Azeem Azhar

Some of the foundation model companies have gone off and done surveys, but the numbers that come back are meaningless.

What does it mean to say you use AI at work?

What does it mean to say you're...

using it for educational tasks.

It's really hard to break that apart and get any sense of it.

But if you talk to your friends or you look at your own logs and histories, you will get a sense of just how diverse those tasks are and how many of them are in a way brand new to your behavior.

So these are exactly the sorts of things that you'd expect to see from a general purpose technology.

And with an exponential technology that is bringing the costs down so rapidly and bringing the capabilities up so fast, it's no surprise that we are leaning into it and inventing all sorts of these new behaviors.

A quick note.

If you want to support us in bringing more of these conversations to the world, please consider subscribing to the show.

The Exponential Age is...

is quite a tricky one to navigate because you've got these general purpose technologies, but they're rapidly improving.

And at the best of times, general purpose technologies have broad and diffuse effects across our economies.

And the speed that exponential ones bring makes it just much harder to understand what second and third order effects might be.

But

But AI is just one of those technologies, and it's certainly moving faster, both in terms of progress and applications, diffusion and uptake, than anything that I had studied previously.

But there are some common patterns.

So a couple of common patterns.

It'll open and expand markets, number one.

And number two, we don't necessarily know where the profits are going to lie, and that makes it hard for those who have to deploy capital.