Azeem Azhar's Exponential View

Broadcasting live from Paris, I tackle three massive technology stories that are reshaping our digital future. From Apple's stunning interface redesign to the collapse of traditional search advertising, and Sam Altman's vision of an AI singularity that's already begun - this episode captures the tectonic shifts happening in tech right now.

Transcribed - Published: 18 June 2025

This week, I'm speaking with Kevin Weil, Chief Product Officer at OpenAI, who is steering product development at what might be the world's most important company right now.

Transcribed - Published: 10 June 2025

Economist and polymath Tyler Cowen challenges Silicon Valley's optimistic projections about AI-driven economic growth. We explore what could slow down AI's economic impact, despite its remarkable capabilities – and where humans find the new normal amidst major shifts.

Transcribed - Published: 4 June 2025

Thomas Dohmke, CEO of GitHub, joins Azeem to explore how AI is fundamentally transforming software development.

Transcribed - Published: 28 May 2025

Aaron Levie, CEO & co-founder of Box, joins Azeem Azhar to explore how an “AI-first” mindset is reshaping every layer of Box – from product road-maps to pricing – and what that teaches the rest of us about building faster, smarter organisations.

Transcribed - Published: 21 May 2025

Lennart Heim, a researcher and information scientist at RAND Corporation, joins Azeem Azhar to unpack a provocative claim: China is catching up with US AI capabilities, but it doesn't matter.

Transcribed - Published: 14 May 2025

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.

Transcribed - Published: 7 May 2025

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.

Transcribed - Published: 30 April 2025

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.

Transcribed - Published: 23 April 2025

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.

Transcribed - Published: 16 April 2025

Azeem Azhar welcomes Packy McCormick, founder and investor at Not Boring, to discuss the current tech landscape – reflections on Web3, why bits and atoms are cool again and how AI and energy are reshaping the world as we know it.

Transcribed - Published: 10 April 2025

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.

Transcribed - Published: 1 April 2025

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.

Transcribed - Published: 1 April 2025

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.

Transcribed - Published: 19 March 2025

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.

Transcribed - Published: 2 January 2025

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.

Transcribed - Published: 26 December 2024

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) The hyperscalers are racing ahead in capital expenditure, (2) The expected explosion in AI workloads is drawing in a wave of new specialized GPU cloud providers, (3) By 2027, AI data centers alone could account for 10% or more of total US electricity consumption, straining America’s aging infrastructure, (4) Open-source variants like Llama 3.1 are driving commoditization at speed, slicing away the profit margins of plain-vanilla model-serving.

Transcribed - Published: 23 December 2024

Transcribed - Published: 28 November 2024

Azeem Azhar is joined by 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.

Transcribed - Published: 7 February 2024

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.

Transcribed - Published: 31 January 2024

Generative AI has a lot to offer health care professionals and medical scientists. This week, host Azeem Azhar 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.

Transcribed - Published: 17 January 2024

In this conversation, Azeem Azhar speaks with climate lead at Hugging Face, Sasha Luccioni, to shed light on the environmental footprint of AI, the pressing issues in AI deployment, and the potential paths to a more ethical and sustainable AI future.

Transcribed - Published: 10 January 2024

AI is enabling new strides in autonomous driving. In this episode, Azeem Azhar joins the co-founder and CEO of Wayve, Alex Kendall, to explore how the AI revolution is opening new market opportunities for the auto industry. Wayve is a UK-based start-up that makes AI technology for self-driving vehicles.

Transcribed - Published: 27 December 2023

Organizations across the world have been grappling with the opportunities and challenges of generative AI. In this episode, Azeem Azhar joins AI pioneer and entrepreneur Andrew Ng to debate whether we’re at an inflection point in the AI revolution.

Transcribed - Published: 20 December 2023

Azeem Azhar speaks with Aravind Srinivas, the co-founder and CEO of Perplexity.ai, about the looming challenges in AI research and product development, such as user-centric design and the importance of open-source models.

Transcribed - Published: 13 December 2023

The upheaval at OpenAI sent shockwaves through the tech world. Karen Hao, a contributing writer who covers AI at The Atlantic, joins Azeem Azhar to break down the ideologies and power struggles within OpenAI and their implications for the development of artificial intelligence. She also explains how these internal conflicts reflect broader challenges in AI development and governance.

Transcribed - Published: 6 December 2023

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is on every business leader’s agenda. How do you ensure the AI systems you deploy are harmless and trustworthy? This month, Azeem Azhar picks some of his favorite conversations with leading AI safety experts to help you break through the noise. Today’s pick is Azeem’s 2020 conversation with the pioneering AI scientist Fei-Fei Li, professor of computer science at Stanford University and the founding co-director of Stanford’s Human-Centered AI Institute.

