Podcast · Business

Azeem Azhar's Exponential View

How will the future unfold? What is the impact of AI and other exponential technologies on business & society? Join Azeem Azhar, founder of Exponential View, on his quest to demistify the era of exponential change.

New episodes: Weekly
Typical length: 33 min
Latest: 4 Jun 2026
Language: English

Latest episode

4 Jun 2026 · 19 min

Why AI isn’t showing up on your bottom line

More than three years after ChatGPT's release, only 27% of executives say AI has met their ROI expectations. The history of factory electrification explains why — most companies are at the light-bulb stage, adding Copilot licenses rather than reconceptualizing their businesses around AI. In this episode I map the three stages of AI adoption, and show what it actually takes to move from chatbots to the autonomous company — the only stage where the moat becomes real.

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Earlier episodes 29 most recent

E39 · 1 Apr 2026 · 21 min
Karpathy’s autoresearch could make scientists of us all
Published in early March 2026, Andrej Karpathy's autoresearch AI tool makes autonomous scientific experimentation cheap and easy — but it was designed to solve machine learning problems. I wanted to see if I could apply its loop architecture to my own work: refining my worldview, testing arguments, solving business problems. In this video, I share how I adapted Karpathy’s autoresearch loops for problems that aren't easy to quantify, how to avoid the local minima trap, and the broader impact of these kinds of methods. I covered:
E38 · 25 Mar 2026 · 37 min
What NVIDIA’s bet on OpenClaw means for the future of AI and your token budget
Last week Jensen Huang shared the numbers from NVIDIA’s order book: AI compute demand has grown a millionfold in two years. Much GCT coverage focussed on chips, robots, data centers in space, but I think Jensen revealed something far more important in his keynote: “the inference inflection has arrived,” and this is about to transform how all companies should manage their budgets. The inference era is already the operating assumption of the world’s most valuable company.
E37 · 18 Mar 2026 · 21 min
Why I changed my mind about Apple and AI
Apple may have stumbled into one of the most defensible positions in AI. This was not on my radar – just two months ago, I was describing a credibility crisis at the company; they appeared wrong-footed on the most important technology of our times and an acquisition was their only plausible way out. In this episode I work through what I and many other commentators missed – and what road lies ahead for Apple.
E36 · 13 Mar 2026 · 33 min
How to think well with AI: signals, quietness, and the argument engine
AI has become so embedded in how I work that I can no longer cleanly separate it from my thinking. That raises a question I find genuinely unsettling: is intensive AI use making me a sharper thinker, or quietly doing the opposite? In this episode I pull back the curtain on my full research and writing process — the custom tools, the friction points, and the places where I'm still not sure I've got it right. For Ezra Klein, having AI summarize material is a disaster for original thought. But my AI systems are designed to protect the cognitive work that has to stay human, while they handle…
E35 · 5 Mar 2026 · 42 min
Showing you my AI chief of staff (OpenClaw practical guide)
Meet R Mini Arnold - my OpenClaw chief of staff, which manages the equivalent of a ten-person team from a Mac mini in my garden studio. While I slept, that AI team debugged its own code at 3am, researched a trending Substack essay using five parallel investigators, and wrote a 4,600-word script for this very episode in 40 minutes. The gap between people who've started building this way and those who haven't is widening every week.
E34 · 25 Feb 2026 · 52 min
Are we in charge of our AI tools or are they in charge of us?
This is the first episode of AI Vistas, a new series where I bring together people I trust and respect to tackle a major question collectively. Today’s question: are we in charge of our AI tools, or are they in charge of us? Joining me are Nita Farahany, distinguished professor of law and philosophy at Duke University and a leading thinker on cognitive liberty and mental privacy; Eric Topol, founder of the Scripps Research Translational Institute and one of the world's most cited medical researchers; and Rohit Krishnan, engineer, former hedge fund manager, and AI builder. Moderating the…
E12 · 19 Feb 2026 · 53 min
Entering the trillion-agent economy (ft. Rohit Krishnan)
In this episode, I sit down with my friend Rohit Krishnan - writer of the Substack newsletter Strange Loop Canon - for a hands-on conversation about what it actually looks like to build with AI agents today. Between us we're burning through tens of billions of tokens a month - I hit nearly 100 million in a single day this week - and we share what we're each running on our own machines. We dig into the quirks and surprising power of tools like OpenClaw, Claude Code, and Cowork, debate why AI remains stubbornly bad at good writing, and zoom out to ask what a world of trillions of agents might…
E100 · 13 Feb 2026 · 50 min
Inside the economics of OpenAI (exclusive research)
