Agency Redefined
Who can do what, where, now.
Leopold Aschenbrenner, formerly with OpenAI, writes in their article Situational Awareness: The Decade Ahead1, “You can see the future first in San Francisco.”
If that’s true today, will it still be true tomorrow?
Source: Leopold Aschenbrenner, “Situational Awareness: The Decade Ahead,” June 2024, available at situational-awareness.ai.
Superagency
Reid Hoffman’s upcoming book, Superagency: What Could Possibly Go Right with Our AI Future (digital release on 28 January 20252), explores AI’s transformative potential. Co-authored with Greg Beato, the book paints an optimistic vision of a future shaped by AI, where human ingenuity and advanced technology combine to create extraordinary outcomes. Hoffman’s message is clear: instead of fearing AI, we should harness its potential to personalize education, accelerate medical breakthroughs, and empower individuals to navigate complexity.
At its core, Superagency challenges conventional fears and makes the case for a future where AI increases individual agency and drives societal progress.
At first glance, this might seem hypothetical.
The book’s release coincides with a key moment in AI innovation - the arrival of NVIDIA’s Project Digits.
This intersection invites us to imagine a world of true super agency.
NVIDIA’s Project Digits: A Personal AI Revolution
This week at CES 2025, NVIDIA’s Jensen Huang announced Project Digits, a personal AI supercomputer priced at US$3,0003. This compact device, resembling a Mac Mini, delivers unprecedented computing power - equivalent to 1,000 times that of an average laptop. Powered by NVIDIA’s Grace Blackwell architecture and the GB10 Superchip, it can run AI models with up to 200 billion parameters, rivaling industry-leading systems like OpenAI’s GPT-4. Moreover, linking two units allows for processing models of up to 405 billion parameters.
Huang’s ambition is clear: to bring data centre-level AI computing to the desks of developers, researchers, and students worldwide.
Project Digits’ energy efficiency, enabled by NVIDIA’s collaboration with MediaTek, ensures high performance with minimal power consumption, using a standard electrical outlet. It is a device designed not only for its power but also for its accessibility - a move that democratizes AI research and innovation.
The Democratization of Agency
What makes Project Digits significant is its affordability and accessibility. At US$3,000, it is within reach of an estimated 41 to 82 million individuals globally4 - a small fraction of the world’s population, yet significant for developers, researchers, and students in high-income and middle-income economies. Institutions are also likely to adopt these systems, broadening their impact.
This shift marks a new era of distributed agency. By equipping individuals with tools of this magnitude, NVIDIA is lowering the barriers to entry for AI development. What could once only be achieved in expensive data centres is now possible on a desktop. As Huang described during his CES keynote, Project Digits is a tool for individuals to shape the future of AI, enabling them to tackle global challenges with unprecedented speed and scope.
It is worth noting that the current US$3,000 price is a launch point. As with most emerging technologies, prices are likely to decrease over time due to performance improvements, market competition, and expanded consumer options. As affordability improves, the reach and impact of personal AI supercomputers like Project Digits will only grow, enabling individuals and organisations worldwide to harness their transformative power and amplify their agency.
Amplified Ambition
With this leap in personal computing power comes the acceleration of ambition. When individuals and organizations can do more, they aspire to achieve more. Personal AI supercomputers like Project Digits empower people to set higher goals, innovate faster, and solve problems on a scale previously unimaginable.
“The greatest danger in times of turbulence is not the turbulence - it is to act
with yesterday’s logic.” – Peter Drucker
Ambitious goals could include:
A researcher studying rare genetic disorders could now run complex protein-folding simulations overnight that would have previously required months of queue time at a university computing center. Climate scientists could develop and test high-resolution weather models for their local regions, enabling more accurate prediction of extreme weather events. Medical imaging specialists could train AI models on their own datasets to detect early signs of diseases specific to their patient populations.
For creative professionals, Project Digits opens new frontiers. Film studios could render complex CGI sequences locally instead of relying on expensive cloud services. Architects could generate and evaluate thousands of building designs optimized for energy efficiency and local climate conditions. Game developers could create more sophisticated NPCs with context-aware behaviors and natural language interactions that adapt to individual players.
In education, professors could develop personalized learning models trained on their students’ work patterns and learning styles. Research students could iterate on their AI experiments in hours rather than weeks, accelerating the pace of academic discovery. Language preservation projects could create translation models for endangered languages using smaller, specialized datasets that weren’t previously viable for model training.
Globally, the replication of such capabilities across millions of users could redefine industries and address some of the world’s most pressing challenges. From researchers using AI to combat climate change to entrepreneurs developing scalable solutions in education and healthcare, the ripple effects are enormous.
The Global Perspective
Accelerated agency confirms a critical point - the most significant trends, technologies, threats, and opportunities increasingly originate far beyond where we live and work. Tomorrow’s breakthroughs are as likely to emerge from Nairobi, Bengaluru, Medellín, Ho Chi Minh City, or Accra as they are from traditional tech hubs. Cities in low- and middle-income countries are increasingly becoming hotbeds of innovation, driven by necessity and opportunity5.
This global distribution of agency creates a new dynamic for business leaders. To remain competitive and visionary, leaders must embrace a broader perspective. They need to see beyond their immediate surroundings, recognizing that the next big thing might be taking shape in a place they’ve never visited.
Agency in 2025: The Opportunity Ahead
As tools like Project Digits become more accessible, the potential for distributed innovation grows exponentially. This democratization of AI amplifies individual capabilities and also fosters a more interconnected and ambitious global community.
The challenge for business leaders is to harness this momentum. How can they leverage the collective imagination and ingenuity enabled by AI to drive sustainable growth, tackle systemic challenges, and achieve sustained success? The answer lies in embracing this accelerated agency - to see the world as a playground of possibilities rather than a set of limitations.
In 2025, with the launch of Superagency by Reid Hoffman, the theme of agency will likely become prominent. It’s worth rememembering that agency isn’t just about individual power - it’s about collective action on a global scale. Leaders who embrace this perspective will shape the future of their organizations and also drive meaningful progress for society as a whole.
The future is being created here, there, everywhere.
When we see how the future is being created, we can shift what we do to shape the world.
It's Impossible! Yet it happened.
Breaking Boundaries: Designing for Opportunity, Not Location
The estimate that approximately 0.5% to 1% of the global population (around 41 to 82 million people) could afford NVIDIA Project Digits at its US$3,000 price point is based on the following considerations: global income inequality, the target market (developers, researchers, and students), and the relatively high cost of the device for a personal AI supercomputer. This calculation incorporates factors such as purchasing power disparities, the appeal to tech enthusiasts and well-funded institutions, and the expectation of broader accessibility as prices decrease over time due to market competition and technological advancements. Population data was drawn from Worldometers (2025 global population estimate: 8.2 billion, available at https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/) and the UN\u2019s population projections (available at https://www.un.org/en/UN-projects-world-population-to-peak-within-this-century).