Guest blog on Vivatech, an AI Conference

  

 

AI or IA, French Style

French President Emmanuel Macron was there. NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang was there. And so were Robbert – a veteran IT programmer - and I. With 180,000 other tech geeks from all around the world.

Vivatech 2025 at the Porte de Versailles on the edge of Paris was a speed-dating festival for Artificial Intelligence (intelligence artificielle) startups and investors. 13,500 startups, 3,200 investors such as Bearing Point, BNP Paribas and Coinhouse crypto, and 3,500 exhibitors.

We estimate that 97.4% of exhibitors claimed AI/ IA in their company name or product name.

There were AI robots – humanoid types, robodogs… AI for health, including toilets that analyze your urine and devices that detect skin cancers… multiple variants on electric bicycles with passenger and cargo capability (which I passed on to our favorite village hoteliers for transporting guests and luggage from the train station)… solar energy (which Robbert’s son is pursuing) and other climate solutions… and even AI for marketing, which piqued my interest. Precious little aviation, except for a model of an Embraer/ Eve eVTOL in the Brazilian pavilion.

My overall sense after walking the three exhibit halls for several hours is that we are rapidly moving to a world in which sensors are everywhere – indeed, we may already be there: trackers for movement, cameras for facial recognition, biosensors for health/ disease detection, digital footprints for banking and social media, government surveillance… and that there is nowhere a connected person can hide.

But there’s also an underlying nag that AI is being touted as the magic solution for everything – when we know it can be wrong and even hallucinates fabricated information.

A few days later, after being bombarded by thousands of exhibit placards proclaiming ‘AI Inside’, I honestly cannot recall any of the startup company names or product names (many of which used common words with ‘creative’ spellings, ie substituting a phonetic letter). Nor do I recall any of the placards describing a customer benefit – most focused on their supposed technical wizardry. One Meta (Facebook) speaker even suggested randomly trying different AI products; if you don’t like the results for the first, try a second, a third… How is that ‘intelligent’?

Enroute, Robbert and I took my first ‘night train,’ an 11-hour saunter through the French countryside. The tossing and turning in the sleeper bunk was all the train’s doing, not mine, but it did save the cost of a hotel room. And thankfully, the high-speed TGV return trip was air conditioned.

Rick Adams is the author of The Robot in the Simulator: Artificial Intelligence in Aviation Training, available through the AviationVoices.com website - https://aviationvoices.com/shop/

 Rick Adams is a journalist, but also my husband. We collaborate on many subjects.