In this episode, I'm joined by Jaime Sevilla, founder of Epoch AI; Hannah Petrovic from my team at Exponential View; and financial journalist Matt Robinson from AI Street. Together we investigate a fundamental question: do the economics of AI companies actually work? We analysed OpenAI's financials from public data to examine whether their revenues can sustain the staggering R&D costs of frontier models. The findings reveal a picture far more precarious than many assume; we also explore where the real infrastructure bottlenecks lie, why compute demand will dwarf energy constraints, and what…
E99 · 5 Feb 2026 · 50 min
Mustafa Suleyman — AI is hacking our empathy circuits
A week before OpenClaw was released, I recorded a prescient conversation with Mustafa Suleyman, CEO of Microsoft AI and co-founder of DeepMind. We talked about what happens when AI starts to seem conscious – even if it isn’t. Today, you get to hear our conversation. Mustafa has been sounding the alarm about what he calls “seemingly conscious AI” and the risk of collective AI psychosis for a long time. We discussed this idea of the “fourth class of being” – neither human, tool, nor nature – that AI is becoming and all it brings with itself.
E98 · 29 Jan 2026 · 16 min
Davos 2026 and the end of the rules-based order
At Davos 2026, the mood was unlike any previous World Economic Forum gathering. With Donald Trump arriving amid escalating geopolitical tensions and European leaders sounding alarms about sovereignty, I recorded live dispatches from the ground. In this special episode, I bring together observations from four days at the annual meeting, tracking the seismic shifts in global order alongside the practical realities of AI adoption in the enterprise.
E97 · 21 Jan 2026 · 55 min
Anthropic’s Head of Economics on AI adoption data, Claude Code, the burden of knowledge & the next generation of experts
In this episode, Peter McCrory, Head of Economics at Anthropic, unpacks the company's new Economic Index report. His team analyzed millions of real Claude conversations to map exactly where AI is augmenting human work today and where it isn't. We explore the striking divergence between API and chat usage, why businesses need to extract tacit knowledge to unlock AI's potential, the "hollow ladder" risk for junior workers, and Anthropic's estimate that AI could add 1.0-1.8% to annual productivity growth over the next decade.
E96 · 16 Jan 2026 · 33 min
My outlook for 2026: orchestration, the human edge and the AI bubble
In this episode, I share my outlook for 2026 and explain why AI tools now feel genuinely different. I explore how the act of making has been transformed, why authenticity and meaning will become the new scarcity, and whether the foundations of energy and capital can hold. I also address the question I was asked most in 2025: when will the AI bubble burst?
E95 · 8 Jan 2026 · 47 min
AI, markets, and power: A conversation with Paul Krugman (2025 re-run)
In this episode, Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman and I discuss how a strong US economy, high asset valuations, and rapid AI adoption are sitting in uneasy tension. We explore what past technology cycles can teach us, why safety nets struggle to address disruption, and where genuine optimism still makes sense.
E94 · 20 Dec 2025 · 25 min
Reflecting on 2025 (the K-shaped economy, AI's impact on work and human judgement, energy bottlenecks)
What made 2025 special? 🎊 We recorded this to publish after Christmas, but demand for year‑end reflections prompted an early release - so if you hear me say Christmas has passed, that’s why. 🎊 In this episode, I reflect on the past year and what it revealed: a K-shaped divide. On one track, AI models are now doing hours of high quality work, improving at exponential pace, and shifting how we work from doing to judging. On the other, organisations and the broader economy are struggling to keep up. Stay to the end for my seasonal film recommendation.
E93 · 19 Dec 2025 · 22 min
What I learned from the world's leading minds in 2025
In this episode, I’ve distilled a year of extraordinary dialogue into one 20-minute briefing. I’ve spent 2025 in conversation with the architects of our future - the builders and thinkers redefining AI, energy, and the global economy. These are the "eureka" moments from my most exclusive interviews. From the future of "protopia" with Kevin Kelly to the hidden tech gaps with Dan Wang, this is your strategic roadmap for the exponential age.
E92 · 10 Dec 2025 · 24 min
What it will take for AI to scale (energy, compute, talent)
In this episode, I look at the next 24 months of AI. The technology is improving rapidly – so what could hold back widespread transformation of how we work and live? I dig into the real constraints, from electricity shortages to institutional inertia, why mid-2026 matters for enterprise AI, and why so many people remain uneasy about a technology they use every day.
E91 · 5 Dec 2025 · 24 min
The method of invention, AI's new clock speed and why capital markets are confused
In this episode, I reflect on the third anniversary of ChatGPT's launch as a marker of where we are in the exponential age. As a product, ChatGPT captures the speed of technological progress, the new behaviours emerging around it and the widening gap between innovation and institutional change – all symptomatic of the era I called the exponential age in my 2021 book.
E90 · 21 Nov 2025 · 22 min
