Super Data Science: ML & AI Podcast with Jon Krohn · Jon Krohn

955: Nested Learning, Spatial Intelligence and the AI Trends of 2026, with Sadie St. Lawrence

·1 hr 9 min·3 clips

The same level of AI capability costs 100 times less today than it did a year ago.

1. Super Data Science Podcast episode 955 focuses on Sadie St. Lawrence’s 2026 AI trend predictions and a review of her 2025 calls. 2. Jon Krohn hosts the conversation, and Sadie St. Lawrence appears as a returning guest, futurist, and founder of the Human Machine Collaboration Institute. 3. The episode asks what intelligence becoming dramatically cheaper means for AI products, work, and business models in 2026. 4. Jon opens with the claim that the same AI capability that cost $100 a year ago now costs $1. 5. Sadie connects that price collapse to her broader view that the future is closer than people think. 6. Jon and Sadie revisit her 2025 prediction that agentic AI would dominate the year. 7. Sadie says conference audiences are tired of hearing about agentic AI and want something new for 2026. 8. Jon adds a reliability example, saying AI systems are moving from roughly 50% success on multi-hour tasks toward longer tasks by the end of 2026. 9. Sadie says everyday-device integration showed up in AirPods real-time translation, CES refrigerators, ovens, and a toothbrush from Costco. 10. She says Apple still disappoints her in this area, despite widespread AI branding across consumer products. 11. The conversation turns to AI-driven science, where Jon mentions a paper about 39% more materials-science discoveries before it was redacted. 12. Sadie also points to DeepMind’s genome work as compressing roughly 800 years of material discovery into a few steps. 13. Sadie says enterprise AI monetization matters because many projects stay stuck in MVPs and do not reach production. 14. She argues that the same exponential curve will make eight-hour tasks and 99% reliability increasingly relevant for computer science and machine learning. 15. Jon and Sadie discuss the labor market shift from data science toward AI engineering and prompting skills. 16. Sadie says the old data scientist role split into MLOps, ML engineering, and related roles before being rebranded again around AI. 17. Later, Sadie names nano banana as her wow moment because she used it to redesign a room with a tile floor in image generation. 18. Jon’s wow moment comes from a workshop demo where Ed Donner used a crew of four software agents to build a working trading platform over a lunch break. 19. The episode’s tone is conversational and reflective, with repeated tangents into history, product choices, and personal experience. 20. Listeners who follow AI product strategy, enterprise adoption, and job-market shifts will get the most from this episode; listeners wanting a tightly scoped technical tutorial may skip it.

As heard by us

A brisk year-starting AI recap that pairs 2025 hindsight with 2026 forecasts.

Jon Krohn and Sadie St. Lawrence open the year with a fifth straight annual check-in on the five biggest AI trends for 2026, after looking back at how the 2025 calls held up.

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Why you'd press play

You want the 2026 AI call after a year of steep price drops.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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