Azeem Azhar
13 Aug 2026Lovable $400M | Corgi Investigation | Grok Bot | Investor Updates
Azeem Azhar: the State of the AI Economy report
Azeem Azhar of Exponential View joins the show with a gift from Greece and gives an overview of his team's State of the AI Economy research, estimating over $110B of AI spend in one 12-month period and $126B the following year—roughly a $20B/month run rate. He explains the split between lab spending, startup token spend, and mainstream business/consumer spending, and argues most companies are still 'in the paddling pool' of AI adoption with plans to spend more.
Azeem Azhar on China's AI Labs & the Open-Source Race
Azeem describes moving his OpenClaw agent from Claude Sonnet to DeepSeek to cut costs, but notes Sonnet's instruction-following still makes it noticeably sharper. He recounts his May trip to Chinese AI labs: the Minimax team's around-the-clock work culture, honesty about compute constraints, a culture where city mayors act as the real VCs (e.g., Wuhan for autonomous vehicles), and Z.ai's slides charting a path to ASI. He also reflects on how Chinese researchers' fluent 'scientific English' makes nuanced AGI/ASI discussions hard to translate.
Hyperscaler Capex, AI Revenues & SaaS Earnings
Azeem sizes the data-center buildout at $700-800B next year and $5-7T overall, noting hyperscaler AI revenues just exceeded annual depreciation ('from intensive care to high dependency') with revenues growing ~300% a year versus capex at 70-80%. He then explains why beaten-down SaaS stocks like Atlassian finally re-rated: analysts are lagging indicators, and MCP-driven per-transaction pricing eases 'SaaSpocalypse' fears (with a Datadog-style CFO cost-control caveat), while Lovable's $400M raise at a $13.3B valuation shows AI-native app builders disrupting traditional SaaS.
Unitree's IPO, China Robotics & the SpaceX Comparison
Azeem is skeptical of Unitree's 5,000x-oversubscribed consumer-driven IPO, preferring integrated AI-plus-hardware players like GalBot and Agibot, and arguing humanoids built separately from the underlying models are problematic. He compares the listing to a future SpaceX IPO, praising Elon's data-center relationships, giga-casting cost discipline and resilience, before the hosts thank him and plug his book 'Exponential: Order and Chaos in an Age of Accelerating Technology.'