Transcribed - Published: 29 November 2023

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is on every business leader’s agenda. How do you ensure the AI systems you deploy are harmless and trustworthy? This month, Azeem picks some of his favorite conversations with leading AI safety experts to help you break through the noise. Today’s pick is Azeem’s 2021 conversation with veteran AI scientist Murray Shanahan, professor of cognitive robotics at Imperial College London and principal scientist at DeepMind.

Transcribed - Published: 22 November 2023

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is on every business leader’s agenda. How do you ensure the AI systems you deploy are harmless and trustworthy? This month, Azeem picks some of his favorite conversations with leading AI safety experts to help you break through the noise. Today’s pick is Azeem’s conversation with Joanna Bryson, a leading expert on the questions of AI governance and the impact of technology on human cooperation.

Transcribed - Published: 15 November 2023

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is on every business leader’s agenda. How do you ensure the AI systems you deploy are harmless and trustworthy? This month, Azeem picks some of his favorite conversations with leading AI safety experts to help you break through the noise. Today’s pick is Azeem’s conversation with Meredith Whittaker, president of the Signal Foundation. Meredith is a co-founder and chief advisor of the AI Now Institute, an independent research group looking at the social impact of artificial intelligence.

Transcribed - Published: 8 November 2023

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is on every business leader’s agenda. How do you ensure the AI systems you deploy are harmless and trustworthy? This month, Azeem picks some of his favorite conversations with leading AI safety experts to help you break through the noise. Today’s pick is Azeem’s conversation with Dr. Rumman Chowdhury, a pioneer in the field of applied algorithmic ethics. She runs Parity Consulting, the Parity Responsible Innovation Fund, and she’s a Responsible AI Fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University.

Transcribed - Published: 1 November 2023

As exponential technologies like artificial intelligence march on, the ability to make future-proof decisions is all the more important for leaders. Azeem Azhar’s new TV show and podcast, Exponentially with Azeem Azhar, goes beyond mainstream conversations about technology to explore new ways of thinking about our collective future. Guests include: Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, and Vinod Khosla.

Transcribed - Published: 7 September 2023

In his brief commentary, Azeem Azhar discusses the increasing complexity and capabilities of large language models (LLMs) and the transformative potential they hold.

Transcribed - Published: 26 May 2023

In his brief commentary, Azeem Azhar lays out why the future of the Web is underpinned by AI, and what this means for the traditional business model of the internet.

Transcribed - Published: 24 May 2023

In his brief commentary, Azeem Azhar shares his outlook on how artificial intelligence will change the labor market, drawing on research published by Goldman Sachs.

Transcribed - Published: 19 May 2023

Drawing on Carlota Perez's framework, Azeem Azhar considers whether large language models, such as OpenAI's GPT-4, will drive a paradigm shift across our economies.

Transcribed - Published: 17 May 2023

Artificial intelligence (AI) is dominating the headlines, but it’s not a new topic here on Exponential View. This week and next, Azeem Azhar shares his favorite conversations with AI pioneers. Their work and insights are more relevant than ever. Jürgen Schmidhuber is a recognized pioneer in the field of deep neural networks. His techniques form the basis of the modern AI systems used by billions of people daily on services like Google, Facebook, and the Apple iPhone. In 2019, Jürgen joined Azeem to discuss the next thirty years of artificial intelligence.

Transcribed - Published: 12 May 2023

Artificial intelligence (AI) is dominating the headlines, but it’s not a new topic here on Exponential View. Azeem Azhar shares his favorite conversations with AI experts. Their work and insights are more relevant than ever. Gary Marcus has a reputation for being a contrarian in the AI community. A neuroscientist, founder, and the author of Rebooting AI: Building Artificial Intelligence We Can Trust, Marcus has been a vocal critic of deep learning as the best way forward for AI. in 2019, he joined Azeem Azhar to discuss the alternatives for building better machine intelligence.

Transcribed - Published: 10 May 2023

Artificial intelligence (AI) is dominating the headlines, but it’s not a new topic here on Exponential View. This week and next, Azeem Azhar shares his favorite conversations with AI pioneers. Their work and insights are more relevant than ever. DeepMind’s co-founder and CEO, Demis Hassabis, joined Azeem in 2020 to explore his company's progression from gaming to accelerating scientific discovery. In 2023, DeepMind’s parent company Alphabet announced consolidation of its biggest research units, DeepMind and Google Brain, into a new division led by Demis.

