ai-PULSE 2025: Inside the Ideas and Announcements Shaping the Next Era of AI

ai-PULSE 2025: Inside the Ideas and Announcements Shaping the Next Era of AI Build • Maxime Eyraud • 09/12/25 • 8 min read

On December 4, we hosted the third edition of ai-PULSE , our annual conference on everything AI. With 1,600+ people gathered at STATION F in Paris and thousands more joining online, this was our biggest and most ambitious edition yet — a place where leading researchers, founders, and builders from Europe and beyond came to explore where AI is heading next.

It also doubled as a global stage for major announcements, from Yann LeCun’s return to France and the launch of his new venture to the debut of Gradium and UMA ’s latest fundraising news.

As iliad Group Deputy CEO and Scaleway President Aude Durand promised in her introduction, the goal was simple: “to offer the most expert content, from star scientists in cutting edge labs to CEOs, CTOs of startups that are building breakthrough tech and even specialists implementing new use cases for AI across every industry every day.”

This year’s program revolved around a clear theme — AI is getting smarter, faster, and everywhere at once . Models are evolving from chatbots to agents; workflows are accelerating across every discipline; and AI is moving off screens into speech-native systems, devices, and robots.

That trajectory framed each keynote — from world models to robotics to voice AI — and defined the conversations that followed.

Thinking Beyond LLMs: The Promises of World Models with Yann LeCun (Meta) and Pim de Witte (General Intuition)

AI pioneer Yann LeCun and General Intuition cofounder and CEO Pim de Witte joined iliad's Aude Durand to discuss world models.

Few conversations captured the audience’s imagination like the opening keynote between Yann LeCun and General Intuition cofounder and CEO Pim de Witte , moderated by Aude Durand . LeCun restated a thesis he has championed for nearly a decade: by design, LLMs can’t give us human-level intelligence. Text is simply too limited a signal — as LeCun put it, “most of human knowledge is not well represented by text.” World models are the missing piece : systems that can perceive, predict, and simulate the dynamics of the world, not just string words together.

LeCun explained why generative architectures struggle with video prediction and physical reasoning: “ It turns out, understanding the physical world is much more difficult than understanding language. (...) And in fact, roboticists have known this for a very long time.” He argued instead for Joint Embedding Predictive Architectures (JEPA), a non-generative approach optimized for learning abstract representations.

Pim de Witte echoed this view: good world models must compute what could happen, not “the next most likely or entertaining frame.” He compared LLMs to a snowball rolling downhill, unaware of obstacles in its path. By contrast, world models learn from perception itself — from pixels, embodiment, and interaction — giving them a grounded understanding of environments rather than a statistical guess about them. As de Witte put it, “It's time we start understanding the world of pixels as well as we understand the world of code and the world of text.”

The conversation closed on a distinctly European note. Both speakers chose to build their next-generation AI labs from Europe, citing talent density and a research culture less fixated on scaling LLMs at all costs. De Witte’s announcement of a scientific partnership between General Intuition and Kyutai underscored the message: Europe is not following in world models; it is leading.

Designing Robots for Real Life: The Rise of Empathic Robotics with Jérôme Monceaux (Enchanted Tools)

Enchanted Tools cofounder and CEO Jérôme Monceaux discussed with iliad's Aude Durand the company's work in humanoid robotics.

After a theatrical entrance by Mirokaï , Enchanted Tools ’s social humanoid robot, cofounder and CEO Jérôme Monceaux stepped on stage to explain the philosophy behind its design: robots meant for real human environments require empathy, anticipation, and safety by design, not just mechanical strength. Drawing on 20 years of robotics work — from Aldebaran’s NAO and Pepper to today’s Mirokaï — Monceaux framed humanoid robotics as a social technology, not an industrial one .

Mirokaï is powered by Gemini Live and a suite of onboard machine-learning models enabling multimodal perception, emotion reading, and real-time behavioral synthesis. But the real magic lies in human-robot interaction . Monceaux described seemingly simple gestures — handing an object to a child, anticipating when to release it, responding to micro-expressions — as some of the hardest problems in robotics. Success, he argued, depends less on complexity and more on “designing the dance between the robot and the user.”

To illustrate, Monceaux proudly described a medical deployment now underway at ICM in: using Mirokaï to assist children undergoing radiotherapy . In a setting where parents cannot enter the treatment room, the robot’s presence has transformed a distressing, hour-long process into one that is calmer, faster, and sometimes even joyful. This emotional shift, in turn, resulted in a "10x factor in the productivity of the machine." The story offered a critical lesson: the value of emotional robotics isn't just in utility, but in how their ability to provide emotional support can create tangible, productive outcomes.

Powering European AI: Scaleway’s Announcements with Damien Lucas (Scaleway)

Scaleway CEO Damien Lucas took the stage to cover the company's announcements across hardware, quantum, frontier models, and geographic expansion.

Next up on stage was Scaleway CEO Damien Lucas , who laid out the company’s most ambitious roadmap yet. He began with expansion: after France, the Netherlands, and Poland, Scaleway is now deploying its full cloud and AI product suite in Italy, Sweden, and soon Germany — bringing sovereign European compute closer to builders across the continent.

On hardware, Lucas unveiled a wave of new compute options : next-generation AMD CPUs, Ampere ARM processors, explorations of Fujitsu’s MONAKA-class designs , and, in a European first, NVIDIA Blackwell Ultra B300 GPUs , 50% faster than the B200 and available immediately on Scaleway Cloud. In line with our environmental commitments, all GPUs are now fully integrated with our Environmental Footprint Calculator , empowering customers to monitor, understand, and…