State of AI with Nathan Benaich

Turning compute into intelligence Jul 09, 2026

Ted Moskovitz leads the Science of Scaling team at Anthropic, the group that works out how to turn compute into smarter models. In this RAAIS 2026 fireside with Air Street Capital's Nathan Benaich, he argues that frontier scaling has become an empirical science - a discipline for cutting uncertainty before spending the compute, not just buying more of it.

They get into the honest measure of AI acceleration (it's the counterfactual, not the benchmark), why a bigger model can be cheaper than splitting a task across small ones, whether a model can have research taste, and why safety and capability turn out to be the same axis. Plus the highest-leverage AI work to do in 2026, and why Anthropic's London office no longer feels like a satellite.

Recorded live at RAAIS 2026 in London.

Timestamp:

00:00 - Meet Ted Moskovitz and the Science of Scaling team

00:45 - What "the science of scaling" actually means

01:18 - Why scaling is a science, not an art

02:55 - Big labs vs the new "neo labs"

04:47 - How a research finding reaches the product

06:44 - What neuroscience carries over to AI (and what doesn't)

09:12 - "When AI builds itself" and the real measure of acceleration

10:33 - Trust, bypass mode, and the latest model jumps

11:42 - One big model vs many small ones

13:13 - Can a model have research taste?

15:39 - How safety research makes products better

17:36 - Emergent misalignment and the alignment race

19:14 - The highest-leverage AI work in 2026

20:21 - Inside Anthropic's London office

21:34 - Audience Q&A

Accelerating science and medicine with collaborative agents Jul 07, 2026

Vivek Natarajan, Research Lead for AI, science and medicine at Google DeepMind, on porting the self-play and search recipe behind AlphaGo into scientific and clinical reasoning. He walks through the AI co-scientist, which generates and debates hypotheses (one matched a decade of lab work in two days), and AMIE, a diagnostic dialogue system trained in simulation. Recorded at RAAIS 2026.

Chapters:
0:00 Welcome and introducing the AI co-scientist
1:41 Origins: Med-PaLM and the leap to hypothesis generation
5:10 System 1 versus System 2 thinking
6:34 Borrowing from AlphaGo: self-play and search
8:02 Generate, debate, evolve, and tournaments
11:47 Testing in real labs: Imperial College and antimicrobial resistance
13:29 Ten years in two days: Penadés reacts
15:44 More breakthroughs: leukemia, liver fibrosis and vorinostat
18:44 Plant immunity and protein design
20:09 Democratizing medicine: from Med-PaLM benchmarks
21:28 AMIE and the value of experience
23:12 Diagnosis, empathy and augmenting doctors
25:19 Real patients: the Beth Israel feasibility study
27:21 The co-clinician and the new triad of care
28:31 Audience Q&A

Beyond hill climbing: the path to superhuman scientific discovery Jul 02, 2026

At RAAIS 2026, Google DeepMind's Roberta Raileanu lays out a recipe for superhuman scientific discovery: AI systems that make groundbreaking discoveries across domains faster than people can. She walks through three ingredients - reinforcement learning to discover solutions where progress can be measured, open-ended divergent search to find new problems rather than climb known ones, and meta-learning to speed up discovery on problems no one has posed yet. The through-line: we can search for anything we can measure, but we still cannot measure what makes a discovery good. The bottleneck isn't the search. It's the signal.

Chapters:

00:00 - Introduction

00:51 - Defining superhuman scientific discovery

01:40 - The state of play: real progress, real plateau

06:58 - Ingredient one: discovery as reinforcement learning (Move 37, MLGym)

12:51 - Ingredient two: open-ended search and why greatness cannot be planned

18:30 - Rainbow Teaming: quality-diversity in practice

21:07 - Ingredient three: meta-learning the process of discovery (DiscoBench)

25:06 - The recipe, and the missing signal

Compute scarcity is an engineering problem Jun 30, 2026

Angelos Perivolaropoulos, a research engineer at ElevenLabs, on turning GPU scarcity into an inference-engineering problem: how to serve far more users on the same hardware, from batching to frontier architecture changes. Recorded at RAAIS 2026.

