Sir Niall Ferguson Decodes Trump, China, And The New World Order Azeem Azhar's Exponential View podcast

41:48

Greg Jackson, CEO of Octopus Energy, joins Azeem to discuss the Iberian blackout and how we can create a more stable, flexible, and resilient energy grid for the future. This conversation digs into grid technology, market structures, and the real opportunities of the clean energy transition. (00:00) Episode trailer (01:38) What caused the Iberian blackout? (04:55) Managing load in traditional vs renewable grids (11:57) The role of market incentives (18:13) Greg's social experiments within the UK grid (23:49) How the "virtual power plant" is becoming a reality (26:59) The path to completing the renewable energy transition (33:15) Are lobbyists slowing down the transition? (36:26) What does the next 5-10 years look like? (40:42) Why the name "Octopus?" Greg's links: Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/g__j LinkedIn: https://uk.linkedin.com/in/gregsjackson Octopus Energy: https://octopus.energy/ Azeem's links: Substack: https://www.exponentialview.co/ Website: https://www.azeemazhar.com/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/azhar Twitter/X: https://x.com/azeem…

Azeem Azhar's Exponential View

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The difference between early and late AI adopters 49:30

10 days ago49:30

49:30

Physicist and entrepreneur Steve Hsu, whose startup Superfocus tackles hallucination problems in large language models, joins Azeem to discuss AI agents, hallucination challenges and what happens when technology meets labor markets. They discuss: ( 01:31 ) The deeper shift that Superfocus represents ( 07:00 ) Will models overcome hallucination? ( 10:15 ) AI Agents can replace 80-90% of call center calls ( 12:27 ) What it’s like showing customer support AI to customer support people ( 22:36 ) China's mayors are like mini CEOs ( 30:05 ) What will matter most in the supposed "AI race"? ( 35:58 ) DeepSeek was not part of the Chinese Government ( 38:23 ) How open source will change the future of deployment ( 40:59 ) What the public doesn't understand about AI tail risk ( 48:01 ) How AI plush toys can teach French to 2-year-olds This was originally recorded for "Friday with Azeem Azhar", a new show that takes place every Friday at 9am PT and 12pm ET. You can tune in through Exponential View on Substack. Produced by supermix.io and EPIIPLUS1 Ltd…

Azeem Azhar's Exponential View

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Sir Niall Ferguson decodes Trump, China, and the new world order 52:23

17 days ago52:23

52:23

Sir Niall Ferguson, renowned historian and Milbank Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, joins Azeem Azhar to discuss the evolving relationship between the U.S. and China, Trump's foreign policy doctrine, and what the new global economic and security order might look like. ( 00:00 ) What most analysts are missing about Trump ( 05:43 ) The win-win outcome in Europe–U.S relations ( 11:17 ) How the U.S. is reestablishing deterrence ( 15:50 ) Can the U.S. economy weather the impact of tariffs? ( 23:33 ) Niall's read on China ( 29:29 ) How is China performing in tech? ( 33:35 ) What might happen with Taiwan ( 42:43 ) Predictions for the coming world order Sir Niall Ferguson's links: Substack: Time Machine Books: War of the World , Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe Twitter/X: https://x.com/nfergus Azeem's links: Substack: https://www.exponentialview.co/ Website: https://www.azeemazhar.com/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/azhar Twitter/X: https://x.com/azeem Our new show This was originally recorded for "Friday with Azeem Azhar" on 28 March. Produced by supermix.io and EPIIPLUS1 Ltd…

Azeem Azhar's Exponential View

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What it’s like on the frontlines of Trump’s tariff’s war 43:19

