Paris (France) (AFP) – Europe’s biggest tech trade fair Vivatech opened its doors Wednesday in Paris, putting American billionaire Jeff Bezos front and centre on its guest list as enthusiasm for generative AI rubs shoulders with anxiety about the continent’s technological dependence. Talk of securing access to AI is on the agenda both in Paris and at the G7 summit in Evian, where President Donald Trump and the heads of US tech giants are meeting leaders of top industrial economies. Washington last week pushed its allies’ tech dependency to the top of the agenda. It banned non-American users from the AI models Fable and Mythos, whose creator Anthropic withdrew access for all in response.
In a sign of how seriously the move jarred transatlantic ties, France and Vivatech’s guest nation Germany issued a joint statement as the fair opened, offering a “shared vision for strengthening Europe’s digital sovereignty.” Aimed at Brussels and fellow EU member states, the declaration announced the relaunch of the “Franco-German Forum for the Future.” The platform aims to link up the two countries’ private and public-sector tech efforts, including tallying up local alternatives to foreign digital services and creating an “evaluation framework for Europe’s critical digital dependencies.”
Tech heavyweights – Bezos, founder of Amazon and Blue Origin, touted space as a “dynamic, entrepreneurial place” alongside the rocket firm’s chief Dave Limp and former NASA astronaut Mike Massimino. The disastrous launchpad explosion of Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket had been “a gut punch,” Bezos acknowledged, as the company races to develop lunar landers for the American space agency, which aims to set up a base on Earth’s satellite. Nevertheless, “space travel is hard, and it’s worth it,” he insisted.
Other prominent attendees will include French President Emmanuel Macron and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, expected to walk the Vivatech halls on Thursday. Also joining the roughly 15,000 start-ups showing off their inventions until Saturday will be French researcher Yann LeCun, who made waves this year with a new company focused on physical AI after leaving Facebook’s parent company Meta. Further visitors include the head of Dutch tech heavyweight ASML, whose ultraviolet lithography machines indispensable to advanced chipmaking have propelled it to the largest market capitalisation in Europe. Fans of AI automation may be more excited by the Thursday appearance of Peter Steinberger, the Austrian creator of the open-source AI agent OpenClaw that took Silicon Valley by storm earlier this year.
Palantir falling-out – Further highlighting the tech sovereignty debate, French Finance Minister Roland Lescure stopped at the stand of local firm ChapsVision at Vivatech. The company has been chosen to replace the American data-sifting giant Palantir on a major contract for France’s DGSI domestic intelligence agency, Prime Minister Sebastien Lecornu announced Tuesday. “We cannot accept new strategic dependencies in the digital realm,” Lecornu said. Palantir has insisted that its contract is still in force, with the French government saying it wanted to avoid any gap in service while ChapsVision is brought aboard. The migration for the spy service “will take some time, at least several months…probably in 2027,” Lescure told AFP.
Beyond the geopolitical maneuvering, Vivatech is also the venue for “announcements about partnerships, maybe fundraises, it’s a pretty classic” trade show, said EY partner Jean-Christophe Liaubet. With Germany as the guest of honour this year, more than 200 start-ups from across the Rhine will be in Paris for the fair’s 10th anniversary edition. “In a time of growing technological and global fragmentation, this spotlight underscores Europe’s ambition to affirm its sovereignty and take the lead in innovation,” organisers said.
© 2024 AFP
