The Age Of Intelligence

Olivier Touba: What would your digital twin say?

Olivier Toubia is a Columbia Business School professor working at the frontier of AI, marketing, consumer behaviour, and digital twins. This was recorded late last year but his arguments are relevant and clear: LLMs drive towards the average which means its hard to mimic the diversity of human existence.  * Digital twins are promising — but not ready. Synthetic consumers for research purposes (e.g. virtual focus groups) are fast and cheap, but Toubia’s research suggests they are still too biased and inconsistent to trust too far. Learn what happened when they compared digital and human twins' responses to the same questions. * Politics is the worst domain to deploy synthetic focus groups: The base model exerts a powerful pull. Twins often reflect the worldview of the model as much as the individual they are meant to represent, especially in politics, where performance is weakest. AI is too sensible - compared to humans it tends to be more moderate: in one study 45% of humans wanted to deport illegal immigrants and only 5% of digital twins agreed. * Synthetic personalities reflect a clear pro-tech bias. Twins tend to be more comfortable with algorithms, less concerned about privacy, and more trusting of technology than humans actually are. AI twins thinks AI is smarter than humans.... * Generative AI has entered its monetisation phase with advertising as the likely endgame Subscriptions and enterprise sales matter, but the bigger prize is becoming the interface for search, discovery, decision-making, and purchase. * Business adoption remains uneven but labour anxiety is rational Many pilots are failing to deliver meaningful returns; senior leaders are often enthusiastic, while middle managers and employees are more sceptical. * AI can be creative, but not at the edges. AI tools can recombine ideas - "its a fallacy to think that AI will never be able create new things". However, it still misses the diversity of lived experience that gives humans their edge. The push is towards the average. We usually worry about AI driving polarisation - Olivier's work shows that current LLM tools trend towards the opposite. Humans can provide the spikiness and AI the padding.  See omnystudio.com/listener [https://omnystudio.com/listener] for privacy information.

Its time to build! (European style): Cristina Caffarra

Cristina Caffarra is an eminent economist and veteran antitrust practitioner who has become a leading voice behind Eurostack — a grassroots, industry-led push to rebuild Europe’s digital infrastructure as a sovereignty and competitiveness play. She has a strong argument to make: * Europe is a “digital colony” — and it’s self-inflicted. US hyperscalers are excellent; Europe vacated the field through fragmentation, weak risk capital, and complacency. * The "kill switch" is a distraction; dependency is the disease. The real risk is gradual denial: deprecated features, constrained access, and strategic leverage — not a Hollywood blockbuster blackout. * Productivity is the core argument. Europe’s gap is investment per worker, especially into high-growth tech that diffuses across the whole economy. * Regulation can’t create an industry. Antitrust and platform rules “nibble at the corners”, take years, and leave the giants stronger — while absorbing all the political oxygen. * Europe chose theatre over building. “Taming Big Tech” became a substitute for the only question that mattered: where are Europe’s builders, customers, and scale-ups? * Demand is the lever, not more grants. Without customers, no stack survives — procurement and enterprise buying decisions are the flywheel. * Procurement should be the no-brainer. Every other major power has local preference norms; Europe’s non-discrimination logic is now being weaponised against European options. She notes that even the European Commission's own CIOs focuses on performance and efficiency alone.  * Private enterprise is the real swing voter. Public sector is ~20% of demand; the other 80% sits with CEOs and CIOs who complain about European weakness — and then buy American. * European tech can compete cost — but not ease of use. European components exist; what’s missing is end-to-end “peace of mind” and the glue between parts.  * Mercedes is the case study. They want sensitive AI loads (e.g. autonomous driving) not wholly dependent on US infrastructure — but need suppliers and buyers to co-design workable, integrated alternatives. * She argues that no one wants to “decouple” form the US — that’s a straw man. The practical goal is share: move European supply from <20% to something like 30–40% in a growing market. * This is wartime logic, not business-as-usual. Europe has surged before under pressure; Caffarra argues that its time to stop waiting for Brussels and to start acting like a superpower. She leaves us with a blunt challenge: will Europe keep buying convenience — or invest, through demand, in a tech stack that keeps its innovation future in its own hands? See omnystudio.com/listener [https://omnystudio.com/listener] for privacy information.