Transcribed - Published: 5 May 2023

Artificial intelligence (AI) is dominating the headlines, but it’s not a new topic here on Exponential View. This week and next, Azeem Azhar shares his favorite conversations with AI pioneers. Their work and insights are more relevant than ever. OpenAI has stunned the world with the release of its language-generating AI, ChatGPT-4. In 2020, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman joined Azeem Azhar to reflect on the huge attention generated by the precursor to GPT-4 and what that could mean for the future research and development toward the creation of artificial general intelligence (AGI).

Transcribed - Published: 3 May 2023

After producing more than 160 episodes of Exponential View over the last six years, we’re taking a break to reflect on what we’ve learned and how the conversations we’ve hosted with leaders are changing our perspective on the future. While we percolate on the future of our podcast, we have a challenge for you: find all the phenomenal conversations we’ve hosted that you haven’t heard yet –and take alisten. (And please let us know which episodes helped you understand the world and your future!)

Transcribed - Published: 22 June 2022

This episode is a special introduction to Cold Call, another podcast from Harvard Business Review. Host Brian Kenny explores Shield AI’s work with the U.S. government to develop autonomous combat robots. Harvard Business School professor Mitch Weiss and Brandon Tseng, Shield AI’s CGO and co-founder, join Brian to discuss the challenges start-ups face in working with the public sector, and how investing in new ideas can enable entrepreneurs and governments to join forces to solve big problems.

Transcribed - Published: 15 June 2022

How do you talk about a product before anything like it exists? How do you guide the engineers building it and the marketing department who has to sell it? As co-creator of the iPod and iPhone, founder of the learning thermostat Nest, and with over 300 patents to his name, Tony Fadell is a serial entrepreneur who now focuses on investing. He tells Azeem Azhar how he uses opinion-based decision-making in his work, and why thinking like a product manager helps drive radical innovation.

Transcribed - Published: 8 June 2022

Carbon recycling takes our polluting carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide and, with the help of bacteria, turns them into ethanol. This can replace oil as the basis for carbon-based chemicals industries (e.g., fertilizers, plastics, clothing, health and beauty products, etc.), as well as offering sustainable fuel and animal feed. Jennifer Holmgren, CEO of LanzaTech, joins Azeem Azhar to share her vision of the future where greenhouse gases provide a core contribution to our sustainable life.

Transcribed - Published: 1 June 2022

Quantitative hedge funds, which rely on the work of employed mathematicians to develop complex trading strategies, are nothing new. But what if the mathematical work is outsourced to anyone, via a contest where the best predictions are rewarded with cryptocurrency? Richard Craib, founder of Numerai, explains to Azeem Azhar how his $70 million fund uses collective intelligence to perform well, despite the turmoil in the markets.

Transcribed - Published: 25 May 2022

Hydrogen has long been hyped as a fuel of the future. It’s abundant and its waste product is water. But it’s only recently that the availability of cheap renewable energy has allowed hydrogen to be produced competitively without the use of fossil fuels. Azeem Azhar speaks with Raffi Garabedian, co-founder and CEO of Electric Hydrogen, to explore the market opportunity and roadmap to wide adoption of “green hydrogen.”

Transcribed - Published: 18 May 2022

From The Jetsons to Back to the Future, flying cars are a staple of popular science fiction. German start-up Volocopter is working to turn that fiction into reality. Volocopter’s CEO Florian Reuter joins Azeem Azhar to explore how this radical new transport could transform our cities. They also break down the steps required to fulfill his vision of creating a door-to-door taxi service to rival Uber, via autonomous electric helicopters.

Transcribed - Published: 11 May 2022

Web3’s ability to attach value and incentives to almost every part of human activity has radical implications not only for how businesses engage with their customers, but also for how people can self-organize to drive social change. Web3 investor and analyst Packy McCormick makes the case, in conversation with Azeem Azhar, that an optimistic outlook rooted in market dynamics can enable new sustainable businesses that operate for the public good.

Transcribed - Published: 4 May 2022

As the gaming industry evolves to meet the challenges and opportunities of Web3, could it drive the mass adoption of crypto? Amy Wu leads investment, M&A, and gaming initiatives at cryptocurrency exchange FTX. She speaks with Azeem Azhar about how she evaluates crypto and Web3 as an investor, how she expects the gaming landscape to change in the next two years, and why the community that comes with NFT ownership is more important to her than potential profit.

Transcribed - Published: 27 April 2022

What is the metaverse, how will we use it, and why might the financial innovations of Web3 and blockchain technology be crucial to its success? Citi’s Ronit Ghose, one of the world’s foremost analysts of technology’s influence on financial innovation, returns to the podcast to discuss how money will function in the metaverse.

Transcribed - Published: 20 April 2022