Why the AI productivity gains haven’t arrived - yet
The AI industry is sending mixed signals, with markets turning red while teams report real productivity gains. In this session I explore why we are living in a split reality, where individuals move faster with these tools but the wider economy is ambivalent. We once assumed juniors would get the biggest lift from AI, yet the newer agentic tools seem to reward senior workers who know how to structure problems and judge output.
E89 · 14 Nov 2025 · 48 min
Where did all the entry-level jobs go? (With Revelio CEO Ben Zweig)
Junior roles in AI-exposed fields are disappearing fast. The obvious culprit is AI rapidly automating entry-level jobs. And yet, this isn't quite right. What is driving the drop is managers’ expectations about what AI will do, not the work that it's already replacing. I discussed this with Ben Zweig of Revelio Labs, which builds global workforce data from millions of individual profiles to track hiring, separations and job flows. Together, we explored the future of work and shared practical advice for new grads.
E88 · 7 Nov 2025 · 17 min
The demand for infinite compute
The AI boom isn’t just about chatbots. In this video, I explain why cloud companies and chipmakers are exploding in value: we’re moving into an economy where computation becomes a fundamental input – like steel, electricity or oil. If that’s true, our demand for compute could approach infinity.
E87 · 23 Oct 2025 · 45 min
Inside the US–China decoupling: What’s really at stake (AI, rare earths, Taiwan, trade)
In this episode, I speak with Jordan Schneider, creator of Chinatalk, to explore the new phase of US–China competition. Both countries are using trade policy, export controls and industrial strategy to shift the balance of global power. Yet, their economies remain tightly bound.
E86 · 8 Oct 2025 · 47 min
Inside the collapse of the internet economy (and what comes next)
This conversation is a practical map of how AI “answer engines” upend the web’s traffic-funded model – and what could replace it. Matthew Prince (co-founder and CEO of Cloudflare) joins Azeem to discuss scarcity, pricing, and why unique, trustworthy content becomes the premium input to AI.
E85 · 1 Oct 2025 · 50 min
Why China builds while America debates, with Dan Wang
In this episode, I spoke with Dan Wang, author of “Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future”. We unpacked a bold thesis: China is not merely a competitor in AI and tech, but is re-imagining its entire state apparatus as an engineering state - in contrast to the more “lawyerly” institutions of the US and UK.
E84 · 25 Sep 2025 · 12 min
Are we in an AI bubble? (these are the 5 warning signs)
Is AI in a bubble or a boom? I spent hundreds of hours figuring this out. Today I present a practical five-gauge framework to benchmark today’s AI frenzy against history’s bubbles, from railways to dot-coms. A clear, data-driven guide for investors and decision-makers.
E83 · 24 Sep 2025 · 7 min
Why GPT-5 was never going to impress you
GPT-5 was the most advanced AI when it was released, but most people were disappointed. Why? In this episode, I unpack the two key paradoxes that shape how we judge new technology: shifting goalposts and negative space.
E82 · 10 Sep 2025 · 30 min
My OpenAI thought experiment: $500B to $1.5T?
Can AI stocks beat Big Tech? In this episode, I discuss OpenAI and its decision to expand a secondary share sale that lets insiders sell about $10.3 billion of stock at roughly a $500 billion valuation. Although skeptical at first, the calculations reveal there is a path for OpenAI to deliver outsized returns.
E81 · 5 Sep 2025 · 26 min
AI is eating into entry-level jobs
This is the single most important paper to come out in tech in recent weeks. Erik Brynjolfsson, Bharat Chandar and Ruyu Chen investigated whether generative AI is leading to job losses in roles most exposed to AI – and how these effects differ by age and the way AI is used. In this episode, I break down these results and their implications.
E80 · 24 Jul 2025 · 52 min
AI & the future of media with The Atlantic CEO, Nicholas Thompson
Nick Thompson, CEO of The Atlantic, led one of the first major content licensing deals with OpenAI in 2024. In this conversation, he joins Azeem to unpack how AI is transforming media – and what that means for every business navigating the shifting economics of attention, trust, and discovery.
E79 · 9 Jul 2025 · 24 min
2025 AI reality check: Are we in a bubble?
At the start of the year, I made seven predictions about how 2025 would unfold. Six months in, it's time to mark my own work. From AI capability breakthroughs to autonomous vehicles, climate extremes to workforce transformation, I examine what I got right, what I missed, and why the 2027-2028 period will be when vertical AI hits the real economy in force.

About Azeem Azhar's Exponential View

Azeem Azhar's Exponential View is a English business podcast from Azeem Azhar. Melo plays each episode straight from the publisher's own feed — no ads added, no account needed — and remembers where you stopped, in this browser only.

Publisher: Azeem Azhar
Language: English
Category: Business
New episodes: Weekly
Typical length: 33 min
Latest episode: 4 Jun 2026
Feed: RSS — paste into any podcast app
Apple Podcasts: podcasts.apple.com/podcast/id1172218725

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