Air Street Press
Episodes
Embodied AI is hitting its stride
09 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
A deep dive into world models, VLAMs, planning layers and real deployments from robotics companies Sereact and Wayve - and what comes next for embodie...
Black Forest Labs raises $300M to power frontier visual intelligence
01 Dec 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Today, I’m excited to unveil Air Street’s investment in Black Forest Labs as it announces a landmark funding milestone: a $300M Series B, followin...
State of AI: December 2025 newsletter
30 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Welcome to the latest issue of the State of AI, an editorialized newsletter that covers the key developments in AI policy, research, industry, and sta...
Our investment in Clove
25 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Building the first AI-native wealth institution for the mass affluent. Air Street Capital is investing in Clove’s $14M first financing round, backin...
Profluent raises $106M from Jeff Bezos
20 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Profluent builds frontier AI systems to unlock programmable biology. Now, Profluent has raised $106M led by Bezos Expeditions and Altimeter, with cont...
Introducing Profluent’s E1: Retrieval-augmentation for protein engineering
18 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Understanding how protein sequence encodes structure and function remains one of the central challenges in the life sciences. Yet most protein languag...
Poolside acquires Fern Labs
17 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Poolside is building one of the strongest full-stack AI companies in the world: energy, compute, models, and the infrastructure needed to run multi-ag...
State of AI: November 2025 newsletter
09 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Welcome to the latest issue of the State of AI, an editorialized newsletter formerly known as Guide to AI that covers the key developments in AI polic...
PARIMA’s first regulatory approval and another wake-up call for Europe
04 Nov 2025
Contributed by Lukas
PARIMA, a global leader in cultivated proteins, has become the first European company to secure regulatory approval for cultivated meat, with the Sing...
Gourmey acquires Vital Meat and forms PARIMA to industrialize of cultivated food
29 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Building a next-generation food company.
Poolside launches Project Horizon: 2GW of AI compute
27 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Integrating across compute, power, and intelligence.
The State of AI Report 2025
09 Oct 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The State of AI Report is the most widely read and trusted analysis of key developments in AI. Published annually since 2018, the open-access report...
Air Street Capital partners with NVIDIA on a £2B investment to accelerate the UK AI ecosystem
19 Sep 2025
Contributed by Lukas
AI is the ultimate force multiplier on technological progress in our digital, data-driven world. Our mission at Air Street Capital has always been to ...
Our investment in Delfa to fix clinical trials
26 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Clinical trials are the bottleneck of the pharmaceutical industry. They’re slow, expensive, and often fail, not only because the science frequently ...
Studio Atelico raises $5M to build the AI-first games studio
14 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
We’re excited to announce Air Street Capital’s lead investment in Studio Atelico’s $5M Seed round, alongside friends including Chris Ré (Stanfo...
Guide to AI: August 2025
03 Aug 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Welcome to the latest issue of your guide to AI, an editorialized newsletter covering the key developments in AI policy, research, industry, and start...
Profluent’s OpenCRISPR-1 published in Nature magazine
31 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Gene editing has the potential to solve fundamental challenges in agriculture, biotechnology and human health. CRISPR-based gene editors derived from ...
Defense AI company Delian Alliance Industries raises a $14M Series A
29 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
No one is coming to save Europe. We must build new primes here and now.
From move 37 to drug design
22 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
At this year’s RAAIS, Max Jaderberg of Isomorphic Labs delivered a talk that felt like the spiritual sequel to AlphaGo, only this time the board isn...
What comes after the peace dividend
17 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
At this year’s RAAIS, I joined Adam Satariano of the New York Times and Dimitrios Kottas, founder of Delian Alliance Industries and formerly Apple&#...
The frontiers of pixel generation
15 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
At RAAIS 2025, Andreas Blattmann, co-founder of Black Forest Labs, shared a deep dive into FLUX.1 Kontext, the startup’s newly released generative m...
Your guide to AI: July 2025
13 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
What you need to know in AI across geopolitics, big tech, hardware, research, models, datasets, financings and exits over the last 4 weeks.
ElevenLabs and the voice frontier
10 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Two years ago, I met Mati Staniszewski in a time before AI voices were good enough to fool anyone. ElevenLabs hadn’t launched yet, but their vision ...
