Vietnam AI Innovation Challenge

Vietnam just announced yet another AI startup competition, with some pretty ambitious goals.

I hate to be the guy who ruins the mood (which is one of the reasons I stopped blogging about Vietnam), but I really don’t think another pitching contest is gonna help us get there.

We’ve been doing this for 26 years, going all the way back to Trí Tuệ Việt Nam. Where are the globally successful products that came out of all those winners?

Honestly, what’s the point of these competitions? At best, they give founders a false sense of validation. At worst, they distract them from the hard, boring work of actually building a great company.

Why are we so obsessed with them? Is it because we’ve been conditioned from a young age to chase awards and rankings for their own sake, a.k.a. bệnh thành tích?

Or is it because we Vietnamese simply love comparing ourselves with one another, exactly the attitude Hoàng Tụy pointed out more than 30 years ago? How are you supposed to compete with the world when you’re busy comparing yourself to thằng Tí con Tèo?

I’d love to be proven wrong. In fact, some of my very smart friends are behind these competitions, and I have a lot of respect for them.

But after all these years, I think it’s fair to ask whether these competitions are actually helping, or just giving us the illusion that we’re making progress.

As a hacker once said:

Mọi chiến thắng khi đang đi sai đường đều là thất bại.

Every victory in the wrong direction is a defeat.