China AI Digest (Jun 28, 2026)

Three podcasts, one ladder of ambition — from the self-evolving machine to the trillion-dollar bet on top. AI Next, the podcast from Microsoft Research Asia, asks what happens when systems learn to act, reflect and remember — closing the self-improvement loop and quietly removing humans from it. Zhang Xiaoyun spends three hours with former SpaceX chief engineer Lewis Hong on Elon Musk's management style, the SpaceX–xAI merger and the largest IPO in history. And Dafang Says AI+ dissects Zhipu's trillion-Hong-Kong-dollar valuation — up nineteen hundred percent in a year on ¥724m revenue against a ¥4.7bn loss — asking whether it's a value re-rating or a bubble.