Joshua Tan: Incubating Networked Systems and Autonomous Orgs | Intelligence at the Frontier 2026

Sat, May 2, 2026, 12:00 AM

AI has become roughly 1,250 times more effective over the past six years. Organizations haven't kept up. Joshua Tan thinks that's the next frontier. Joshua, co-founder and research director at Metagov and lead at Stanford's Open Lab, argues that as AI agents grow more capable, the organizations coordinating them need to evolve too. He introduces the concept of autonomous organizations — systems like the Facebook newsfeed or agent-run code repositories that operate through algorithmic logic no single person fully controls. DAOs were an early attempt at this, but their rigidity made them slow to change. What comes next is something more adaptive, more sub-symbolic, and harder to govern. His proposal: a startup incubator model for autonomous organizations, where new governance structures are launched as live experiments and learned from in real time. Speaker: Joshua Tan (Metagov / Stanford Open Lab) This session was part of Intelligence at the Frontier, held March 14–15, 2026, at Frontier Tower in San Francisco. Learn more at https://www.fundingthecommons.io Note: This recording was captured with technical limitations on Day 1. We apologize for any audio quality issues and appreciate your patience.