Last week, I was in Paris for my first visit to Viva Technology, known as VivaTech. I’ve wanted to attend the show for a couple of years, but other commitments have always got in the way.
The four-day show describes itself as “Europe’s biggest start-up event” and is now in its eighth year. With about 165,000 attendees, including an estimated 13,500 start-ups, 2,000 investors and investment funds, and 450 speakers, it’s quite something. To be honest, I found it rather overwhelming.
Unsurprisingly, artificial intelligence (AI) was the omnipresent theme, with major companies like Amazon, Anthropic, Meta, Microsoft, Orange and Salesforce showcasing related developments. But to me, it was like a tsunami of AI.
Every exhibitor appeared to be cashing in on the AI frenzy, with particularly ridiculous examples including smart golf clubs, cat bowls and boxing bags all powered by AI. I’m seriously starting to believe that the AI hype is hurtling out of control. There were echoes of my visit to MWC earlier in the year, when I came away feeling that if technology companies aren’t more careful, consumers will quickly start suffering from the rapid onset of AI fatigue.
However, I couldn’t help but admire — or perhaps envy — the French government’s commitment to AI. The day before VivaTech, President Emmanuel Macron announced a €400 million public investment fund for research and training on AI. At the event, Marina Ferrari, France’s minister of state for digital affairs, declared that she believes France is “leading the way in the development of AI”.
A further impressive aspect of VivaTech is the stellar line-up of speakers, which included luminaries such as Robin Li (CEO of Baidu), John Kerry (68th US secretary of state), Dr Werner Vogels (chief technology officer at Amazon), Linda Yaccarino (CEO of X), Yann LeCun (chief AI scientist at Meta) and Dario Amodei (CEO of Anthropic).
There was also an appearance by Elon Musk, albeit virtually, taking questions and answers from attendees. He reiterated his concerns about AI and criticized rivals in a clear dig at Google, stating that it’s “important that AI is trained to be truthful and not to be politically correct” and that by taking political correctness into account, companies are “programming AI to lie”, which he feels “will backfire very badly”. That said, he accepted that his GrokAI chat bot has “a lot of catching up” to do.
His participation was complemented by Tesla’s substantial exhibition space, where its Cybertruck was the centrepiece. This was the must-see product at the show for many. Automotive was one of the broader themes at VivaTech, with vehicles from Chinese electric car-maker BYD, Peugeot and Lightyear, which displayed a solar-powered car.
The keynote session with Baidu’s co-founder, chairman and CEO, Robin Li, provided an interesting insight into his views on the differences between AI development in China and the rest of the world. He believes that there’s too much emphasis on the AI models in Europe and the US, and prefers the more app-centric approach in China. He discussed the development of so-called “super apps”, or AI-native apps built on top of numerous AI models. He also shared an update on Baidu’s conversational AI chat bot, Ernie Bot, which has been operational for more than a year and has over 200 million users.
Another surprising feature of the show was the sheer number of virtual reality headsets. Many demos used a Meta Quest headset, but I was astonished by the number of Apple Vision Pros in use — I’ve never seen so many in the wild. Training applications were extremely popular alongside product demos, with luxury brand LVMH providing numerous examples on its lavish stand.
Robotics was another clear trend, coming in all shapes and sizes and catering for many sectors, including for industrial and agricultural deployment.
Smartphone manufacturers were conspicuous by their absence, which helped shine the spotlight on Chinese phone-maker Honor. CEO George Zhao presented at a keynote session on day one, which I took part in with AI luminary Justine Cassell.
Mr Zhao provided an update on Honor’s AI strategy and revealed that the company is partnering with Google Cloud to offer generative AI experiences on its devices. There were few concrete details, but this news comes in addition to its established relationship with Meta to use its Llama large language model.
Honor announced the launch of its Honor 200 and 200 Pro smartphones in China on 27 May and globally on 12 June, alongside a partnership with renowned French portrait photography specialist Studio Harcourt. Photography remains a central pillar of Honor’s smartphone market positioning, and it’ll be interesting to see how the partnership evolves.
Despite these interesting highlights, I came away from the show with my head spinning. It was a chaotic event where I found it extremely difficult to pick out any winning products among the avalanche of start-up companies. The show also lacked structure, which may be more attributable to the current omnipresence of AI as a theme than anything else. I don’t doubt its value to the start-up and investment community, and the extensive number of top-tier speakers underlines its importance, but I’m not sure I’ll be rushing back next year.
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