Sangeet Choudary: Who Learns Wins

Sangeet Choudary is the best-selling co-author of Platform Revolution and the author of the new book Reshuffle [https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DTKW6NQV]. He has advised CEOs at more than 40 Fortune 500 companies and is currently a Senior Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley. * The SaaS crash isn’t cyclical — it’s structural. AI is eroding seat-based pricing, collapsing product boundaries, and destroying the old logic of defensible SaaS moats. * AI doesn’t just change tasks — it rewrites value. Focusing on “automation vs augmentation” misses the point; AI reshapes whole systems of work, competition, and advantage. * Translation is the real superpower of AI. By collapsing the cost of translating across silos, AI enables coordination without standards, APIs, or shared workflows. * Moats built on customer understanding are dissolving. When users can no-code, extend, or bypass tools — and adjacent platforms can invade workflows — retention logic breaks. * The decisive divide is above vs below the algorithm. Those who design and own learning systems capture capital-like returns; those whose knowledge is absorbed become commoditised labour. * Platforms don’t just intermediate — they absorb learning. Campaign managers, drivers, and operators trained the systems that ultimately priced them out. * Firms must be re-designed, not AI-enabled. Automating existing workflows locks in obsolete constraints; the real prize is questioning why the workflow exists at all. * The future firm is modular — but selectively integrated. AI makes context exportable, pushing work outside the firm, while pulling learning-critical activities tightly inside. * In physical AI, learning beats scale. The advantage isn’t owning assets — it’s owning the feedback loops that reveal how complex systems actually behave (the Tesla lesson). * Nations compete on where learning compounds. The US bets on intelligence concentration, China on model commoditisation plus execution, India on open standards — while Europe risks playing defence in a power game. He leaves us with a lingering question: are you above or below the algorithm?     See omnystudio.com/listener [https://omnystudio.com/listener] for privacy information.

Helen Toner and Emelia Probasco: National Security in the Age of Intelligence

Helen Toner, whose decade of work on AI Safety came in to prominence when she was the OpenAI Board member who led the revolt against Sam Altman, and Emelia Probasco, who covers the national securty angles of AI both now work at the Centre for Security and Emerging Technology (CSET). They  join the podcast to discuss the security issues around AI with the conversation ranging from their take on the China / US race, the role of allies, alternative paths for the technology and the "AI Adulting Problem".  We discuss the challenges around AI as a dual use technology. As a general purpose technology it is impossible to control what happens next. This can cut both ways - drones optimised for warfare can deliver humanitarian aid with great precision.  The key is to keep talking - and we discuss the current state of diplomacy around AI, why the US needs allies and how the worriers need to better articulate their concerns if we want to solve them.  We also touched on the alternative - how AI is being deployed in the military, why the existing rules of war matter, the challenges of deploying AI in legacy organisations (and with legacy weapons systems).  Helen and Emelia bring real insight from working on some of the hardest problems from where national security meets the transformational power of AI.  See omnystudio.com/listener [https://omnystudio.com/listener] for privacy information.

Karen Hao: Rebel against the Empire

In this episode, we sit down with Karen Hao—award-winning journalist, MIT-trained engineer, TIME 100 AI honoree, and author of the best-seller Empire of AI—to unpack the power structures shaping today’s AI, business, and competition. She has a clear and punchy point of view. In our conversation we ask: - Is the Silicon Valley–Wall Street model the only way forward, or others can chart a better path? - Do paradigm shifts like AI inevitably create harmful externalities—hidden data workers, energy and water shortages—just as the Industrial Revolution created pollution and child labor? - Are today’s billion-dollar AI investments solving big problems—or just fuelling hype? - Are we consciously shaping AI—or sleepwalking in “a dream made in the Valley”? Karen argues that today’s AI giants act as modern empires: claiming resources that aren’t theirs, exploiting vulnerable labour, monopolizing knowledge, and sustaining themselves with a narrative of existential competition. She shows how many tools we use were born from subjective and often ad-hoc decisions—like scraping even the murkiest corners of the internet—despite harmful downstream effects. She is critical of current regulatory efforts, weakened by Big Tech lobbying and points to real alternatives. She warns of an inevitable financial bust—investments wildly outpacing business value. But her message is ultimately hopeful: beyond the Big Labs, smaller teams are building AI for healthcare and the environment, showing that another path is possible.  Her call to action is clear: we must not sleepwalk into a future shaped by a self-serviing AI elite. We need to collectively imagine alternatives, and build a more balanced future. As Karen claims, something better is achievable: "The shape of a technology is never inevitable: there are many, many human choices." Note: This podcasst was recorded as part of an INSEAD alumni webinar. Live questions were submitted by the audience.  Empire of AI book link. [https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/460331/empire-of-ai-by-hao-karen/9780241678923] See omnystudio.com/listener [https://omnystudio.com/listener] for privacy information.