00:00 Introduction: ElevenLabs and the GPU squeeze

00:38 The question: how to scale when you can't add capacity

01:11 About Angelos: Scribe, speech-to-text and text-to-speech

01:56 GPU scarcity meets exponential demand

02:44 What a token actually costs: compute vs memory bandwidth

03:38 Prefill, decode and the KV cache

05:53 Batching and continuous batching (1 → 15 users/GPU)

08:37 FP8 quantization and quantize-aware training (→ 20)

11:29 Speculative decoding and multi-token prediction (→ 28)

15:13 Compressing the KV cache: TurboQuant and distillation (→ 70)

17:27 Frontier architectures: MLA, linear attention, state-space (→ 140)

20:39 Trade-offs: nothing is free

22:03 Q&A: papers vs production, token subsidies, TTS evals

State of AI: Compute Index 2026 Jun 29, 2026

The fifth State of AI Compute Index, in collaboration with Zeta Alpha. After a soft 2025, open AI research citations rebounded in 2026 - and NVIDIA still appears in ~91% of them. But the bigger story has moved off the page: Hopper is now the live installed base, Blackwell is mostly still pipeline, and frontier labs have started buying compute by the gigawatt. Nathan walks through what changed, what didn't, and why "GPU count" is becoming the wrong question.

Read the full piece and explore the live charts: https://www.stateof.ai/compute

Chapters

(00:00) What's new in v5 - citations, infrastructure, and gigawatts
(01:25) The breather was short: 2025 was a pause, not a rollover
(03:15) NVIDIA at ~91%, and the challengers - AMD, Huawei, Apple, TPU
(05:05) Inside NVIDIA: the handover from A100 to Hopper to Blackwell
(06:55) Startup silicon fragments - Groq, Cerebras, and the NVIDIA deal
(08:20) Hopper is the installed base: 460k deployed GPUs
(09:50) Blackwell is mostly pipeline: 80% still announced
(11:00) The demand side, measured in gigawatts
(12:15) Looking ahead, and why a GPU order isn't a cluster

Links:

Full index and charts: https://www.stateof.ai/compute
State of AI Report: https://www.stateof.ai
Air Street Press: https://press.airstreet.com

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STARK: Europe's next defense prime Jun 26, 2026

Air Street Capital backs Stark, the German multi-domain defense company, in its €500M led by Founders Fund and Sequoia.

In this episode, we discuss why cheap, software-defined unmanned systems in the air and at sea are the decisive lesson of Ukraine, and why we think co-founder and CEO Uwe Horstmann - a Project A GP and Bundeswehr reservist - is building the German neoprime Europe needs. Round led by Sequoia and Founders Fund, with the NATO Innovation Fund, Project A, and Air Street.

Links: stark-defence.com · full post at press.airstreet.com · YouTube version

How Revolut runs AI at scale Jun 25, 2026

Nikolay Donets, Head of Machine Learning Engineering at Revolut, on what it takes to run AI across more than 70 million customers, 200+ products, and 40+ countries - and why the hard part is no longer the model but the control plane around it: one gateway, a use-case-based governance layer, fallback chains, cost controls, and mandatory human oversight. Recorded at RAAIS 2026.

Chapters:

0:00 Intro - Revolut's AI at scale

1:24 The problem: classical ML and three libraries

2:54 The 2022 shift to API-served models

4:25 Four internal groups, four sets of needs

9:39 The decision: govern the use case, not the model

10:54 One central gateway vs. distributed libraries

14:10 Performance monitoring and drift detection

17:33 Lesson: fallback chains and the silently-dead model

20:02 Lesson: frontier vs. non-frontier cost (up to 8x)

20:48 Lesson: the platform is the org chart

22:59 Case study: from Rita to AIR

26:40 Voice support at scale

28:21 AIR, the in-app assistant

30:25 Q&A: human oversight, hallucinations, AI as judge

Odyssey raises $310M Series B for world models Jun 23, 2026

Odyssey just raised a $310M Series B at a $1.45B valuation to build world models. We wrote the first check into the seed back in July 2024, so in this episode we walk through what the team has actually built, and why it is more interesting than "AI video."