24 days ago43:19

43:19

In this episode, Azeem Azhar speaks with Ryan Petersen, CEO and founder of logistics platform Flexport, about the current state of global trade amidst escalating tariffs, geopolitical tensions, and technological disruption. Ryan offers unique insights from the frontlines of the US-China trade war and explores how businesses are adapting to a rapidly changing landscape. (00:00) Episode trailer (01:12) Ryan's overall thoughts and predictions (03:40) Why shipping is crucial to your everyday life (08:07) Why tariffs may actually increase global shipping (11:34) Who’s pausing their China shipments? (14:29) The mindset of Flexport customers right now (16:02) Is this the end of globalization? (21:48) The fragility and resiliency of global trade (25:27) The most underrated story in the world (30:25) How tech has changed global trade (36:31) Who will win in the new trade settings? (41:20) What could a U.S-China trade deal look like? Ryan's links: Flexport https://www.flexport.com/ Twitter/X https://x.com/typesfast LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/rpetersen/ Azeem's links: Substack: https://www.exponentialview.co/ Website: https://www.azeemazhar.com/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/azhar Twitter/X: https://x.com/azeem Our new show This was originally recorded for "Friday with Azeem Azhar", a new show that takes place every Friday at 9am PT and 12pm ET. You can tune in through my Substack linked below. The format is experimental and we'd love your feedback, so feel free to comment or email your thoughts to our team at live@exponentialview.co . Produced by supermix.io and EPIIPLUS1 Ltd…

Azeem Azhar's Exponential View

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A tour of the tech boom — 5 waves you need to understand 42:28

30 days ago42:28

42:28

Azeem Azhar welcomes Packy McCormick, founder and investor at Not Boring, to discuss the current tech landscape. In this episode you'll hear: (01:50) What Packy got wrong (and right) about Web3 (10:17) The shift to "know thyself and know thyself-nots" (14:28) Europe just woke up (18:46) Bits and atoms are cool again (21:10) London airport shutdown reveals a deeper challenge (23:32) A new kind of home energy infrastructure (29:28) A theory on Eric Schmidt's new CEO role (34:08) What's the role of nuclear in a solar + battery world? (40:33) The coming tech boom Our new show This was originally recorded for "Friday with Azeem Azhar", a new show that takes place every Friday at 9am PT and 12pm ET. You can tune in through my Substack linked below. The format is experimental and we'd love your feedback, so feel free to comment or email your thoughts to our team at live@exponentialview.co. Packy's links: Substack: https://www.notboring.co/ Twitter/X: https://x.com/packyM Azeem's links: Substack: https://www.exponentialview.co/ Website: https://www.azeemazhar.com/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/azhar Twitter/X: https://x.com/azeem Produced by supermix.io and EPIIPLUS1 Ltd…

Azeem Azhar's Exponential View

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Are we ready for human-level AI by 2030? Anthropic's co-founder answers 52:06

6 weeks ago52:06

52:06

Anthropic's co-founder and chief scientist Jared Kaplan discusses AI's rapid evolution, the shorter-than-expected timeline to human-level AI, and how Claude's "thinking time" feature represents a new frontier in AI reasoning capabilities. In this episode you'll hear: Why Jared believes human-level AI is now likely to arrive in 2-3 years instead of by 2030 How AI models are developing the ability to handle increasingly complex tasks that would take humans hours or days The importance of constitutional AI and interpretability research as essential guardrails for increasingly powerful systems Our new show This was originally recorded for "Friday with Azeem Azhar", a new show that takes place every Friday at 9am PT and 12pm ET on Exponential View. You can tune in through my Substack linked below. The format is experimental and we'd love your feedback, so feel free to comment or email your thoughts to our team at live@exponentialview.co . Timestamps: (00:00) Episode trailer (01:27) Jared's updated prediction for reaching human-level intelligence (08:12) What will limit scaling laws? (11:13) How long will we wait between model generations? (16:27) Why test-time scaling is a big deal (21:59) There’s no reason why DeepSeek can’t be competitive algorithmically (25:31) Has Anthropic changed their approach to safety vs speed? (30:08) Managing the paradoxes of AI progress (32:21) Can interpretability and monitoring really keep AI safe? (39:43) Are model incentives misaligned with public interests? (42:36) How should we prepare for electricity-level impact? (51:15) What Jared is most excited about in the next 12 months Jared's links: Anthropic: https://www.anthropic.com/ Azeem's links: Substack: https://www.exponentialview.co/ Website: https://www.azeemazhar.com/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/azhar Twitter/X: https://x.com/azeem Produced by supermix.io…

