Latest Interviews

The Future of Software Engineering: Cognition’s Russell Kaplan

Russell Kaplan, Marco Argenti

Cognition, founded by former Olympiad medalists and now valued at $4 billion, is advancing software engineering by deploying Devin, an autonomous AI agent capable of executing end-to-end development tasks. The company differentiates itself through a dual-product strategy combining Devin for independent execution with the recently acquired Windsurf IDE for human-in-the-loop collaboration, targeting enterprise integration into proprietary codebases. While AI capabilities in coding are projected to double every seven months, Cognition aims to elevate Devin to senior engineer status within a year, though future growth is anticipated to be constrained by energy availability rather than data scarcity.

Louis Tomlinson: When The Police Knocked... I Just Knew! "The Room Was Cold That Day".

Louis Tomlinson, Steven

Louis Tomlinson recounts his journey from a working-class Doncaster upbringing to global stardom with One Direction, detailing the intense isolation, guilt, and personal losses, including the deaths of his mother and sister Felicity, that defined his early years in the spotlight. He reflects on the band's rapid ascension, the painful fragmentation following Zayn Malik's departure and the eventual hiatus, and the enduring legacy of bandmate Liam Payne, while discussing his current focus on fatherhood and mental stability. Now at 33, Tomlinson is channeling his experiences into a positive solo musical direction, expanding his entrepreneurial ventures with a music festival and streetwear brand, and redefining success beyond industry metrics to prioritize family and personal fulfillment.

The Shutdown’s Economic Impact

Alec Phillips, Alison Nathan

A partisan role reversal has precipitated a broad federal government shutdown as Democrats withhold support for clean spending bills to demand the extension of ACA health insurance subsidies, a move that polling suggests is driving voter blame toward Republicans. The crisis faces a critical resolution pressure point on October 15 when active-duty military personnel miss a pay cycle, a deadline that historically compels congressional action to avoid widespread economic disruption. While the shutdown projects to reduce Q4 GDP by approximately 0.3 percentage points and delay key economic data releases, market analysts and the Federal Reserve anticipate the stalemate will resolve quickly through a targeted fiscal compromise.

YouTube CEO Neal Mohan on AI, Censorship & the Future of Creators

Neal Mohan, Chamath, Jason, Friedberg, Ari

YouTube CEO Neal Mohan outlined the platform's dominance with 2 billion monthly active users and over $70 billion paid to creators, while addressing tensions between its 55/45 revenue model and high-profile creators who opt for direct monetization. Mohan defended YouTube's algorithmic fragmentation as a driver of niche engagement while highlighting new AI initiatives that prioritize creator likeness rights and transparency labels over blanket bans. The discussion further detailed strategies to balance global moderation complexities with evolving regulations and a renewed focus on YouTube Premium and TV to reinvent the viewer experience.

Anthropic: The Great Equaliser: How Agentic AI Is Powering Europe’s Next Generation of Startups

Guillaume, Charlie

Guillaume, Head of Anthropic for EMEA, discusses the strategic deployment of the Cloud4 coding model which self-wrote 90% of its own code to power a growing ecosystem of European startups like Dust and Lovable. The conversation highlights how major enterprises including BMW and Novo Nordisk are utilizing these models as virtual collaborators to accelerate R&D and customer service, while emphasizing Anthropic's strict data sovereignty and safety policies to address European regulatory concerns. Amidst this expansion, the company aims to hire over 100 new staff members across its London, Dublin, and Zurich offices to support the region's robust AI funding environment and mitigate local talent gaps.

NextSilicon & More Than Moore. The Silicon Revolution: Why the Future of Hardware is Software

Next Silicon introduces a reconfigurable compute platform that utilizes a smart runtime algorithm to dynamically adjust chip hardware within 20 nanoseconds for CPU, GPU, and AI workloads without requiring code rewrites. This "software-aware hardware" targets the most computationally intensive code segments to deliver projected performance speedups of 4x to 10x while consuming only a quarter of the energy used by static ASICs. By supporting established languages and frameworks like CUDA and PyTorch, the system aims to decouple hardware efficiency from the need to pre-anticipate future algorithmic shifts.

A Chat with AI21 Labs: Building Custom AI Systems That Actually Work From Hype to Business Impact

Yuval, Asaf

AI21, a foundational LLM builder, highlights the persistent gap between individual AI experimentation and institutional production adoption, driven by "ChatGPT Syndrome" and fear of missing out. The company identifies a critical "underground movement" where employees innovate silently due to a lack of official guidelines, resulting in disjointed pilots and missed collective wisdom. To escape this paralysis, successful deployment requires multidisciplinary teams to map granular workflows and align stakeholders on clear KPIs, transforming informal usage into a structured, high-value organizational framework.

Roshn Group & Enhance Ventures: AI Meets Real Estate: Hype or Real Value

Robert, Yazeed Al-Ghamdi, Aristide, Maria Paula

Saudi Arabia's Roshan giga-project, mandated to deliver 400,000 housing units under Vision 2030, is leveraging Google Cloud AI and a proprietary digital sales platform to generate over 6 billion SAR in revenue while reducing land selection time by 40%. This hybrid transaction model, which integrates global KYC protocols and visualizes amenities for remote buyers, was further accelerated by the region's largest PropTech hackathon that sourced external solutions for operational bottlenecks. Driven by a young demographic and supported by upcoming infrastructure projects, the organization plans to launch a corporate venture capital arm and export its technology stack to international markets within the decade.

