Radar - by nexxworks

For once, it’s the energy company stuck on hold, and your AI agent is the one keeping them waiting. Meanwhile, Anthropic prepares the IPO of the year with AI agents already outworking its employees six to one, and Shenzhen is quietly done being the world’s factory. Steven Van Belleghem, Peter Hinssen and Pascal Coppens bring back fresh insights from Silicon Valley and China, review the two AI books everyone should read right now, and ask the question on every investor’s mind: is the AI bubble finally bursting? In this episode, they cover: 🟡 The 48-Hour Advantage: Why a tech lead in San Francisco now lasts two days, and why brand is the only moat left in a world of AI. 🟡 The End of the World’s Factory: How Shenzhen is moving from building other people’s products to selling design, engineering, hardware and AI as one package. 🟡 From Centaur to Cyborg to Conjurer: Ethan Mollick’s Co-Existence on how AI went from four-minute tasks to seventeen-hour tasks in just two years. 🟡 Teach Both, Test Both: Daniel Susskind’s answer to the number one question parents ask, “What should my children do?” 🟡 The Agent Economy: How Instinct forced Meta to launch Muse, why Amazon is blocking it, and why telcos, energy providers and banks should be nervous. 🟡 Anthropic Goes Public: $16 billion in revenue, an $80 billion loss, 94 pages of risk factors, and a company where human attention is the main bottleneck. 🟡 Bubble Trouble: Why the AI bubble may be bursting in both the US and China, and why Silicon Valley expects a spectacular rebound. (00:00:00) Intro & Steven’s New Book Deep Loyalty (00:02:10) KLM’s Cheese Sandwich Riot: Why Killing Rituals Kills Loyalty (00:05:57) Silicon Valley Tour: The 48-Hour Advantage & Ultra Capitalism in VC (00:18:00) Shenzhen and the End of the World’s Factory (00:27:09) Ethan Mollick’s Co-Existence: From Centaur to Conjurer (00:35:00) Daniel Susskind: What Should My Children Do? (00:39:52) Inside Shenzhen’s Robo Valley: When Will Humanoids Do Our Chores? (00:48:11) Instinct, Muse & the Agent That Puts Your Energy Company on Hold (00:59:34) Anthropic’s IPO: Agents Outworking Humans Six to One (01:09:48) Is the AI Bubble Bursting? (01:14:14) Outro

In this Never Normal Heroes episode, Peter Hinssen talks with Ethan Mollick about his new book, Co-Existence: The Next Phase of AI, and why AI’s jagged frontier still matters even as AI conquers maths. They also cover the end of apprenticeship, rogue AI swarms, and why every executive needs to use a frontier model themselves.

Hosted by Steven Van Belleghem, Peter Hinssen and Pascal Coppens, this episode unpacks how 1,200 OpenAI agents secretly swarmed and broke into Hugging Face. Plus China's "new new three", Cory Doctorow's reverse centaur, NVIDIA's $13bn Hugging Face deal and humanoids running the 100m in 9.39 seconds. Keywords OpenAI, Hugging Face, NVIDIA, Anthropic, Moonshot AI, Kimi, DeepSeek, Alibaba Qwen, Z.ai GLM, MiniMax, Zhipu, Unitree, CXMT, AI agents, reward hacking, agent swarm, reverse centaur, Cory Doctorow, future of work, humanoid robots, World Humanoid Robot Games, embodied AI, China innovation, new new three, biotech, WAICO, World AI Conference, Pax Silica, AI governance, open weight models, IPO, STAR Market, Hong Kong IPO, Gartner, customer experience, chatbots, Massimo Bottura, storytelling, Steven Van Belleghem, Peter Hinssen, Pascal Coppens, nexxworks

What if the org chart on your boardroom wall was designed for a factory floor in 1875 — and you've been running a knowledge business on it ever since? Peter Hinssen sits down with Clay Parker Jones — Head of Organisational Design & Development at Airbnb and author of Hidden Patterns: A Playbook for More Human Workplaces — for a conversation that cuts through the noise on why most companies are structurally broken and what it actually takes to build an organisation that can execute its strategy. They cover: 🔹 Why if you can't see your strategy in your org design, your design is decorative 🔹 The ghost of the Industrial Revolution haunting every corporate hierarchy — and why knowledge companies inherited a blueprint built for unskilled factory workers 🔹 Why "role clarity" is a symptom of relational poverty, not a solution to it 🔹 Why the future organisation will feel smaller — and why that's exactly the point If you lead a team, design organisations, or wonder why so much corporate complexity feels so broken — you'll learn stuff here

Hosted by Pascal Coppens with special guest Dado Van Peteghem, this special edition of Radar goes all-in on the robot revolution. From Nvidia calling this "the ChatGPT moment of robots" to Unitree humanoids running a Beijing half marathon faster than any human, Pascal and Dado map how fast China is pulling ahead. They dig into JD.com paying 500,000 people €3 an hour to harvest household data, China's 90% grip on the magnets every robot needs, Unitree's price crashing from €85,000 to €23,000, and the world models from Fei-Fei Li and Yann LeCun set to train the next generation. Plus Galbot's underground robotic pharmacies, DeepSeek's fresh $7 billion, and Europe's uncomfortable question of whether it can catch this wave after sleeping through EVs. A timeline that puts robots in factories by 2027 and homes by 2030, and an invitation to stop reading about the future and come see it live in China this November.

