Can Insurance Make AI Systems Safer? — Daniel Reti & Luca Ambroz

In this episode, Dewi speaks with Daniel and Luca, two quantitative analysts who left Bank of America to build Exona Labs — a startup helping insurance companies price AI risks. Daniel shares his path from applied maths in Hungary through finance to AI safety, while Luca talks about measuring the Higgs boson at CERN before pivoting to the corporate world. They explain the moment AI coding assistants made them realize this technology was genuinely transformative, the historical parallel of steam boiler insurance (and why AI moves faster), and how Blue Dot's incubator helped them build risk modelling tools that incentivize safer AI deployment through market mechanisms. This conversation digs into why insurance could be faster than regulation, how financial incentives can drive safety at scale, and what it takes to build a startup in an industry that still prices everything by counting past failures. Check out Daniel and Luca's new AI Insurance Startup here - https://exonalab.com/ Want to take one of our courses? Check them out here — https://bluedot.org/courses