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

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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 gap. But it makes for an easy-to-grasp 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.