Viva Technology Conference Insights

For a few days, Paris has become the world’s tech capital, hosting Viva Technology, Europe’s biggest startup and tech event.

One of the day’s highlights was the discussion among NVIDIA‘s founder and CEO, Jensen Huang, Mistral AI Cofounder and CEO Arthur Mensch, and Maurice Levy, Emeritus Chairman of Publicis and founder of VivaTech. French President Emmanuel Macron later joined the panel.

The main message conveyed by the panellists is that every country should build its AI to avoid outsourcing its intelligence (data)—more sovereign AI infrastructure is needed.

A few highlights of the discussion:

– NVIDIA and Mistral AI announced a partnership to help Mistral expand into AI infrastructure services (launch of Mistral Compute)

– Jensen Huang retraced his 30-year journey, building NVIDIA. Where does the success come from? He made many mistakes, but none were fatal. Persistence and staying in the game for long were a blessing. Most importantly, people around him continued to support him. He didn’t think of the destination, but more importantly, he learned to enjoy the journey and work hard every day to complete his tasks. Interesting fact: NVIDIA NV1 (the first graphic accelerator) was produced in Grenoble (France) and manufactured by SGS-Thomson Microelectronics.

– Arthur Mensch: You don’t do business in Europe the same way you do in the US; you need to adapt to the reality of the 27 countries. Similarly, AI requires a model that can adapt to 24 languages. The largest French companies need to support Mistral AI, and he hopes that this will expand to many more European companies. Not only software but also hardware should be European. We need to build GPU clusters and have an independent platform that is separate from traditional cloud providers. Mistral is expanding from AI company to a cloud AI company.

To echo the words from all the panellists, “YEAH TO EUROPEAN CHAMPIONS.”

You can read more about Mistral Compute here: https://lnkd.in/eu-zH5Yu