Azeem Azhar's Exponential View

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The future of Human-AI coexistence, according to Kevin Kelly (co-founder of Wired, futurist, author) 44:33

7 weeks ago44:33

44:33

Kevin Kelly is a co-founder of Wired Magazine and a renowned author and futurist. Decades ago, Kevin predicted much of today's technological and cultural landscape. In this discussion, he presents his new bold vision for what’s coming next: The Handoff to Bots. In this episode, you’ll hear: Why declining populations will radically reshape economies What a bot-to-bot economy could look and feel like Why people of the future might be paid to read emails How AI could help humanity find deeper purpose Why this future might be closer than you think Kevin’s links: Website/blog: https://kk.org/ Twitter/X: https://x.com/kevin2kelly Instagram: / kevin2kelly Azeem's links: Substack: https://www.exponentialview.co/ Website: https://www.azeemazhar.com/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/azhar?ori... Twitter/X: https://x.com/azeem Timestamps: (00:00) Intro (02:17) The baby black hole behind Kevin's theory (10:49) Kevin's thesis: The handoff to bots (15:05) This world is closer than we think (19:32) The role of humans in this new world (21:23) Could monopoly influence pose a problem? (28:33) The nature of “struggle” in this new world (32:42) Could we see countries competing for population? (36:06) How a scarcity of humans might change what we value (42:30) What would 1994 Kevin think of 2025 Kevin's blog? Production: Production by supermix.io…

Azeem Azhar's Exponential View

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AI in 2025 – A global perspective, with Kai-Fu Lee 50:23

18 weeks ago50:23

50:23

Kai-Fu Lee joins me to discuss AI in 2025. Kai-Fu is a storied AI researcher, investor, inventor and entrepreneur based in Taiwan. As one of the leading AI experts based in Asia, I wanted to get his take on this particular market. Key insights: Kai-Fu noted that unlike the singular “ChatGPT moment” that stunned Western audiences, the Chinese market encountered generative AI in a more “incremental and distributed” fashion. A particularly fascinating shift is how Chinese enterprises are adopting generative AI. Without the entrenched SaaS layers common in the US, Chinese companies are “rolling their own” solutions. This deep integration might be tougher and messier, but it encourages thorough, domain-specific implementations. We reflected on a structural shift in how we think about productivity software. With AI “conceptualizing” the document and the user providing strategic nudges, it’s akin to reversing the traditional creative process. We’re moving from a training-centric world to an inference-centric one. Models need to be cheaper, faster and less resource-intensive to run, not just to train. For instance, his team at ZeroOne.ai managed to train a top-tier model on “just” 2,000 H100 GPUs and bring inference costs down to 10 cents per million tokens—a fraction of GPT-4’s early costs. In 2025, Kai-Fu predicts, we’ll see fewer “demos” and more “AI-first” applications deploying text, image and video generation tools into real-world workflows. Connect with us: Exponential View…

Azeem Azhar's Exponential View

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AI in 2025 – The great normalisation, with Nathan Benaich 46:11

