State of AI 2024: Frontier Models, AI Geopolitics and The Robotics Renaissance | Nathan Benaich, Founder, Air Street Capital
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Who is Nathan Benaich and what is the State of AI report?
Welcome back to the Mad Podcast. Today my guest is Nathan Banesh, founder of Airstreet Capital, a VC firm focused on AI investing. Every year since 2018, Nathan has been publishing a fantastic report called The State of AI. And in this episode, we talked about the 2024 edition, which just came out. And we covered anything from foundation models to applications.
You will likely have similar quality of intelligence for much lower price and much smaller models. We predicted that there would be this blockbuster app that was like fully written in a generative fashion
to the geopolitics of AI and AI regulation.
China was kind of not in this fight twelve months ago and now is very much in it. And they've been actually a very lively contributor to open source.
Please enjoy this great conversation with Nathan. Nathan, welcome. Good to be here. We are going to talk about your uh annual labor of love, the state of AI report, which uh came out uh on October tenth uh this year, uh which is a Gigantic effort, super impressive, uh which uh I look forward to every year and very much enjoyed this year. Uh maybe uh as as a word of intro, so people may have seen the report, but like who's the the man behind the behind the report? What what's your what's your uh story?
Yeah, yeah. So um my day job is I run a fund called Air Street Capital. I invest uh I guess like you in early stage companies uh with a focus on AI. Um I set it up by myself about four years ago, still run it as a solo GP. I invest in North America and Europe and have kind of diverse interests that are oftentimes reflected in the report in editorial capacity. Um, I think the main reason why like I enjoy making the report and like the kind of original uh reason why we did it is because I think making contributions to the, you know, ecosystem that you work in and work with is Just like a nice way to to be a value added contributor. Um and I think in our space in AI, everything is like so deeply technical and a lot of the breakthroughs do arise from, you know, universities or industry labs that I think to be as smart as you can be around where progress is going, you have to understand where it comes from and, you know, how it works.
And uh and then the second thing is that there's so many different participants to the industry, whether it's, you know, now politics, but big companies uh of all different sizes and um and sort of sophistications of AI and universities and et cetera, that all these different players are experts in their field, but they don't sort of have the time to really pop their head over their parapet and like perceive what's happening in their space. Um and the third one was just I was like a fan of Mary Meeker's um uh you know internet trends report a couple of years ago and it's kind of sad when she stopped making it. Um and I just felt like there should probably be something like this for AI. Like I don't think anybody enjoys the sort of
you know, kind of consulting like buy my product thing. And so we wanted to make something kind of rough around the edges where it like literally looks like someone's behind the desk, like typing things out and like messing up the formatting and stuff. Um and that was reflective of like progress and took an opinionated view. that was hopefully sufficiently good that if it landed on the desk of like the CEO of an AI company, they would think that their work was represented uh properly. Um, but then if it hit the desk of somebody in policy that they could actually digest what was going on.
And you've been doing this from inception, right? Because you started Air Street Capital in twenty eighteen and the first report was two thousand eighteen.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. There's no correlation between that. It like looks good post facto, but
It's not a a vision of uh V C plus content, uh plus media. A lot of a lot of things
just kinda come across 'cause I I just feel like it's a good idea and like no I'm like no one's doing it and so we should just try. Yeah. And then things like that.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
Who is Nathan Benaich and what is the State of AI report?
0:00–5:46
2
What does the “vibe shift” in AI mean for the industry?
5:46–20:34
3
How have foundation models evolved and what is their current state?
20:34–38:40
4
Why are AI‑driven consumer apps expected to dominate the App Store?
38:40–51:38
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