VivaTech 2023: Musk and Macron headline France technology show

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00:00 Let's get you more on this. Our science editor Julia Seager is standing by at VivaTech for us.

00:04 Hi to you Julia. We understand that President Emmanuel Macron will be visiting VivaTech today.

00:11 He's set to make some announcements at what could be quite interesting.

00:15 Walk us through what we might hear from the president today.

00:21 That's right Rochelle. The French president is expected to visit the trade show later on this afternoon.

00:27 VivaTech, just to give you a context, is trying to become the European equivalent of the CES in Las Vegas.

00:35 And it has indeed changed quite a bit since its debut in 2016.

00:39 They're expecting about 2,400 startups and 2,000 investors and that's double compared to 2016.

00:47 Now the president will be of attendance. He's going to be strolling around the aisles of the exhibition center.

00:52 And he is in familiar ground indeed because he's considered as the president of the startup nation.

00:58 He's going to make a stop over at the French tech booth.

01:01 And this time it's going to be to address the issues that French startups are facing today.

01:06 This after the last two years where seed money was literally flowing while things are now getting more difficult.

01:12 And many of those companies were valued and even perhaps overvalued as unicorns.

01:18 Now the addition was initially quite dull until of course the surprise announcement of the visit of Elon Musk.

01:26 He's the CEO of course of Tesla, SpaceX and Twitter.

01:32 Julia, I remember being at VivaTech when the president was there.

01:36 There will be a lot of people wanting to listen in to him.

01:39 He's set to speak a little bit later on today.

01:42 Walk us through, we've got some hints of what the announcement might be. Give us some more details.

01:50 We do indeed Rochelle. He's set to speak at 4 p.m. today.

01:55 And we expect him to enlarge the 2018 AI plan which was initially endowed with 1.5 billion dollars.

02:04 But at the time it did not include generative AI.

02:07 Which of course now in hindsight with the launch of chat GPT at the end of 2022 has become essential.

02:13 He wants France to become a champion in the field of AI.

02:16 That said France is already doing well.

02:18 We have over 300 startups and 30 unicorns in that field.

02:23 Many great startups like Mistral for instance.

02:26 It's a company that was founded by two experts from Google and Meta.

02:30 And who recently raised about a hundred million euros.

02:34 But to stay in that global race much more will be needed in terms of education and research.

02:39 But also in terms of funding and especially of what we call deep tech funding.

02:45 Now deep tech is those technologies that are set to really bring disruption and a change to society.

02:53 I'm thinking of course of synthetic biology, of quantum, but also of blockchain and robotics and space.

03:01 And it's important to say that technology is not just about applications and digital platforms.

03:07 It's also about science and about what we call fundamental technologies.

03:13 Julia, following the Viva Tech for us for now. Thank you very much.

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