Welcome to Exponential View, the show where I explore how exponential technologies such as AI are reshaping our future. I’ve been studying AI and exponential technologies at the frontier for over ten years.

Each week, I share some of my analysis or speak with an expert guest to make light of a particular topic.

To keep up with the Exponential transition, subscribe to this channel or to my newsletter:

https://www.exponentialview.co/

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Last week Jensen Huang shared the numbers from NVIDIA’s order book: AI compute demand has grown a millionfold in two years. Much GTC coverage focused 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.

In this week’s podcast, I cover:

(1:20) NVIDIA's $1 trillion order book

(1:56) OpenClaw: our era's web browser

(7:54) Training vs Inference: how AI is changing

(12:50) Pre-fill vs. decode: the technical split

(18:06) The Harness: why OpenClaw changes everything

(18:59) The engine is useless without a car

(22:21) From 100M to 870M tokens per day

(24:29) Meet my agent R Mini Arnold's team

(26:16) AI focus group simulations at $10–50 a run

(29:36) Jensen's self-interest (and why he's still right)

(33:07) AI governance: token budgets don't belong with IT

(35:07) From training economy to inference economy


Read my essay "Magnitudes of Intelligence" on Substack: https://www.exponentialview.co/p/the-hundred-million-token-day
Access the solar supercyle model here: https://www.exponentialview.co/p/solar-supercycle

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Where to find me:

Exponential View newsletter: https://www.exponentialview.co/

Website: https://www.azeemazhar.com/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/azeem/

Twitter/X: https://x.com/azeem

Production by EPIIPLUS1.

Production and research: Baba Films, Chantal Smith, Marija Gavrilov.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Welcome to Exponential View, the show where I explore how exponential technologies such as AI are reshaping our future. I've been studying AI and exponential technologies at the frontier for over ten years.

Each week, I share some of my analysis or speak with an expert guest to make light of a particular topic.

To keep up with the Exponential transition, subscribe to this channel or to my newsletter: https://www.exponentialview.co

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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. I cover:

(01:16) Why I was wrong about Apple

(02:40) What's behind the Mac Mini shortage

(04:07) China goes OpenClaw crazy

(06:28) Perplexity builds on a Mac Mini

(07:12) The edge case for Apple

(09:05) Apple Moat 1: hardware

(11:31) Apple Moat 2: privacy

(15:47) The K problem: when good enough beats genius

(18:08) Privacy, sovereignty & the diary problem

Read my old position on Apple at Substack: https://www.exponentialview.co/p/ev-515

For a practical guide my OpenClaw stack, click here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCG3dFRF3ek

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Where to find me:

Exponential View newsletter: https://www.exponentialview.co/

Website: https://www.azeemazhar.com/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/azeem/

Twitter/X: https://x.com/azeem

Production by EPIIPLUS1.

Production and research: Baba Films, Chantal Smith, Marija Gavrilov.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Welcome to Exponential View, the show where I explore how exponential technologies such as AI are reshaping our future. I've been studying AI and exponential technologies at the frontier for over ten years.

Each week, I share some of my analysis or speak with an expert guest to make light of a particular topic.

To keep up with the Exponential transition, subscribe to this channel or to my newsletter: https://www.exponentialview.co/
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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 everything else. Knowing where to draw that line turns out to be the hardest and most important question.

I covered:

00:00 - Is AI worsening our thinking?

02:35 - Ezra Klein on AI and the death of original thought

04:02 - Cognitive offloading vs cognitive surrender

09:20 - Signal detection at scale

11:06 - Why I use several AI personas to scan for different insights

13:37 - AI tells me what NOT to think about

16:25 - The value of quietness

19:07 - Small notebooks, small ideas

20:01 - Writing reveals what you don't yet know

23:24 - The golden thread

25:20 - Speaking drafts aloud

28:05 - How I stress-test my arguments before publishing

29:35 - Using AI to stress-test my own house views

31:44 - Stylometer: my AI style and grammar tool

33:10 - Did AI make the thinking better?

For more on this week’s topics, subscribe to my newsletter https://www.exponentialview.co/

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Where to find me:

Exponential View newsletter: https://www.exponentialview.co/

Website: https://www.azeemazhar.com/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/azhar/

Twitter/X: https://x.com/azeem

Production by EPIIPLUS1

Production and research: Baba Films, Chantal Smith, Marija Gavrilov.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.