Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis came to San Francisco on Monday night to promote Greece, but he also did something that heads of state on trade missions don’t usually do. In front of approximately 250 founders, investors and operators, he openly said that he does not have answers to many of the questions about AI that leaders around the world debate privately.
The prime minister, speaking to this editor at an event organized by Endeavor Greece, the local arm of a global nonprofit that supports entrepreneurs in emerging and growing markets, described his trip to the Bay Area as partly a fact-finding mission. He spent the morning touring Tesla and Sequoia Capital, among other stops, with plans to address the U.N. General Assembly in New York this week. But the trip was also intended to build bridges; in fact, he was introducing anyone in tech who might consider settling in Greece, which is ready to take back developed market status next year from MSCI, the influential index provider.
“I think it’s another indication that the economy is doing well and that Greece is no longer treated as a special case,” Mitsotakis said.
Mitsotakis, who earned a master’s degree from Stanford and called the visit “a homecoming,” made the economic argument first during our meeting. Greece is paying down its debt at a record pace and, he added, borrows at a lower rate than the United States. “I don’t know if I should say this,” he told the crowd, smiling.
It’s not an apples to apples comparison. Interest rates are lower across the eurozone, which explains part of the difference. But it constitutes a strong topic of conversation. At the time of writing, the yield on 10-year Greek bonds is around 4.3%, compared to about 5% on US Treasuries. That would have been completely unimaginable during the debt crisis, when Greek yields exceeded 40% in 2012.
Mitsotakis was equally eager to talk about how Greece has spent its money. For example, he said much of the roughly 36 billion euros Greece received from the EU’s post-Covid recovery fund went toward digital infrastructure, including an online portal that allows Greeks to handle government paperwork without having to wait in line, and a new supercomputer assembled with the help of Hewlett Packard Enterprise in the port city of Lavrio that he said will come online within months to boost artificial intelligence and scientific research in Greece.
Unsurprisingly, he also listed policy changes that may be even more important for technology companies. Greece has changed the way stock options are taxed, he said, relaxing labor laws and offering returning Greeks much lower taxes for up to seven years.
We also talked about the country’s growing array of visa programs, though when asked how he measures their success, Mitsotakis said the government is “still [has] work to be done” on processing speed.
On the other hand, he offered to say that there has been a radical change in Greece’s public universities, which he said had long adopted a “radical left approach,” looking down on corporations and now creating new companies.
Mitsotakis’ broader goal is to bring back the talent that Greece lost during its debt crisis, when many of the country’s youngest citizens left because they had no other options. He also sees an opportunity: With U.S. work visas becoming harder to obtain, he suggested, more founders should consider hiring in Greece.
I was struck that the conversation took a different tone when it referred to the effects of AI on society. Mitsotakis was refreshingly candid about not having a finished plan.
Greece, for example, is instituting a social media ban for children under 15 starting next January, a measure that many countries are similarly adopting. weighing or adopting. However, he suggested that the ban may already be outdated, considering the seemingly addictive nature of AI chatbots.
“Sometimes I feel like we’re already fighting yesterday’s battle,” he said. “What does it mean for our children to grow up with digital peers, boyfriends or girlfriends?”
He was equally cautious about AI in classrooms. Greece has carried out an educational pilot with OpenAI aimed at reducing administrative work for teachers, and sees promise in personalized AI tutors. But he said the benefits depend on AI not replacing “the hard work of learning basic skills.” He warned that students are already using chatbots to do their homework, adding, “complacency is a human trait.”
When I asked him about AI infrastructure (Greece has been courting data center investment) he described the country as an outlier. Despite growing opposition to data centers around the world due to the amounts of electricity and water needed to power them, Mitsotakis said “we have not had any significant reaction” in Greece. He pointed to the fact that Microsoft is building a cluster of data centers near Athens and that AWS recently announced a deal with Greece’s largest utility to build the country’s largest data center in a former coal region. There, he said, projects are welcome.
Unlike many politicians, he also did not pretend to have answers about what will come next. Job displacement “is something that is going to happen,” he said, “and no government or society is prepared for the speed with which it will happen.”
As for the debate over whether AI development should slow, he sided with frontier lab leaders who have been calling for a slowdown. “If the people who are building the models tell us, ‘We’re not really sure exactly what’s going on with these models,'” especially how they improve themselves, he said, “we have to listen to them.”
Some form of “smart regulation” is inevitable, he observed, and the United States will largely decide what that will look like. Still, he added, Greece would be happy to host the conversation.
Humanity has created “a form of intelligence that is very rapidly surpassing the capacity of the most advanced organ that evolution has ever created,” Mitsotakis said, raising the question of what it means to be human. Bringing together technologists with “the social scientists, the philosophers, the historians,” he said, “I can’t think of a better place to really have these discussions.”
You are right. Athens is where Socrates harassed his fellow citizens in the agora, the city’s ancient public square, about what constitutes a good life and a just society. Perhaps the issues that Silicon Valley is still debating will eventually be resolved there too?
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