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

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 typically do. In front of roughly 250 founders, investors and operators, he said openly that he doesn’t have answers to many of the AI questions leaders around the world are more privately debating.

The prime minister, speaking with this editor at an event held along the waterfront edge of San Francisco’s Financial District, described his Bay Area trip as partly a fact-finding mission. He’d spent the morning touring Tesla and Sequoia Capital, among other stops, with plans to head this week to the U.N. General Assembly in New York. But the trip was also meant to build bridges; indeed, he was pitching anyone in tech who might consider setting up shop in Greece, which 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 and foremost during our sit-down. Greece is paying down its debt at a record pace, and, he added, borrows more cheaply 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 accounts for part of the difference. But it makes for a strong talking point. 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 just as eager to talk about how Greece has spent its money. For example, he said that much of the roughly €36 billion Greece received from the EU’s post-COVID recovery fund went into digital infrastructure, including an online portal that lets Greeks handle government paperwork without waiting in line, and a new supercomputer assembled with the help of Hewlett Packard Enterprise in the port town of Lavrio that he said will come online within months to power AI and scientific research in Greece.

Unsurprisingly, he also listed policy changes that can matter even more to tech companies. Greece has changed how stock options are taxed, he said, 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, though 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, which he said 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, when 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, more founders should consider hiring in Greece.

It did strike me that 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, for example, is instituting a ban on social media for children under 15 as of this coming January, 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, and he sees promise in personalized 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 — Greece has been courting data center investment — he described the country as an outlier. Despite growing opposition to data centers 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 centers near Athens and that AWS recently announced a deal with Greece’s largest utility to build the country’s biggest data center in a former coal region. There, he said, the projects are welcomed.

Unlike many politicians, he didn’t 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, and 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, raising 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?