2025 is the year of open-endedness
08 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
If 2016 was the year AI shocked the world by mastering Go, 2025 is shaping up to be the year they learn to innovate. This is the thesis of Ed Hughes, ...
AI, power, and politics at RAAIS 2025
03 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
At this year's RAAIS, we convened a panel with Lionel Laurent (Bloomberg), Chris Yiu (Meta), and Benedict Macon-Cooney (Tony Blair Institute) to disse...
Inside poolside’s path to AGI with Eiso Kant
01 Jul 2025
Contributed by Lukas
When poolside co-founder and CTO Eiso Kant stepped on stage at RAAIS 2025, he didn’t deliver the kind of slick, pre-baked keynote you might expect f...
State of AI Compute Index v4 (June 2025)
30 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Today, we release v4 of the You'll now find updated counts as of June 2025 for AI research papers using chips from NVIDIA, TPUs, Apple, Huawei, AM...
The AI rollup mirage and the risk of repeating old mistakes
27 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Across the technology investing world, investors are scaling their bets on a seductive thesis: Generative AI will transform low-margin service busines...
From research to production with Gemini and Paige Bailey
26 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
At this year’s RAAIS, Paige Bailey of Google DeepMind delivered her talk on AI research to production with interactive demos and a clear thesis: “...
Ten years of RAAIS. Day one in AI.
24 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
A decade is a familiar yardstick for measuring progress. In that time, we tend to expect steady, incremental change. Historically, meaningful change...
‘Sovereign AI’ is political branding. The reality is closer to digital colonialism
09 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
On AI factories, sovereign AI and what this means for national AI strategies. This article originally appeared on Fortune.com and can be read here f...
Guide to AI: June 2025
08 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
What you need to know in AI across geopolitics, big tech, hardware, research, models, datasets, financings and exits over the last 4 weeks.
Britain’s Defence Strategy: from diagnosis to delivery
02 Jun 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Our read of the UK's Ministry of Defence Strategic Defence Review 2025.
Research and Applied AI Summit: celebrating 10 years
30 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Bringing you the best of AI today and what’s coming tomorrow.
Hedera Dx raises €15M Series A
30 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Scaling on-site precision oncology infrastructure and real-world data.
Is the EU AI Act actually useful?
27 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Born pre-GPT-4 to shape the world of GPT-7.
What Wall Street didn't see coming
23 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Generative models, reinforcement learning, model efficiency, DeepMind and NVIDIA's impact weren't top of mind on Wall Street back in 2016...
The AI Factory Illusion
20 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Where politics and power meet AI. In recent months, a subtle but politically astute rebranding has propagated across the AI industry. Leading figures ...
Guide to AI: May 2025
11 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Welcome to the latest issue of your guide to AI, an editorialized newsletter covering the key developments in AI policy, research, industry, and start...
Delian Alliance Industries launches Interceptigon autonomous strike systems
08 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Expanding its product range as an emerging defense prime.
Biology has scaling laws too
06 May 2025
Contributed by Lukas
On Profluent’s launch of ProGen3, a new family of protein language models trained on over 3.4 billion protein sequences.
Your guide to AI: April 2025
06 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
What you need to know in AI across geopolitics, big tech, hardware, research, models, datasets, financings and exits over the last 4 weeks.
Our investment in Polar Mist
04 Apr 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Building European maritime supremacy.
Staking your ground
23 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Why startups should push an ambitious public-facing agenda from day one
Guide to AI: March 2025
02 Mar 2025
Contributed by Lukas
What you need to know in AI across geopolitics, big tech, hardware, research, models, datasets, financings and exits over the last 4 weeks.
See you in Berlin, Munich and Zurich!
18 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
We’re about to set off to bring Air Street AI meetups to Berlin on Thursday 20th Feb, Munich on Tuesday 25th Feb and Zurich on the 4th March. We foc...
Our investment in Fern Labs
09 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
$3M day one financing to build multi-agent systems for real-world problems.Learn more at www.fern-labs.ai
State of AI outtakes #2: embodied AI
04 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The State of AI Report aims to provide a comprehensive overview of everything you need to know across AI research, industry, politics, and safety. To ...
