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.

Image Credits: Daniel Vegera for Endeavor Greece /

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? When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission.

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Image source, Getty ImagesByChris VallanceSenior technology reporterChinese AI developer Moonshot is conducting an internal review after researchers were able t...