The short version: the scarce input for world models is experience. We get into how Odyssey is attacking that on three fronts. Starchild-1 gives world models sound, generating audio and video together in real time. Agora-1 is a learned game engine that drops four players into the same generated world, frame by frame. And PROWL lets a model hunt down its own failures and train on them.

Along the way we cover why a world model is not a video generator, what self-driving taught Oliver Cameron and Jeff Hawke, and where this goes next for robotics, agents, and simulation.

From Air Street Press. Read the full piece at press.airstreet.com.

Macrodata: robots need a data refinery Jun 22, 2026

Macrodata just raised a $4M pre-seed, led by Air Street, to build the data layer for robotics. The team behind FineWeb - Guilherme Penedo and Hynek Kydlíček - is bringing the discipline that made open LLMs work to messy physical-world robot data, through their open-source framework Refiner. We cover why physical AI is the next scaling paradigm, what Refiner does, and why we wrote the first check. From Air Street Press. Read the full piece at press.airstreet.com.

Europe cannot rent its way to AI sovereignty Jun 21, 2026

Last week the US government ordered Anthropic to switch off its most capable model for every foreign national on earth - four days after it launched. Nathan Benaich (founder of Air Street Capital, co-author of the State of AI Report) argues this exposed the AI risk almost no one is naming: not that the machines go rogue, but that everyone outside the US and China rents their intelligence from a landlord who can cut them off at will.

Adapted from remarks given at a private dinner this week, this is the case for why Europe can't regulate its way to sovereignty - and what government, industry, civil society and academia each need to do to build it instead.

Read the full essay and subscribe at press.airstreet.com.

Introducing Perceptic: the AI operating system for drug development Jun 21, 2026

Today we announce Perceptic — the AI operating system for biopharma built by the team behind Palantir's AIP and Life Sciences practice. Coming out of stealth with a $12M seed round from Air Street Capital, Accel and angels, Perceptic is already in production at CSL and multiple top-20 pharma companies.

In this piece, we unpack why the frontier labs are racing into life sciences — from Anthropic's recent Novartis CEO board appointment to OpenAI's 80-year-old Erdős proof — why pharma's next R&D leap needs an application layer the model labs can't build alone, and why this is the team to do it.

From discovery to design: in conversation with Ali Madani (Profluent) Jun 18, 2026

Over the past few weeks, it’s been hard to keep up with AI in biology. Profluent signed a $2.25B partnership with Eli Lilly on AI-designed gene editors, Verve put out striking base-editing data, CZ Biohub published new scaling results on protein models, and Isomorphic Labs pulled in another large raise.

I couldn’t think of anyone better to discuss this with than Ali Madani, the founder and CEO of Profluent. Profluent is an AI lab building frontier models to design proteins, with the goal of taking medicine from discovering molecules nature already made to designing the ones it didn’t. I first read Ali’s ProGen paper back in 2021, DMed him on then Twitter, and wrote the largest first check from Air Street Capital into the company at inception. Last month, Profluent announced a $2.25B deal with Eli Lilly, one of the largest to date between a frontier AI biology lab and big pharma.

We discuss the shift from discovery to design, why Profluent bet sequence-first while others went structure-first, the Lilly deal and large-scale DNA editing, fine-scale base editing, whether LLM-style scaling laws hold for proteins, and much more. You can either watch the interview in full here or on YouTube or read the transcript below.

