‘We’re already fighting yesterday’s battle’: Greece’s PM gets candid about AI

Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis came to San Francisco to promote his country to entrepreneurs and investors. But at an event hosted by the local arm of Endeavor for roughly 250 founders and investors, he did something heads of state on trade missions rarely do: he openly admitted he has no answers to many of the AI questions leaders usually debate only in private.

The economic case

Mitsotakis, who earned a master's degree at Stanford and called the visit a "homecoming," led with economics. Greece is paying down its debt at a record pace and, he said, borrows more cheaply than the United States: its 10-year bond yield now sits around 4.3%, versus roughly 5% for U.S. Treasuries. The comparison isn't quite apples to apples — eurozone rates are lower overall — but the contrast with 2012, when Greek yields topped 40%, is striking. Next year the country is set to regain developed-market status from index provider MSCI.

Much of the roughly €36 billion Greece received from the EU's post-COVID recovery fund went into digital infrastructure: an online portal for government paperwork and a supercomputer assembled with help from HPE in the port town of Lavrio, due online within months. The government has changed how stock options are taxed, loosened labor laws, and offers returning Greeks lower taxes for up to seven years. The goal is to win back the talent that left during the debt crisis.

Candid about AI

The tone shifted when the conversation turned to AI's effects on society. From January, Greece is banning social media for children under 15, but Mitsotakis conceded the measure may already be dated given the addictive pull of 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?"

He was cautious about AI in classrooms, too. Greece ran a pilot with OpenAI to reduce teachers' administrative work and sees promise in personalized AI tutors — but only if the tools don't replace "the hard work of learning the basic skills." Students are already using chatbots to do their homework, he noted: "Complacency is a human trait."

On data centers, he called Greece an outlier: unlike much of the world, it has seen no significant backlash. Microsoft is building a cluster near Athens, and AWS recently struck a deal with Greece's largest utility to build the country's biggest data center in a former coal region.

Mitsotakis didn't pretend to know what comes next. Job displacement "is going to happen, and no government and no society is prepared for the speed with which it will happen." In the debate over slowing AI development, he sided with the frontier-lab leaders calling for a pause: if the people building the models aren't sure what's happening inside them, we should listen. Some form of "smart regulation" is inevitable, and the U.S. will largely shape it — but Greece, he added, would happily host the conversation. After all, it was in Athens that Socrates pressed his fellow citizens in the agora on what makes a good life and a just society.

Source: TechCrunch