Smarter. Faster. Everywhere. How the themes for ai-PULSE 2025 came to be

Every year, I try to capture what’s really going on in AI. Not the press releases, not the buzzwords, but the stuff I actually see and feel in my work, in the conversations we have, and sometimes in the unexpected details around us.

This year, three words kept coming back to me: Smarter. Faster. Everywhere.
Here’s how they landed.

Smarter

This one hit me in the middle of a product discussion at Scaleway.

We were debating (again): Which models do we put into our inference product?

Every week there’s a new release. Benchmarks say one thing, then another. LLM-arena loves it, MMLU less so, ARC-AGI flips the table. And yet, our clients don’t care about the leaderboard drama. They just want the best model for their use cases.

So we have to curate. We have to choose. And the truth is, we’re not alone. Everyone in the industry is struggling with evaluation right now. Eval is still an unsolved problem. It’s messy. It’s hard. And it needs to be done right.

That’s “Smarter.”

Faster

This one came from watching people code with AI this year.

Not flashy gimmicks, but genuine use cases. People with little or no programming background building things at a speed that makes experienced developers pause.

But then reality bites: do you really want to vibe-code this into production?
Pace matters, but so does reliability.

And it’s not just coding. Agents need reasoning, and reasoning eats tokens. Tokens per second become the bottleneck. Cue new hardware, new inference software, new tricks.

That’s “Faster.”

Everywhere

This one came from a wave of… cuteness. Hugging Face unveiled Reachy Mini, a robot with big eyes and tiny arms. Jensen Huang pulled out his Pixar-looking pet on stage at GTC. Suddenly AI didn’t look like infrastructure anymore, but like something designed to melt hearts.

And honestly, you can laugh a bit at it. Deploying cuteness as the ultimate strategy to conquer the world, one plush-eyed robot at a time.

But it’s not just robots. AI is sliding into toys, gadgets, interfaces, things that suddenly feel more alive, more personal. Small details that flip the switch from “oh, that’s clever” to “wow, that’s magic.”

That’s “Everywhere.”

Smarter. Faster. Everywhere.

So that’s how the themes came to me.
Not in a strategy deck, but in these little “ha-ha” moments: a benchmark that doesn’t agree, a coder moving at full speed, a robot batting its eyelashes on stage, a gadget suddenly talking back in a way you didn’t expect.
That’s what we’ll explore at ai-PULSE this year.

Smarter models, faster ways to build, AI sneaking into the fabric of our lives.

See you there.


ai-PULSE will be back at Station F in Paris on December 4 for a full day of technical conferences, business insights, and networking. Make sure to reserve your seat here.