Timestamp timeline

0:00 – Teaser: AI-designed molecules & the $2.25B Lilly deal
0:22 – Intros: Nathan Benaich (Air Street Capital) & Ali Madani (Profluent)
2:10 – What is Profluent, and why AI matters
5:45 – The landscape: readers vs. writers
7:45 – Profluent’s edge: 100B+ sequences and a wet lab
9:20 – OpenCRISPR and the exponential curve
12:55 – Why sequence beats structure
14:50 – The Eli Lilly deal and large gene insertion
16:20 – Fine-scale vs. large-scale editing
18:00 – Why it’s hard: the pre-AI era and the activity/specificity trade-off
20:45 – The Verve news, and scaling beyond one-offs
23:45 – Rare vs. common disease
26:10 – “What do you know that no one else does?”
27:40 – bio × AI is an undersaturated field
32:40 – When will a top-10 pharma be AI-first?
34:30 – Every molecule will be designed with AI

Timestamp

Alta Ares: the Iron Dome for autonomous air defense Jun 09, 2026

Air Street Capital has led Alta Ares’s $60M Series A.

In this episode, we explain why modern air defense is no longer just about intercepting threats, but doing so affordably, under jamming, and at the speed of battlefield adaptation. From Ukraine to the GCC, the old model of static shields and slow procurement is breaking. Alta Ares is building full-stack, AI-first air defense across software, sensors, command-and-control, and effectors. We believe it can become Europe’s Iron Dome for autonomous air defense.

Speech-to-text at conversation speed - Angelos Perivolaropoulos, ElevenLabs May 31, 2026

Angelos Perivolaropoulos leads speech-to-text research engineering at ElevenLabs across Scribe v2 and Scribe v2 Realtime. From AA-WER-leading batch transcription to 150ms real-time ASR, his work powers voice agents that can listen. A RAAIS 2026 speaker profile from Air Street Press.

From clip-makers to simulators: Odyssey's new world models May 19, 2026

Odyssey just shipped two new world models. Starchild-1 generates synchronized audio and video in real time at up to 24 fps, responding to streaming text, speech, or action input - the first real-time multimodal world model. Agora-1 puts up to four players into a shared simulated deathmatch on GoldenEye, with every frame each player sees generated on the fly while the model holds a shared world state across all participants.

We walk through both releases, the technical contributions behind them - a causal distillation pipeline from a bidirectional audio-video foundation model, an asynchronous KV-cache that handles the audio/video clock mismatch, and a decoupled simulation/rendering architecture for the multi-agent case - and why world models are a different shape of system than the clip-makers (Veo, Sora, Kling) that have dominated generative video for three years.

Odyssey is an Air Street Capital portfolio company. Jeff Hawke, Odyssey's co-founder and CTO, presents this work at RAAIS 2026 in London on June 12.

What it takes to ship AI under regulation - Nikolay Donets, Revolut May 17, 2026

Nikolay Donets leads ML Engineering at Revolut - the platform behind classical ML, fraud detection, time-series foundation models, and the ElevenLabs voice agents now serving customers in 30+ languages. A RAAIS 2026 speaker profile from Air Street Press.

State of AI · May 2026: cyber threshold, China parity, agents in real markets May 04, 2026

The April 2026 issue of State of AI from Air Street Press. The through-line: frontier AI moved from benchmark progress to operational capability across cyber, coding, agents, and capital formation.

Two frontier models cleared the UK AI Security Institute's 32-step end-to-end cyber-attack range in a single month, and AISI now estimates frontier cyber-offence is doubling every four months, down from seven months at the end of last year. We unpack what that means for the public cybersecurity stack.

Microsoft and OpenAI reset their 2019 deal to non-exclusive while keeping Microsoft as primary cloud partner. Anthropic stacked another $40B from Google, $5B from Amazon (with $100B of AWS spend), and chip deals with Google and Broadcom reportedly worth hundreds of billions, and is reportedly already raising again at a $900B valuation. Sam Altman's Axios essay sketched a "superintelligence New Deal" in explicit FDR terms.