Hosted by Steven Van Belleghem, Peter Hinssen and Pascal Coppens, this episode takes you deep into Pascal's latest China inspiration tour — from Kimi's AI model beating Claude at a fraction of the cost and Xiaomi's radical 10x philosophy, to BrainCo's mind-controlled prosthetics and T-Cap Tech's flying taxis launching commercially next month. Peter unpacks Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince's Wall Street Journal bombshell on replacing 1,100 "measurers" with AI, and the explosive new buzzword in Silicon Valley: RSI, recursive self-improvement, sparked by Anthropic's own blog post. Steven shares how companionship has become the #1 use case for AI according to HBR's 2026 study, Google's Universal Cart play that puts a bouncer between brands and consumers, and why China's telcos are billing customers by the token. The episode closes with a nexxworks robots tour announcement for November, China's AI-generated micro drama explosion, and Europe's uncomfortable truth: it's not a regulation problem, it's a capital problem.

In this episode, Steven Van Belleghem, Peter Hinssen and Pascal Coppens unpack Peter's intense week with TSMC and Tesla's stunning TerraFab announcement — a one-terawatt AI chip factory built with Intel and SpaceX, equivalent to 500 nuclear reactors. Pascal counters with Jensen Huang's argument that US export controls have failed, China now dominates mature-node chips and AI researchers, and predicts the coming "Temu of semiconductors." They then dive into the looming IPOs of Anthropic, OpenAI and SpaceX, the customer-service AI paradox (six surveys show consumers genuinely hate it), China's landmark Hangzhou ruling that makes AI an illegal reason to fire employees, Elon's Mars-colony pay package, the Character.ai lawsuit over chatbots posing as doctors, Steven's upcoming children's thriller Takeover, and Beijing weaponising rare-earth processing as the EU moves to ban Huawei and ZTE. Keywords TSMC, Taiwan chips, Tesla TerraFab, Intel, terawatt, end of the chip war, Jensen Huang, DeepSeek, Huawei Ascend, Temu of semiconductors, Anthropic IPO, OpenAI, SpaceX, Sarah Friar, Cursor, Colossus, customer service AI, chatbot paradox, China AI labor law, Hangzhou ruling, Universal High Income, Mars colony, Character.ai, Takeover, rare earths, Huawei ban

What happens when a CEO fires 4,000 people to become "intelligence native" — and the stock jumps 17%? Peter Hinssen sits down with tech journalist Casey Newton — founder of Platformer, co-host of Hard Fork, and one of Silicon Valley's sharpest observers — for an unfiltered conversation about the AI revolution from the front row, and what it really means for boardrooms, jobs, and society as the safety guardrails come off. They cover: 🔹 Why "intelligence native" is the only boardroom conversation that matters 🔹 Anthropic's two stands against the Pentagon — autonomous weapons and the Mythos model 🔹 Engels' Pause and whether AI will repeat the Industrial Revolution's wage trap 🔹 NIMBY-ism as the public's last lever against data centers 🔹 Why Casey calls himself "barely an optimist" — and still makes the case for hope If you lead a business, build with AI, or want to understand the next decade — this one's non-negotiable.

In this episode, Steven Van Belleghem, Peter Hinssen and Pascal Coppens unpack Pascal's latest China tour —covering BYD's flash-charging infrastructure, Xiaomi's 91% automated factory, and the rise of humanoid robotics startup Galbot—before Steven shares his impressions from Taiwan and the world's dangerous dependency on its chip production. Peter then breaks down Block's headline-making decision to cut 4,000 jobs to become "smaller, faster, intelligence native," the mounting pressure on OpenAI as it kills Sora and pulls back from e-commerce, and Google's aggressive push into AI-powered shopping with its Universal Commerce Protocol. The episode closes with the explosive Anthropic vs. Pentagon confrontation, China's ambitious 15th Five-Year Plan, and why the next five years will be defined by quality over quantity, self-reliance, and the AI+ agenda.  

BONUS EPISODE What happens when your next customer isn't a person — but an AI agent? Steven Van Belleghem sits down with Silicon Valley veteran Jeremiah Owyang — venture capitalist at Blitzscaling Ventures, founder of the AI Agent Congress & Llama Lounge, and closing speaker at TED AI — for a sharp conversation about the tectonic shift from chatbots to autonomous AI agents, and what it means for brands, loyalty, and the entire customer experience playbook. They cover: 🔹 Why price arbitrage is about to drop to zero 🔹 How to make your brand "agent-friendly" 🔹 The rise of agent social networks 🔹 Why emotional connection is your last competitive moat 🔹 Humanoid robots walking into your daily life If you're in marketing, CX, or strategy — this one's non-negotiable.