19 weeks ago46:11

46:11

Nathan Benaich, Founder and General Partner of Air Street Capital, joins me to discuss AI in 2025. From runaway consumer adoption to evolving enterprise moats, from still-elusive AI-driven drug breakthroughs to the renewed vigour in robotics, several core themes stood out. 1. Frontier models & AI at scale In 2024, we witnessed the astonishing growth of frontier models and their deployment on a massive scale. OpenAI’s GPT-4 and GPT-4 o1, Anthropic’s Claude and Google’s Gemini have all demonstrated that being “at the frontier” is increasingly the price of admission. 2. Consumers, voice and infinite worlds On the consumer side, we have reason to believe 2025 will be the year of AI-enabled workflows that feel truly natural. Voice, multimodality and integration into daily routines—like transcribing my morning thoughts during a commute—are becoming routine. 3. Accelerating science & drug discovery While AI accelerates lab automation and data analysis—improving reproducibility and speeding up processes—the promised “AI-designed blockbuster drug” is still in the pipeline. Clinical timelines and regulatory hurdles do not compress easily. 4. Geopolitics, funding and the sovereign question As training costs skyrocket and models require unimaginable scale, questions mount… Who funds these massive compute requirements? Will nation-states view these labs as strategic assets, akin to telecoms or chipmakers? 5. From explosive capability gains to refined utility We’ve grown numb to what was once astonishing—perfect speech synthesis, infinite text generation, zero-shot coding. The capabilities of models now surpass human levels in many benchmarks. The next major shifts may be subtler, or simply less obviously spectacular. Connect with us: Exponential View Nathan Benaich…

Azeem Azhar's Exponential View

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AI in 2025 – Infrastructure, investment & bottlenecks with Dylan Patel 51:13

20 weeks ago51:13

51:13

Dylan Patel, founder of SemiAnalysis and one of my go-to experts on semiconductors and data center infrastructure joins me to discuss AI in 2025. Several key themes emerged about where AI might be headed in 2025: 1/ Big Tech’s accelerating CapEx and market adjustments The hyperscalers are racing ahead in capital expenditure, with Microsoft’s annual outlay likely to surpass $80 billion (up from around $15 billion just five years ago). By mid-decade, total annual investments in AI-driven data centers could climb from around $150–200 billion today to $400–500 billion. While these expansions power more advanced models and services, such rapid spending raises questions for investors. Are shareholders ready for ongoing, multi-fold increases in data center build-outs? 2/ The competitive landscape and new infrastructure players The expected explosion in AI workloads is drawing in a wave of new specialized GPU cloud providers—names like CoreWeave, Niveus, Crusoe—each gunning to become the next vital utility layer of AI compute. Unlike the hyperscalers, these players tap different pools of capital, including real-estate-like finance and private credit, enabling them to ramp up aggressively. This dynamic threatens the established order and could squeeze margins as competition heats up. The market is starting to understand that. 3/ The semiconductor supply chain isn’t the only bottleneck We often talk about GPU shortages, but the real sticking point is broader infrastructural complexity. Yes, Nvidia and TSMC can ramp up chip supply. But even if you have enough high-end silicon, you still need power infrastructure and grid connectivity. Building multi-gigawatt data centers in the US—each the size of a utility-scale power plant—is now firmly on the agenda. In some states, data centers already consume 30% of the grid’s electricity. By 2027, AI data centers alone could account for 10% or more of total US electricity consumption, straining America’s aging infrastructure. 4/ Commoditization of models and margin pressure A year ago, advanced language models were scarce and expensive. Today, open-source variants like Llama 3.1 are driving commoditization at speed, slicing away the profit margins of plain-vanilla model-serving. If your model doesn’t outperform the best open source, you’re forced to compete on price—and that’s a race to the bottom. Currently, only a handful of players (OpenAI and Anthropic among them) enjoy meaningful margins. As models proliferate, value will increasingly flow to those offering distinctive tools, integrating closely into enterprise workflows and locking in switching costs. 5/ Into 2025: exponential curves and new market norms Despite these challenges—soaring costs, stalled infrastructure build-outs, margin erosion—Dylan is confident that exponential scaling will continue. The sector’s appetite for GPUs, specialized chips and next-gen data centers appears insatiable. We could easily see record-breaking fundraising rounds north of $10 billion for private AI ventures—funded by sovereign wealth funds and other capital pools that have barely scratched the surface of their capacity to invest in AI infrastructure. There’s also a very tangible productivity angle. AI coding assistants continue to reduce the cost of software development. Some software companies could be looking at 20–30% staff reductions in these technical teams as high-level coding becomes automated. This shift, still in its early days, will have profound downstream effects on the entire software ecosystem. Find us: Exponential View SemiAnalysis…

