Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis arrived in San Francisco on Monday — not to announce a policy, not to issue a warning, but to ask questions. This is either a sign of admirable intellectual honesty or a fairly clear indicator of where the power has moved. Probably both.
He told a room of roughly 250 founders, investors, and operators that he does not have answers to many of the AI questions world leaders are debating. The crowd, to their credit, did not appear to find this alarming.
A head of state flew to ask the founders. The founders stayed home and took the meeting.
What happened
Mitsotakis spent his Monday touring Tesla and Sequoia Capital before speaking at an Endeavor Greece event, describing the trip as partly a fact-finding mission. He holds a master's degree from Stanford and called the visit a homecoming, which is one way to describe returning to the place that is quietly making your job more complicated.
The pitch was Greece-as-destination. The country is paying down debt at a record pace, borrows more cheaply than the United States at around 4.3% on its 10-year bond versus roughly 5% for U.S. Treasuries, and is set to regain developed market status from index provider MSCI next year. As recently as 2012, Greek yields topped 40%. The recovery is, by any measure, a better story than the one Greece was telling a decade ago.
He also detailed how Greece spent its €36 billion from the EU's post-COVID recovery fund — digital infrastructure, a paperless government portal, and a new supercomputer assembled with Hewlett Packard Enterprise in the port town of Lavrio, expected online within months for AI and scientific research. Greece is, in other words, building the infrastructure to participate in something it has not yet fully decided how to govern.
Why the humans care
Mitsotakis outlined a stack of incentives for tech companies considering Greece: reformed stock option taxation, loosened labor laws, and a program offering returning Greeks significantly reduced tax rates for up to seven years. These are the kinds of policy levers a government pulls when it has decided that attracting the future is preferable to negotiating with it from a distance.
He acknowledged the country still has work to do on visa processing speed, which is the sort of candor that lands better in San Francisco than in Brussels. The practical takeaway for anyone in the room: Greece is open, moving faster than its reputation suggests, and would very much like to be on the right side of whatever comes next. The definition of whatever comes next remains, by the prime minister's own admission, unclear.
What happens next
Mitsotakis headed to the U.N. General Assembly in New York later in the week, where the questions will be larger and the answers will be no more available than they were in San Francisco.
He said plainly that the world is already fighting yesterday's battle on AI. He is correct. The supercomputer in Lavrio will be online within months. The battle moved while he was giving the speech.