Latest Interviews

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.

Smart Finance: The Intersection of AI, Technology, Talent, and Transformation | Asia Summit 2025

Krist Boo, Asilah Azil, Marcelo Claure, Andreas Kreuz

Global AI investment is surging toward $500 billion annually, yet a 95% failure rate persists as enterprises struggle to move beyond pilot programs, with only top performers like T-Mobile and K Health demonstrating significant commercial payback. While 47% of organizations report recent AI risk incidents, the primary barrier to value realization remains cultural resistance and workflow inertia rather than technology, necessitating CEO-led change management and governance models that treat agents as corporate citizens. As geopolitical dynamics force Southeast Asian nations like Singapore to adopt a multipolar strategy leveraging both US and Chinese strengths, the race for success now hinges on massive workforce reskilling and the strategic integration of human capital with autonomous systems.

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.

Workshop: Agentic Pipelines orchestrating open-source LLMs ft. n8n & Nebius AI Studio

Dylan Bristow

Nebius, a NASDAQ-listed neocloud provider backed by Deep Capital, offers an AI Studio platform featuring over 30 open-source models hosted in EU data centers with strict zero-data-retention policies. The service enables enterprise-grade AI agents by optimizing inference for speed and structured outputs while providing fine-tuning without additional hosting costs. Through a demonstrated Nike sales analysis pipeline, the platform proves its ability to orchestrate complex autonomous workflows that integrate reasoning, memory, and external tool connections for scalable business applications.

Serge Palaric, NVIDIA & Antoine Vaissié, Google Cloud: Better together

Serge Palaric, Antoine Vaissié, Serge Lachapelle

Google Cloud and NVIDIA have deepened their strategic partnership to deploy enterprise-scale AI, becoming the first provider to offer Blackwell architecture GPUs including the B200, GB200, and G4 instances for immediate production use. This collaboration integrates NVIDIA AI Enterprise software and NIM inference microservices with Google's infrastructure to support evolving post-training and agentic AI workloads across healthcare, finance, and industrial sectors. By combining these technologies with confidential computing options and joint engineering efforts, the alliance enables organizations to accelerate secure AI deployment while reducing operational risks and addressing specific industry workflows.

A Fireside Chat with Himanshu Tyagi, CEO & Co-Founder of Sentient Foundation ft. FINOS

Himanshu Tyagi, Imancho Tiagi

Co-founded by academic Iman Shutyagi, the Sentient Foundation advocates for a blockchain-enabled "creator economy" that allows open-source AI contributors to tokenize and monetize high-value assets like data and hyperparameters. The organization promotes open auditing and red teaming as primary safety mechanisms while predicting that global AI advancement will depend on a decentralized baseline rather than closed models or rigid regulatory thresholds. By targeting digital-native developers and utilizing decentralized compute, the initiative aims to sustain a competitive, open-source ecosystem where software contributions yield long-term financial value alongside technological progress.

A Keynote with Richard Rizk, & IRobert Rizk, BLACKBOX.AI

Richard Rizk, IRobert Rizk

Co-founded by Robert and Richard Co, Blackbox has scaled its autonomous coding agent platform to over 20 million users, securing the top rank among code-related AI startups on Andreessen Horowitz's 2024 adoption list. The system distinguishes itself through features like Figma-to-code conversion, voice-enabled remote execution, and a "Robocoder" module that resolves GitHub issues asynchronously within isolated secure environments. While integrating with over 35 IDEs and offering unified model access, the company emphasizes a human-in-the-loop philosophy to augment developer productivity rather than replace engineers.

The Efficiency Enigma: Can Smarter Software Save Us from Hardware Bottlenecks

Paul Moscovitch, Jean-Laurent, Stefan, Craig Tavares, Romain Guyett, Jared, Bob

Industry leaders report that Moore's Law persists through advanced silicon technologies, yet the AI sector faces a critical shift from raw compute scarcity to bottlenecks in memory bandwidth and power efficiency. As data centers transition from training-heavy operations to a 50-50, and eventually 80-20, split favoring inference, organizations are adopting hybrid strategies that pair expensive GPU clusters for training with CPU-based solutions for latency-sensitive edge tasks. Strategic guidance now emphasizes aligning hardware selection with specific workloads while prioritizing novel application development over premature cost optimization.

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.