Azeem Azhar's Exponential View

Our society has become increasingly reliant on data, but its value is not accessible to all. Of the 16 billion terabytes of data created globally in 2016, only 1% was analyzed. Among other discrepancies, the growing data monopolies concentrate power over certain technologies such as artificial intelligence precluding their positive impact on society.

Trent McConaghy, AI researcher and the founder of the decentralized data exchange, Ocean Protocol, is aiming to solve this by enabling individuals and organizations to share, monetize, and access data.

In this conversation, Trent and Azeem Azhar discuss:

• The real-world impact of deep learning and error reduction, and why we have not yet fully leveraged data’s learning potential.
• Early use cases of successful data exchange in mining and autonomous driving.
• Drawing distinctions between human rights and tradable property, should ownership of personal data be protected as a human right?

Further Reading:

• “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Data” (2009)
• “The Web3 Data Economy Towards a Transparent, Permissionless Ecosystem to Spread the Benefits of AI” (Nov. 22, 2018)
• “Major Automakers, Startups, Technology Companies and Others Launch Mobility Open Blockchain Initiative (MOBI)” (May 4, 2018)
• “Is It Your Data” (Jan. 22, 2019)
• “Should we treat data as labor? Let’s open up the discussion” (Feb. 21, 2018)
• “We need to own our data as a human right — and be compensated for it” (Jan. 21, 2019)
• “This AI Company Is The Future Of Gold Exploration” (February, 2019)
• Open Data Impact Map

Trent McConaghy @trentmc0
Azeem Azhar @azeem
www.exponentialview.co

Nathan Benaich, Founder and General Partner of Air Street Capital, joins me to discuss AI in 2025. From runaway consumer adoption to evolving enterprise moats, from still-elusive AI-driven drug breakthroughs to the renewed vigour in robotics, several core themes stood out.

1. Frontier models & AI at scale

In 2024, we witnessed the astonishing growth of frontier models and their deployment on a massive scale. OpenAI’s GPT-4 and GPT-4 o1, Anthropic’s Claude and Google’s Gemini have all demonstrated that being “at the frontier” is increasingly the price of admission.

2. Consumers, voice and infinite worlds

On the consumer side, we have reason to believe 2025 will be the year of AI-enabled workflows that feel truly natural. Voice, multimodality and integration into daily routines—like transcribing my morning thoughts during a commute—are becoming routine.

3. Accelerating science & drug discovery

While AI accelerates lab automation and data analysis—improving reproducibility and speeding up processes—the promised “AI-designed blockbuster drug” is still in the pipeline. Clinical timelines and regulatory hurdles do not compress easily.

4. Geopolitics, funding and the sovereign question

As training costs skyrocket and models require unimaginable scale, questions mount... Who funds these massive compute requirements? Will nation-states view these labs as strategic assets, akin to telecoms or chipmakers?

5. From explosive capability gains to refined utility

We’ve grown numb to what was once astonishing—perfect speech synthesis, infinite text generation, zero-shot coding. The capabilities of models now surpass human levels in many benchmarks. The next major shifts may be subtler, or simply less obviously spectacular.

Connect with us:

• Exponential View
• Nathan Benaich
  

Scott Santens is a writer and an advocate for universal basic income. His articles have been featured in TechCrunch, the Boston Globe, and Politico, among other places. Scott has coauthored two books: What Do We Do About Inequality? and Surviving the Machine Age: Intelligent Technology and the Transformation of Human Work. He also moderates the sub-Reddit /r/BasicIncome.

Scott talks about why he believes “citizen’s salary” is a necessary measure for our societies to deal with tech unemployment by providing an independent income floor. He finds it paradoxical that we keep on developing technology to help us do more, while also being afraid of tech taking over our jobs. In these circumstances, he notes, a new model of ownership needs to be implemented, with everyone starting from the same point.

For further reading on Scott’s work and UBI, visit:

• FAQ about Universal Basic Income
• Basic Income sub-Reddit
• Basic Income Earth Network

Marko Ahtisaari is the CEO and cofounder of The Sync Project, a collaborative venture of scientists, musicians, technologists, and patients, working toward developing functional music that responds to each individual body and serves as precision medicine.

Marko is also a director’s fellow at the MIT Media Lab, working on the Open Music Initiative to develop a new distributed ledger system to identify and compensate music rights holders and creators. He was the executive vice president of design at Nokia and worked on award-winning N9 and Lumia products. His startup Dopplr was acquired by Nokia.

Marko presents ideas and undergoing projects born out of the vision that in the near future people will use non-drug modalities to heal, enhance well-being, and assist in therapy. He guides us through the recent experiment Unwind.ai, which uses your heart rate to select the tracks that will bring you peace of mind — at least for 5 minutes.

For further reading on the Sync Project and music in medicine, please see:

• Understanding Music as Precision Medicine
• Sync Music Bot (cutting-edge music recommendation technology)
• UNWIND.AI (using biometric data to generate music for sleep)
• Studies in neuroscience reveal music’s effect on the reward system
• Using music to manage pain
• Using music to support physical activity and sports training
• More on music recommendation/analysis technology in general

Matthew Taylor is the chief executive of the Royal Society of Arts, a UK organization committed to finding practical solutions to societal problems. Before leading the RSA, Matthew was the chief adviser on political strategy to former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair.

Azeem and Matthew Taylor discuss the well-being economy, the meaning of good work in an age of automation, and the state of democracy.

www.exponentialview.co