Guide to AI: January 2025
01 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Welcome to the latest issue of your guide to AI, an editorialized newsletter covering the key developments in AI policy, research, industry, and start...
UK defence and dynamism
26 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Air Street’s submission to the UK Strategic Defence Review. You can read more at press.airstreet.com and https://press.airstreet.com/p/uk-defence-a...
Vibe shifts: Microsoft and Google on AI
23 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The dawning AI-first era is creating clear winners and losers. Here we dive into the vibe shift of both Microsoft and Google in their work on AI.
91% of AI papers used NVIDIA in 2024
21 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Final 2024 statistics for AI chip usage across NVIDIA, Google, Huawei, Apple, AMD, Cerebras, Cambricon, Graphcore, Groq, SambaNova, and Intel Habana i...
Announcing Sereact's €25M Series A
20 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Scaling AI-first software for general purpose robotics.
AI-first biology: five years on
19 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Revisiting my 2019 lecture on why biology was experiencing its AI moment. Read more at press.airstreet.com and https://press.airstreet.com/p/ai-first-...
Vibe shifts: is AI still an existential risk?
17 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
The dawning AI-first era is creating clear winners and losers. We’re seeing giants of the past lose ground, while companies that few initially belie...
Profluent unveils Protein2PAM
14 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
New research from Profluent Bio validates the power of machine learning models to design bespoke biological systems at scale.
How not to build a drone
12 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
How the EU spent 16 years and €8 billion on a drone that may never fly. You can read the essay on press.airstreet.com at https://press.airstreet.co...
Air Street: 2024 year in review
10 Jan 2025
Contributed by Lukas
In the spirit of building in the open and holding ourselves accountable to our progress, here is our year in review for 2024. We cover Air Street, Air...
2024's greatest hits on Air Street Press
22 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
We share our best essays from 2024 on Air Street Press.
The AI energy wars will get worse before they get better
22 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
We dive into the AI energy wars, arguing that things will get worse before they get better. Read on for uranium, geopolitics, and why technical fixes...
Odyssey launches Explorer and welcomes Pixar founder to the Board
19 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The company's first generative world model and Pixar's co-founder, Ed Catmull, joins the Board and invests. Learn more at press.airstreet.com and ody...
Jeremy Kahn (Fortune) on Mastering AI
17 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Jeremy Kahn is the AI editor at Fortune and co-writes and edits Fortune’s Eye on AI newsletter. His book Mastering AI: A Survival Guide to Our Super...
State of AI outtakes #3: US politics
15 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The State of AI Report aims to provide a comprehensive overview of everything you need to know across AI research, industry, politics, and safety. To ...
Street talk #1 - 13 December 2024
13 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Every month, we produce the Guide to AI, an editorialized roundup covering geopolitics, hardware, start-ups, research, and fundraising. But s...
Being first is a moat
12 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
This week on Air Street Press - we’re looking at how speed, inertia, and friction impact AI-first start-ups. Why being first is a moat, taking examp...
Vibe shifts #1: Intel
10 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
How Intel lost its way in AI and comes tumbling down. On Air Street Press, we’re starting a new “vibe shifts” series, where we’ll look at some...
Guide to AI - December 2024
08 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Welcome to the latest issue of your guide to AI, an editorialized newsletter covering the key developments in AI policy, research, industry, and start...
Street talk #1 - 6 December 2024
07 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Every month, we produce the Guide to AI, an editorialized roundup covering geopolitics, hardware, start-ups, research, and fundraising. But so much...
Guide to AI - November 2024
06 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Welcome to the latest issue of your guide to AI, an editorialized newsletter covering the key developments in AI policy, research, industry, and start...
Bio-defense(less)?
05 Dec 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Biorisk is real, but we’re having the wrong debates. Could the AI-first bio tools we use to design life-saving vaccines also be used to evade the sc...
Reflections on Reflection
02 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
What a four day meltdown tells us about standards and scrutiny.
AI isn't the dotcom bubble
31 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Reflections on the State of AI Report, by Air Street Capital.
State of AI outtakes #1: scaling in defense
26 Oct 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The State of AI Report aims to provide a comprehensive overview of everything you need to know across AI research, industry, politics, and safety. To ...
Our investment in Patina Systems
17 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Shifting creative control from companies to people.
