In episode 104 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Nathan Benaich.

Nathan is Founder and General Partner at Air Street Capital, a VC firm focused on investing in AI-first technology and life sciences companies. Nathan runs a number of communities focused on AI including the Research and Applied AI Summit and leads Spinout.fyi to improve the creation of university spinouts. Nathan co-authors the State of AI Report.

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Outline:

* (00:00) Intro

* (02:00) Updates in Nathan World — Air Street’s second fund, spinouts,

* (07:30) Events: Research and Applied AI Summit, State of AI Report launches

* (09:50) The State of AI: main messages, the increasing role of subject matter experts

* Research

* (14:13) Open and closed-source

* (17:55) Benchmarking and evaluation, small/large models and industry verticals

* (21:10) “Vibes” in LLM evaluation

* (24:00) Codegen models, personalized AI, curriculum learning

* (26:20) The exhaustion of human-generated data, lukewarm content, synthetic data

* (29:50) Opportunities for AI applications in the natural sciences

* (35:15) Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback and alternatives

* (38:30) Industry

* (39:00) ChatGPT and productivity

* (42:37) General app wars, ChatGPT competitors

* (45:50) Compute—demand, supply, competition

* (50:55) Export controls and geopolitics

* (54:45) Startup funding and compute spend

* (59:15) Politics

* (59:40) Calls for regulation, regulatory divergence

* (1:04:40) AI safety

* (1:07:30) Nathan’s perspective on regulatory approaches

* (1:12:30) The UK’s early access to frontier models, standards setting, regulation difficulties

* (1:17:20) Jailbreaking, constitutional AI, robustness

* (1:20:50) Predictions!

* (1:25:00) Generative AI misuse in elections and politics (and, this prediction coming true in Bangladesh)

* (1:26:50) Progress on AI governance

* (1:30:30) European dynamism

* (1:35:08) Outro

Links:

* Nathan’s homepage and Twitter

* The 2023 State of AI Report

* Bringing Dynamism to European Defense

* A prediction coming true: How AI is disrupting Bangladesh’s election

* Air Street Capital is hiring a full-time Community Lead!

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