Michiel Bakker

AI:AM LIVE — June 23, 2026 — Self-Improving GPU Kernels and Europe's AI Sovereignty: Bing Xu and Michiel Bakker

The open tracked an unusually quiet news day through a markets lens — rumors that GPT-5.6 was pulled back amid the model-release freeze and that Gemini 3.5 Pro is lagging, a 6% semiconductor selloff as SK Hynix overtook Samsung for the first time in 27 years, Anthropic's first memory-chip deal with Micron, and an extended debate on whether AI's leverage dynamics make the boom a 'too big to fail' bubble. Bing Xu, founder & CEO of INT21 (co-creator of MXNet and AITemplate, co-author of the original GAN paper, founder of NVIDIA-acquired HippoML), then made the case that self-improvement should target the infrastructure, not the model: his PTX Kernel Factory points agent swarms at the GPU ISA below CUDA, matching expert libraries like QuACK on mature kernels and posting up to 59% speedups on newer ones — and, he argued, deepening NVIDIA's moat rather than eroding it, because the evolutionary loop depends on NVIDIA's profiling ecosystem. MIT/DeepMind researcher Michiel Bakker followed on Europe 2031, his viral month-by-month scenario of Europe sleepwalking into AI dependence — a fictional 2028 export-control beat that materialized within a day of publishing when the US restricted Anthropic's models for foreign nationals — laying out why regulation requires capability first, why the nuclear-umbrella analogy fails for an economic technology, and where Europe's real leverage (the ASML/IMEC semiconductor ecosystem, a middle-power coalition) still lies. The hosts closed on the geopolitics of AI data and a tease of David Duvenaud and 'gradual disempowerment' the next morning.