author, and entrepreneur Gary Marcus thinks that the COVID-19 crisis should also be considered a wake-up call for AI. Speaking at the virtual Intelligent Health AI conference yesterday, Marcus lamented decades of missed opportunities to build a more robust artificial intelligence, arguing that too much attention has been placed on AI technologies that don't really help the world in any meaningful way. "We would like AI that could read and synthesize the vast, quickly growing medical literature, for example, about COVID-19," he said. "We want our AI to be able to reason causally, we want it to be able to weed out misinformation. We want to be able to guide robots to keep humans out of dangerous situations, care for the elderly, deliver packages to the door. With AI having been around [for] 60 years, I don't think it's unreasonable to wish that we might have had some of these things by now. But the AI that we actually have, like playing games, transcribing syllables, and vacuuming floors, it's really pretty far away from the things that we've been promised."