Today marks the first day of VivaTech 2026. And I was expecting a diverse, cutting-edge display of true technological advancement. Instead, I am walking away of Day 1 with a deeply cynical realisation about where the tech ecosystem is heading.

(For context: I have been invited to come upon my deep-tech R&D work about signal processing applied to edited/generative content detection.)

(Disclaimer: I am not against AI, I truly believe AI/ML can solve monumental issues and push humanity forward. However, I don’t believe that LLMs is a universal saviour.)

The Observation

After going through the exhibitions floors, attending conferences, and talking directly to exhibitors. I came to the conclusion that roughly 85% to 90% of what is being showcased are just LLM wrappers.

And examples are countless: from Notion’s showcased features to the whole India pavilion, even the SNCF Group jumped on the AI train. They made a whole speech about AI in the group that, frankly, made absolutely no sense and said nothing of substance.

Worse, countless startups are fine showcasing fully “vibe-coded” websites, asset presentations, and pitch decks. I mean, I know when you are truly innovating, the raw essence of your product matters more than the visuals. But when your product is just a thin wrapper around someone else’s API, you did not innovate. I believe innovation requires craftsmanship–whether in hardware or software. Slapping a UI on an external LLM–to solve a non-existing problem or something that can be solved easily (regarding innovation's ease) without a LLM–is not craftsmanship.

This hyper-fixation on AI is actively cannibalising the whole venue. And having companies proving they are "future proof" because they use AI in some irrelevant way should not be fine.

And I know that innovation, especially at VivaTech, does not necessarily means technical breakthroughs, but most of the time solving a really specific issue efficiently. Still, even attendees used to VivaTech tend to say with confidence that the floor is a big LLM soup solving non-existent problems or aiming at becoming another concurrent–with no added value–of a big product/company.

Take one of the conference I attended today, called “Digital Money, Real Power: The New Architecture of Finance” featuring BlackRock COO Rob Goldstein and Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire.

For the first ten minutes, the insights were brilliant. They discussed how smart contracts face scaling issues in a highly micro-transactional world, but noted that the blockchain represents a great future for finance because it can ditch an aging and slow banking infrastructure for something fast, globally deployed, and permissionless.

And there are so many things that could have been discussed:

How the global economy will shift when traditional currencies face interoperable blockchains.
How we will value goods in a digital-first ecosystem.
The disruption of traditional trading centres and legacy banking.

Unfortunately, we somehow moved into a disturbing AI echo chamber as the narrative shifted towards “AI will replace all cognitive work and therefore AI needs to be able to execute financial transactions independently.” (Rob Goldstein) and “We have Generative AI, we now need Generative Contracts.” (Jeremy Allaire)

Maybe he is so much of a visionary I cannot understand. But "Generative Contracts" would imply by nature letting a probabilistic algorithm handle transactions from some kind of input, when this can be done programmatically. There are REAL constraints related to the nature of blockchains that makes this impossible in any way. It can be AI-assisted, sure, but being itself generative? It is basically just like creating an AI-tailored smart contracts language like we recently got GlyphLang “An AI-Optimized Programming Language”. And honestly “generative” might also be a buzzword I wasn’t aware of.

And this panel was not an anomaly. Everything on the floor is going all-in on AI, even when the underlying math or utility has absolutely nothing to do with it.

The Ask

So, here comes my ask to the whole tech community: Is VivaTech 2026 a symptom of a tech world that now runs ONLY on hype? Have we entered an era where true innovation–the kind that requires deep R&D, structural thinking, and solving real problems–is being entirely crowded out by superficial profit-chasing?

Have we gone straight into the path the financial world took? So much detached from the situation of real communities and societies that we only want to please investors and the community itself so much we forget that, as much as anyone on this earth, the main goal of our work is to empower/ease our own nation/people.

As stated above, I am doing a lot of deep-tech R&D, and there are not much exhibitors I get acquaintances with due to profound technical views, goals, and ethics discrepancies–only the ones actually building hardware or innovative software.

P.S. If you are at VivaTech this week and want to talk about this in-person, you can reach out at vivatech@johanmontorfano.com.