Exponential View

Hi all, Here’s our short Monday roundup of signals to kick off your week. Another scaling law? ByteDance researchers found that newer AI models learn on the job1 about twice as fast as models from just three months earlier. Execs talk down job cuts. The share of CEOs expecting significant headcount cuts from AI fell from 46% in January 2025 to just 20% in May 2026.2 AI’s audience splits.

ā€œWith so much hype around the tech, your no-nonsense unbiased assesment is essential.ā€ ā€” RB, a paying member Roberto Serrano, a professor at Brown, suspected his economics class was relying on ChatGPT to do their exams. He made the final paper a closed-book exam, and scores for 56 of his 59 students collapsed (by as much as 100%). Kudos to the two students who seem to work unaided. This is a problem of incentives. The students appear to value the high score rather than mastering the subject.

Hi all, Here’s our short Monday roundup of data signals across AI, energy and markets: A GPU wave is ahead of us. More than 95% of the Grace-Blackwell GPUs have not yet been deployed, even though the chip has been shipping since December 2024.1 (h/t Air Street Press) Freelance hunting. Fable 5 now completes 16% of real freelance projects at a quality just as good as that of human professionals, according to the Remote Labor Index. This is about double the previous best2. David vs Goliath.

“Always an excellent perspective on emerging systems and their impact across the human landscape.” — Neill K., a paying subscriber Our friends at Ramp and Revelio Labs released fresh data on AI jobs impact, based on more than 21,000 US firms. They find that heavy adopters grow headcount faster, not slower. These firms increased employment by about 10% over two years after adopting AI. Entry-level roles grew even faster, at 12%.

An Exponential View Report · June 2026 The State of the AI Economy For the first time, we've reconstructed the AI economy from the bottom up, capturing every real dollar of customer demand, no double-counting. By Azeem Azhar, William Gildea, Hannah Petrovic PhD, Nathan Warren & Marija Gavrilov The top line The AI economy is bigger and faster than any technology wave before it, yet still small enough to be early. It's (just) covering the infrastructure bill.

Hi all, Here’s our Monday roundup of data signals across AI, energy and markets. Enjoy! 🔮 The state of the AI economy Azeem Azhar, William Gildea, and 3 others · Jun 25 First, a chart from our inaugural state of the AI economy report. AI quarterly revenues are now exceeding the quarterly AI capex depreciation expense, but have not yet covered cumulative historic depreciation — let alone the additional headroom needed for a healthy margin. China’s young guns.

Hi, Om Malik died on Wednesday. He was one of tech’s truest voices, as a journalist, a founder, an investor, a questioner and a photographer. He understood, before most, that technology is a human endeavor, not just an engineering one. Over the past 15 years, I’d seek him out regularly on my trips to the Bay Area. He will be greatly missed. Azeem We published The State of the AI Economy report this week.

The generative AI economy has generated $110 billion in sales over the past 12 months. It is growing fast. On an annualized basis, the revenue run rate exceeds $175 billion. These numbers took us several months to construct, and as far as we know, it’s the first bottom-up, deduplicated measure of consumer and enterprise AI spending across the full stack. We are releasing this research today in our first The State of the AI Economyreport. The supply side of the AI market is well-understood.

Hi all, Happy Sunday. GenAI drives almost 2% of traffic to Walmart and Target; home and electronics categories lead. A quick show of hands, please: Here’s Sunday edition #579. A working paper by Harvard Business School’s Rembrand Koning and INSEAD’s Hyunjin Kim studies how AI-native startups1 are different to non-AI startups. At similar funding and growth, AI natives are 25% smaller; they have more engineers, denser expertise and fewer managers.