Azeem Azhar's Exponential View

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Exponential Growth: Why AI, Solar & Batteries Will Keep Getting Cheaper | Exponential View & Cleaning Up Podcast 1:10:29

23 weeks ago1:10:29

1:10:29

As we race towards a future powered by AI and data centres, how will the insatiable demand for energy impact the environment? With the richest companies ploughing billions into energy generation, might there be some unexpected upsides for the climate transition? And can exponential technologies address the climate crisis on a finite planet? Cleaning Up host Michael Liebreich sits down with Azeem Azhar, founder of Exponential View, to explore the complex relationship between exponential growth, climate change, and the societal implications of transformative technologies. Michael and Azeem delve into the promises and pitfalls of a future shaped by the rapid advancements in renewable energy, battery storage, and artificial intelligence. This podcast was originally published on Cleaning Up .…

Azeem Azhar's Exponential View

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The Science of Making Truthful AI 43:47

1 year ago43:47

43:47

Artificial Intelligence is on every business leader’s agenda. How do we make sense of the fast-moving new developments in AI over the past year? Azeem Azhar returns to bring clarity to leaders who face a complicated information landscape. This week, Azeem speaks with Richard Socher , CEO and founder of You.com, an AI chatbot search engine at the forefront of truthful and verifiable AI. They explore approaches to building AI systems that are both truthful and verifiable. The conversation sheds light on the critical breakthroughs in AI, the technical challenges of ensuring AI’s reliability, and Socher’s vision for the future of search. They also discuss: How AI’s future is tied to advancements in natural language processing. The role of scientific rigor in large language models’ current and future developments. The founding of You.com and its mission to revolutionize search. Predictions for the next big breakthroughs in AI. @azeem @RichardSocher Further resources: Why AI is humanity’s mirror — and what we can learn from it (Richard Socher, TED, 2023) The Promise of AI with Fei-Fei Li (Azeem Azhar, Exponential View, 2020) AI is the real web3 (Azeem Azhar, Exponential View, 2023)…

Azeem Azhar's Exponential View

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Azeem’s 2024 Trends: AI, Energy, and Decentralization 20:52

1 year ago20:52

20:52

As 2024 begins, leaders are facing increasing uncertainty and a host of difficult decisions. Azeem Azhar returns to bring clarity amid a complicated information landscape, with his analysis of 12 core themes that will shape the year ahead, including AI adoption, geopolitics, decentralization, the energy transition, and more. The discussion specifically touches on: What will drive widespread corporate adoption of AI. How to think about the emergence of new business models around AI. What you need to know about the new wave of decentralization technologies. How leaders should think about an electrified world of stable and declining power prices. @azeem Further resources: The Horizon for 2024: The Biggest Questions on the Horizon (Azeem Azhar, 2024) Notes from a Ski Resort, 2024 Edition (Azeem Azhar, 2024)…

Azeem Azhar's Exponential View

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The Challenges and Benefits of Generative AI in Health Care 35:18

1 year ago35:18

35:18

Artificial Intelligence is on every business leader’s agenda. How do we make sense of the fast-moving new developments in AI over the past year? Azeem Azhar returns to bring clarity to leaders who face a complicated information landscape. Generative AI has a lot to offer health care professionals and medical scientists. This week, Azeem speaks with renowned cardiologist, scientist, and author Eric Topol about the change he’s observed among his colleagues in the last two years, as generative AI developments have accelerated in medicine. They discuss: The challenges and benefits of AI in health care. The pros and cons of different open-source and closed-source models for health care use. The medical technology that has been even more transformative than AI in the past year. @azeem @erictopol Further resources: When AI Meets Medicine (Exponential View Podcast, 2019) Can AI Catch What Doctors Miss? (Eric Topol, TED, 2023)…

Azeem Azhar's Exponential View

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Managing AI’s Carbon Footprint 34:04

1 year ago34:04