Good technology doesn’t speak for itself
15 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Why storytelling matters from inception to IPO and beyond.
Guide to AI - September 2024
01 Sep 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Welcome to the latest issue of your guide to AI, an editorialized newsletter covering the key developments in AI policy, research, industry, and start...
Rediscovering the UK's AI ambition
22 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
At the end of July, the UK Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology commissioned Matt Clifford, Chair of the Advanced Research and In...
Open-endedness is all we’ll need
15 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
On “Agentic AI”: This week, we’re asking how far along this road we are towards agentic AI, looking at some of the more promising research threa...
The cathedral and the bazaar
08 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Openness is not a strategy. Given our past advocacy for open source and skepticism of the ‘bigger is always better’ paradigm, we felt it worth ask...
Guide to AI - August 2024
04 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
While we work on the State of AI Report 2024, this summer edition covers our 8th Research and Applied AI Summit, held in London on 14 June.
Alchemy doesn’t scale: the economics of general intelligence
03 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Today we're asking if something approaching ‘general intelligence’ did begin to become available, does it invalidate our thesis that alchemy d...
The State of Chinese AI
01 Aug 2024
Contributed by Lukas
We dive into the SOTA from Chinese AI labs, the chip wars, sanctions, and loopholes.
The power of non-consensus
30 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
At Air Street, we search for ideas that are non-consensus today but have the potential to flip into being voted consensus by the market in a few years...
Copyright is the wrong hill to die on
25 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
The generative AI copyright wars took a new turn recently, when the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) announced that it was suing music...
Our investment into Odyssey
23 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Powering breakthrough visual storytelling with AI-first visual effects for Hollywood.
Guide to AI - July 2024
07 Jul 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Welcome to the latest issue of your guide to AI, an editorialized newsletter covering the key developments in AI policy, research, industry, and start...
Alchemy is all you need
11 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
There are also specific dynamics at play in the frontier model space that will likely prevent the market from correcting in the near future. These hav...
California’s AI bill was an avoidable disaster
06 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
What went wrong and how to prevent this from happening again.
Who remembers capsule networks?
04 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
We recently stumbled across the first ever Hacker News thread discussing Attention Is All You Need, the landmark paper that describes the transformer...
Your guide to AI: June 2024
02 Jun 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Guide to AI is an editorialized newsletter covering the key developments in AI policy, research, industry, and startups over the last month. Produced...
Chips all the way down
30 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
If foundation model economics is alchemy, what does that mean for hardware? Read more at press.airstreet.com
Dynamism and defense: six months on
28 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Revisiting our work on European readiness. It’s been close to six months since we published our report covering the challenges early-stage defens...
Gorillas, hype cycles, and my MIT EmTech talk
24 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Yesterday, I was the opening act at the MIT Tech Review EmTech Digital conference, where I spoke about how easy it is to miss step changes in AI progr...
Guide to AI - May 2024
05 May 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Guide to AI is an editorialized newsletter covering the key developments in AI policy, research, industry, and startups over the last month. Produced...
Introducing OpenCRISPR
24 Apr 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Profluent releases the world’s first open source AI-generated gene editor. You can read more in the New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/...
Data acquisition strategies for AI-first start-ups
22 Apr 2024
Contributed by Lukas
We dive into data acquisitions strategies for AI-first start-ups, including scraping, synthetic data, annotation, labelling, simulation, data marketpl...
Data is not the new oil - the peril of easy analogies
17 Apr 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In this piece we dive into why the analogy of "data is the new oil" is misleading. While it’s easy to brush this off, language matters, ...
Guide to AI - April 2024
07 Apr 2024
Contributed by Lukas
Welcome to the latest issue of your guide to AI, an editorialized newsletter covering the key developments in AI policy, research, industry, and start...
State of AI Report 2023 - SF Launch Talk - Nathan Benaich
13 Nov 2023
Contributed by Lukas
The State of AI Report (stateofai.com) analyses the most interesting developments in AI. We aim to trigger an informed conversation about the state of...
May 2021 - Your guide to AI
20 Jun 2021
Contributed by Lukas
An analysis of key AI developments in life science, geopolitics, big tech, hardware, research, and startups over the last four weeks. Follow us on:&nb...