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Azeem Azhar's Exponential View

Entering the trillion-agent economy (ft. Rohit Krishnan)

Azeem Azhar's Exponential View

EPIIPLUS 1 Ltd / Azeem Azhar

Ai, Exponential, Robots, News, Artificial Intelligence, Investing, Future, Azeem Azhar, Technology, Review, Economy, Intelligence, Science, Exponential View, Business, Tech News, Work, Economics, Gpt, Openai, It, Automation, Society, Government

5.01.1K Ratings

🗓️ 19 February 2026

⏱️ 53 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

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 actually look like — and what economic infrastructure it will need.

Transcript

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0:00.0

On Wednesday, Rohit, I fell just shy of 100 million tokens.

0:06.4

You know, it is intelligence on a tab.

0:08.8

Computer used to be a job that people did.

0:11.6

There used to be like a room full of people who were computers.

0:14.0

They would compute things.

0:15.2

And now it's machine.

0:16.3

The next up is analyst.

0:17.6

I think it's not unreasonable to think that we will have hundreds of millions

0:21.4

and then billions and then tens of billions and hundreds of billions of agentic systems

0:26.3

running around the internet as automated infrastructure in a few years' time. In that world,

0:33.0

that what do you think an agent meaningfully is? I called it homoagenticus. Suddenly the world becomes one where

0:39.5

agents are the ones that are interacting mostly with each other. Going to websites for us or like

0:44.0

doing transactions for us using your credit card. All of these things are the things that agents need

0:47.8

to be doing. Which means like when you have a trillion of them, we need different coordination

0:51.8

guardrails for them to be able to do tasks for each other.

0:54.8

Agents will need some mechanism to exchange value between themselves, where it won't so much be

1:01.5

about transaction costs and communication costs between employees, but it will be about security

1:06.6

and verifiability costs. I get LLMs to review all of my essays, and I throw away almost all of the comments that it gives me. I can see that it pushes it towards a mean. It's like, oh, you were too colloquial here. Take it out. It's like, no. Like, without that, you know, it'll read like the back of a breakfast cereal. Armini Arnold actually moves house this weekend into a new Mac Mini. It can see my lights

1:30.4

and I can turn them on as I walk to my studio from the house and a few other things. The hardest

1:34.7

leaps for my wife was, I don't need to think about what I need to ask it before I ask it. It's like,

1:40.4

don't worry about it. Just talk to it like, you know, it's your analyst and it'll just do things for you.

1:44.8

Or your husband.

...

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