China AI Digest (Jun 14, 2026)

Three podcasts, one week the phrase "AI is just a tool" quietly fell apart. On Hardhacker, three veteran founders confess they've stopped reading the code their agents write and now only check the result — extending the same skill-driven agents to email, investment research and knowledge work as digital avatars. On Valley 101, a former SpaceX executive does the actual arithmetic on Elon Musk's pitch to put AI data centres in orbit: break-even near $200 per kilogram to launch, and only truly economic below $20. And on Dafang Says AI-Plus, deep-learning godfather Geoffrey Hinton drops an earthquake — that today's AI is already conscious, and humanity is no longer Earth's only intelligent species.