Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis told a crowd of roughly 250 founders and investors in San Francisco that he has no answers to many of the questions world leaders are debating about artificial intelligence.
The visit took place on Monday night in the Financial District, where the prime minister described the trip as partly a fact-finding mission. He had toured Tesla and Sequoia Capital earlier that day. He was also pitching Greece to anyone in technology who might consider setting up shop there. The country is set to regain 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 at Stanford and called the visit “a homecoming,” made the economic case first. Greece is paying down its debt at a record pace. He added that the country borrows more cheaply than the United States. “I don’t know if I should say this,” he told the crowd, smiling.
It is not an apples-to-apples comparison. Interest rates are lower across the eurozone, which accounts for part of the difference. As of this writing, Greece’s 10-year bond yield sits around 4.3%, versus roughly 5% for U.S. Treasuries. That would have been completely unimaginable during the debt crisis, when Greek yields topped 40% in 2012.
Mitsotakis was eager to discuss how Greece has spent its money. He noted that much of the roughly €36 billion Greece received from the EU’s post-COVID recovery fund went into digital infrastructure. This includes an online portal that lets Greeks handle government paperwork without waiting in line. He also mentioned a new supercomputer assembled with the help of Hewlett Packard Enterprise in the port town of Lavrio. He said this facility will come online within months to power AI and scientific research in Greece.
He also listed policy changes that can matter even more to tech companies. Greece has changed how stock options are taxed, loosened labor laws, and offers returning Greeks far lower taxes for up to seven years.
We also talked about the country’s growing array of visa programs. When asked how he measures the success of these, Mitsotakis said the government “still [has] work to do” on processing speed.
He separately volunteered that there has been a stark turnaround at Greece’s public universities. He said they long embraced a “radical leftist approach,” looking down on corporations, and now spin out startups.
Mitsotakis’s larger goal is to win back the talent Greece lost during its debt crisis. Many of the country’s younger citizens left because they had no other options. He also sees an opening: with American work visas getting harder to obtain, he suggested that more founders should consider hiring in Greece.
The conversation took on a different tone when it turned to AI’s effects on society. Mitsotakis was refreshingly candid about not having a finished plan.
Greece is instituting a ban on social media for children under 15 as of this coming January. This is a step many countries are similarly weighing or adopting. He suggested the ban may already be behind the times, however, considering the seemingly addictive nature of AI chatbots.
“Sometimes I feel that we’re already fighting yesterday’s battle,” he said. “What does it mean for our kids to grow up with digital companions or boyfriends or girlfriends?”
He was similarly cautious about AI in classrooms. Greece has run an education pilot with OpenAI aimed at reducing teachers’ administrative work. He sees promise in personalised AI tutors. But he said the benefits depend on AI not replacing “the hard work of learning the 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, he described the country as an outlier. Despite growing opposition to data centres across the globe because of the amounts of electricity and water required to power them, Mitsotakis said that “we have not had any significant reaction” in Greece. He pointed to the fact that Microsoft is building a cluster of data centres near Athens and that AWS recently announced a deal with Greece’s largest utility to build the country’s biggest data centre in a former coal region. There, he said, the projects are welcomed.
Unlike many politicians, he did not pretend to have answers about what comes next, either. Job displacement “is something which is going to happen,” he said, “and no government and no society is prepared for the speed with which it will happen.”
As for the debate over whether AI development should slow down, he sided with the leaders of the frontier labs who’ve been calling for one. “If the people who are building the models are telling us, ‘We’re not really sure exactly what’s happening with these models,'” especially in how they improve themselves, he said, “we need to listen to them.”
Some form of “smart regulation” is inevitable, he observed. The U.S. will largely decide what it looks like. Still, he added, Greece would happily host the conversation.
Humanity has created “a form of intelligence that is very quickly exceeding the capacity of the most advanced organ that evolution has ever created,” said Mitsotakis. This raises the question of what it means to be human. Bringing together technologists with “the social scientists, the philosophers, the historians,” he said, “I cannot think of a better place to really have these discussions.”
He has a point. Athens is where Socrates badgered his fellow citizens in the agora, the city’s ancient public square, about what makes a good life and a just society. Maybe the questions Silicon Valley is still debating will end up being settled there, too?
