Azeem Azhar's Exponential View

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.