I spent 2 days at Axel Springer's AI summit. My takeaway was that Germany wants to fight like hell to stay in the AI arms race. (www.businessinsider.com)

At Axel Springer's two-day AI summit in Berlin, OpenAI's Sam Altman and other tech and political leaders signaled a push to keep Germany competitive in the AI race. The standout announcement: OpenAI will partner with SAP to enable millions of German public-sector employees to use ChatGPT — underscoring broad institutional adoption in a country where OpenAI is the fifth-largest market and “virtually all” people 18–24 reportedly use ChatGPT. Altman argued regulation should be iterative rather than pre-emptive and forecast a wave of small-to-midsize businesses powered by conversational AI; he also made a notable remark linking fusion to future energy paradigms. The summit set a clear theme: deregulate and scale. Germany’s digital minister Karsten Wildberger and speakers like Richard Socher and venture capitalists warned that while seed funding exists, growth capital is scarce and startups often migrate abroad. Palantir’s Alex Karp urged a uniquely German model — leveraging vocational training and industrial strengths instead of cloning Silicon Valley. For the AI/ML community this means immediate opportunities and challenges: large-scale public-sector deployments will drive demand for robust integration, model governance, data privacy and security tooling, and production-grade infrastructure, while policy and capital shifts will shape where core research and product scaling happen next.