Contentsquare & Eurazeo: From Data Rich to AI Smart Reinventing a Scale Up in Real Time

Anne-Charlotte Filbert, Ilan, Remy

Eurazeo's Anne-Charlotte Filbert and Content Square's Ilan analyzed the latter's strategic pivot from a traditional analytics provider to an AI-native platform following a 2023 acquisition of Heap. Driven by CEO John, the company restructured its organizational culture and product roadmap to prioritize agentic workflows, launching proactive "Sense" insights while implementing strict security protocols for tools like Gemini and Dust. The discussion concluded that future market survival hinges on the "velocity" of leadership to transform late-stage enterprises, contrasting Content Square's scale with the agility required for AI-native success.

A Fireside Chat with Sébastien Verger, CTO at Dell Technologies ft.The French Tech Journal

Sébastien Verger, Francois Beaufort

Dell positioned AI as a core strategic pillar through its "Dell AI Factory," addressing the critical challenge where 80% of proof-of-concepts fail to reach production by emphasizing data quality and secure on-premises deployment. The company highlighted its logistical prowess in rapidly scaling infrastructure for partners like XAI and Mistral AI while launching tools such as Dell Pro AI Studio to enable local model execution on AI PCs. Looking toward the next five years, Dell anticipates healthcare breakthroughs in personalized cancer treatments and champions sovereign European data strategies to ensure sustainable, responsible AI governance.

Adrian McDermott, CTO, Zendesk: What CX Teaches Us About AI And The Future Of Work

Adrian McDermott, Joseph

During a presentation on enterprise AI transformation, Zendesk representatives detailed how their platform now supports 15,000 generative AI users and redefines customer service as a critical revenue engine where 94% of value derives from support interactions. The company outlined a strategic shift toward outcome-based pricing and the development of voice-enabled agents, aiming to reduce the customer service market's dependence on human labor by the end of the decade. Data from 33 million analyzed tickets suggests that AI will primarily address upstream business failures and low-value queries, allowing human agents to focus on high-empathy tasks that prevent churn.

Neo4j, Eurazeo Growth: Connected Intelligence Why Graph Technology Is the Missing Link in GenAI

Romain, Philippe

Eurasio Fund identified graph technology as essential for bridging the gap between GenAI prototypes and production environments, a strategy validated by Gartner's finding that knowledge graphs increase success rates by 80%. Major enterprises like Klarna now leverage this approach to eliminate thousands of legacy applications and accelerate processing speeds by 1,000 times, while Neo4j serves as the underlying infrastructure for 84 Fortune 100 companies. The industry further solidified this shift in 2023 when the ISO standardized the Cypher query language as GQL, cementing graph databases as a critical component for explainability and security in complex AI systems.

Stephane Kasriel, Meta Fundamental AI Research (FAIR): Frontier AI From Research to Production

Stephane Kasriel, Stefan, Stephen Beyrer, Romain Guyett

Stefan Beirer leads Meta's Fundamental AI Research division in a $60 billion infrastructure expansion aimed at transitioning AI from academic theory to consumer-scale products through a Bell Labs-style model. This strategy leverages the open-source Llama ecosystem and real-time emotional avatars to drive global adoption while refuting immediate mass displacement fears by citing current hardware limitations. Beirer projects that massive compute investments will drive inference costs down by up to 1,000x within two years, enabling "always-on" devices and accelerating a decade of technological progress comparable to the first industrial revolution.

Ronan Harris (Snap Inc): Bringing AI into the world through augmented reality ft. Bloomberg News

Ronan Harris, Benoit

Snap plans to launch new consumer Spectacles next year while leveraging a platform strategy that currently supports 8 billion daily augmented reality lens uses among its 900 million users. The company is differentiating itself from hardware-focused competitors by fostering a developer ecosystem of 400,000 creators and integrating AI partners like Google and OpenAI to drive both ad targeting and third-party experiences. Despite facing stock declines and layoffs, Snap's leadership argues that adopting machine learning and resisting strict age bans are essential for maintaining market relevance against major global competitors.

Windsurf, BUZZ HPC, Gnosis, ElevenLabs, Prosus & Bloomberg: The Agentic Economy AI’s Unseen Hand

Rachel Metz, Tim Cowley, Jero, Alex, Matty, Maria Zuber, Matias Niemelaer, Andrzej Baliczak

A diverse panel of industry leaders from BuzzHPC, Prozus, Windsurf, and 11 Labs defined AI agents as autonomous systems requiring multi-modal feedback loops to drive enterprise adoption. Real-world deployments at companies like DHL and Prozus have demonstrated significant operational gains, including 20% faster delivery times and a 1.7 million-hour productivity increase, while OpenAI's $3 billion acquisition of Windsurf validates the technology's strategic value in software engineering. Despite hurdles regarding data disambiguation and regulatory compliance, the panel predicts a shift toward a task-based internet where agents outperform human operators in efficiency and revenue generation.