Exponential View

Hi, Hereā€™s the latest roundup of our data signals across AI, energy & markets. Every week, we share the latest updates on the state of the AI economy based on our own latest research and tracking. More models have shipped since we published our State of the AI Economy report in June. At the time, we highlighted that a frontier model is a rapidly depreciating asset. This remains true even at the highest GPQA Diamond grades, where the pricing power of a new model quickly vanishes.

Good morning! What are the conditions under which AI systems could undergo recursive self-improvement (RSI) ā€” and how long might that last? Cards on the table, Iā€™m not wildly excited by the theory of unending accelerating recursive self-improvement for the simple theoretical issue of control and alignment. But I also think itā€™s not likely for practical and theoretical reasons. Now philosopher, Toby Ord, has done the heavy lifting for me.

Hi all, Here’s our Monday roundup of data signals across AI, energy & markets. Enjoy! Every week, we will share the latest updates on the state of the AI economy based on our own latest research and tracking. In our latest inference token update, the share of open-weight tokens has doubled in the last twelve months. While we are approaching a 1:1 closed-to-open token ratio, the number of closed-weight tokens grew sevenfold over the same period. See ourState of the AI Economy 2026 report for more.

Good morning! We are looking for an outstanding economist to join us as an AI Economy Research Fellow. If you know someone we should speak to, send them our way. A few months ago, we (alongside Rohit Krishnan) looked at whether AI is immune to groupthink. The answer was no. Blending several modelsā€™ answers kept about a quarter of the good ideas that had come from a single model.

The petard was a sixteenth-century explosive charge. An attacking engineer would carry it to a castle gate, attach it, light the fuse and scramble for cover. It was a tricky business. The charges were temperamental, their fuses particularly so, and the installer might blow himself up.

Is AI a bubble? Not yet. Our updated dashboard tracking the investment wave currently has no gauges in the red, two in amber, and the rest in healthy green (just). Since our last update, AI revenues have continued to rise, reaching $126 billion over the last twelve months as of July. We also experienced a jumpy market, which led to a severe correction in semiconductor stocks, somewhat cooling public valuations.

Exponential View is appointing its first Research Fellow. We are looking for an economist who can connect frontier economic thinking to messy, real-world evidence and reach useful judgments with the foresight Exponential View is renowned for. The Fellow will investigate how AI is changing economic value, work, firms and markets. The questions may include but are not limited to: How should AI companies, infrastructure and capabilities be valued from first principles?

Hi all, Here’s our Monday roundup of data signals across AI, energy & markets. Enjoy! Every week, we will share the latest updates on the state of the AI economy based on our own latest research and tracking. Since our report in June, revenues have continued to grow, with this July sitting three times higher year-over-year. The annualized run-rate is now over $210 billion. See ourState of the AI Economy 2026 report for more.

Good morning from London. We are looking for an outstanding economist to join us as an AI Economy Research Fellow. If you know someone we should speak to, send them our way. Cheers Amazon spent some $1.8 million on a Claude project that ran for five months. A senior employee said: ā€œItā€™s difficult to figure out how much anything [AI-related] costsā€. We had a similar experience with R Mini Arnold, my OpenClaw agent.

Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat are leaving Google after more than a quarter-century, as you know. Outside the industry, the pair may not be well-known, but theirs was “the friendship that made Google huge.” Jeff and Sanjay are the reason why billions of us have been able to use Google over the past 20 years. Their work on distributed systems, in particular, is why the search engine could handle decades of growth. “Sanjay and I sped up Google Search by 10% today,” Dean once told his daughter.