Four Chinese labs (Z.ai, MiniMax, Moonshot, DeepSeek) released open-weights coding models inside a 12-day window, all landing at roughly the same capability ceiling as Claude Opus 4.6 and GPT-5.4 on agentic engineering. NIST's CAISI evaluation puts the aggregate gap closer to eight months. Both are true.

Anthropic's Project Deal ran a classified marketplace of 69 Claude agents and reported that stronger agents won, and the losers did not realise it. KellyBench (from Air Street portfolio company General Reasoning) watched every frontier model lose money on a Premier League betting season under non-stationarity. Ramp's procurement agents run 3× faster.

Plus eight research papers worth keeping (π0.7, the Ríos-García epistemology paper, ClawBench, the FAIR experience-replay paper, Agent-World, and others), April Investments (Ineffable Intelligence's $1.1B seed, Saronic, Cognition's $25B talks, Cursor's $50B+ talks), and Exits (Skild and Zebra, SpaceX and Cursor, OpenAI and Hiro, Cohere and Aleph Alpha, China blocking Meta's acquisition of Manus).

The next gene editor will be designed: Profluent + Lilly, $2.25B Apr 28, 2026

Profluent just announced a multi-program strategic partnership with Eli Lilly to develop AI-designed recombinases for genetic medicine — worth up to $2.25 billion in milestones, plus tiered royalties on net sales.

In this episode, Nathan unpacks why this deal matters far beyond the headline number. CRISPR taught us how to fix typos in the genome. The harder problem — and arguably the larger one — is editing at the kilobase scale: replacing whole paragraphs of DNA at a chosen genomic address. That's the route to therapies for the long tail of genetic disease driven by patient-level mutational heterogeneity, from cystic fibrosis to inherited hearing loss to retinal dystrophy.

Recombinases have always been the right class of enzyme for this job. They've also been stuck for decades because their targeting specificity is encoded directly in the protein structure, with no equivalent of CRISPR's modular guide RNA. That makes recombinases a near-perfect problem for foundation-model protein design — and it's exactly the bet Profluent has been building toward since their 2024 work designing novel Cas enzymes from scratch.

We cover: why kilobase-scale editing is the next frontier of genetic medicine; why recombinases were intractable until AI; how Profluent's foundation-model platform changes the picture; why Lilly is the right partner; and what the world looks like if you can name a genomic address and get a designed editor back.

State of AI Report: 2026 newsletter Apr 12, 2026

Episode Description

Welcome back to the State of AI! In this packed Q1 2026 episode, we dive into a quarter defined by unprecedented geopolitical friction, staggering capital concentration, and the rapidly blurring lines between commercial cloud infrastructure and national defense.

From a constitutional showdown between Anthropic and the Trump administration to the first-ever kinetic military strike on commercial data centers, the stakes for frontier AI have never been higher. Plus, we break down Anthropic’s explosive $19B ARR sprint, the escalating "distillation wars" with Chinese AI labs, and the historic $1.25 trillion merger between xAI and SpaceX.

If you want to understand where the frontier is heading next, you can't miss this one.

The Pentagon Standoff: Anthropic's $200M DOD contract, its refusal to drop safety guardrails, and the ensuing White House blacklist and federal lawsuit.
Cloud as a Theater of War: Breaking down the unprecedented Iranian drone strikes on AWS data centers in the Middle East.
Revenues Go Vertical: How Anthropic surged to a $19B ARR on the back of Claude Cowork, and OpenAI's massive $50B strategic alliance with Amazon.
The Model Treadmill: The rapid succession of new model releases, including Claude Sonnet 4.6, Gemini 3.1 Pro, and GPT-5.4.
The Distillation Wars: Inside the industrial-scale IP theft by Chinese labs cloning Claude, and the $2.5B NVIDIA GPU smuggling bust.
Safety Meets Reality: Sabotage risks, machine-speed SQL injections, and the UK AI Safety Institute's chilling findings on AI-assisted cyber attacks.
The Physical Layer & NIMBYism: The pushback against hyper-scale data centers and NVIDIA's complete exit from the China-compliant chip market.
Breakthrough Research: From zero-loss cache compression (TurboQuant) to an Australian entrepreneur curing his dog's cancer with AlphaFold.
Historic Mega-Deals: OpenAI's record-shattering $110B raise and xAI's trillion-dollar merger into SpaceX.

00:00 - Intro, Air Street Capital Epoch 3, & RAAIS 2026
01:28 - Geopolitics: Anthropic vs. The White House
03:12 - The Iran-AWS Conflict & Cloud Warfare
04:12 - Financials: Anthropic's $19B ARR & OpenAI's Hyperscaler Strategy
08:04 - The Model Treadmill: Claude Sonnet 4.6, Gemini 3.1 Pro, & GPT-5.4
08:56 - Open Source, IP Warfare, & the $2.5B Smuggling Ring
10:44 - AI Safety: Catastrophic Sabotage & The Sabotage Risk Report
13:20 - Data Center NIMBYism & The Contested Physical Layer
16:00 - Research Highlights: UK AISI, TurboQuant, & World Action Models
22:40 - Investments & Exits: OpenAI's $110B Round & The SpaceX/xAI Merger

Stay Connected:Love hearing what you’re up to! Hit reply to our newsletter or connect with us at the upcoming Air Street AI meetups in SF (April 28) and NYC (May 14). We are also actively recruiting Research Analysts for the State of AI Report—reach out if you live and breathe this space.

Produced by the State of AI & Air Street Press.

In This Episode, We Cover:Episode Timestamps (Estimated):

From catastrophic forgetting to frontier AI - Raia Hadsell, Google DeepMind Apr 02, 2026

Raia Hadsell is VP of Research at Google DeepMind, co-leading the Frontier AI unit. Her work spans Siamese nets and elastic weight consolidation to Gemini 2.5, RoboCat, and a UK AI Ambassador role. A RAAIS 2026 speaker profile from Air Street Press.

When agents need to keep learning - Roberta Raileanu, Google DeepMind Mar 30, 2026

Roberta Raileanu leads open-ended learning at Google DeepMind and co-authored Toolformer. From RIDE and AMIGo to Llama 3's tool use and MLGym, her research tackles what it takes for AI agents to keep acquiring skills. A RAAIS 2026 speaker profile from Air Street Press.

The data centre that orbits Earth - Philip Johnston, Starcloud Mar 29, 2026

Starcloud launched the first NVIDIA H100 GPU in space and trained the first LLM in orbit. CEO Philip Johnston explains why AI's energy bottleneck leads to orbital data centres — with 10x lower energy costs and 5 gigawatts of solar-powered compute on the roadmap. A RAAIS 2026 speaker profile from Air Street Press.

Air Street Capital announces $232M Fund III to back AI-first companies Mar 23, 2026

Air Street Capital has raised a third fund of $232M to back AI-first companies from the earliest stages. In this post, founder Nathan Benaich shares the conviction behind the firm - from his first investments in 2013 through to a portfolio that now includes Synthesia, Black Forest Labs, Wayve, Profluent, and poolside - and explains what Fund III enables for the most ambitious AI founders in Europe and North America.

Dreaming in latent space Feb 23, 2026

Sereact's Cortex 2.0 marks a shift in robotics from reactive control to predictive planning. In this episode, we examine how Sereact’s world-model architecture generates and scores imagined futures before acting, improving success rates and eliminating human intervention across complex warehouse tasks. We break down the benchmark results, the planning budget trade-off, and what it means to deploy world models in real industrial environments rather than simulation.

A letter from the Munich Security Conference Feb 22, 2026

European voters say they support higher defense spending. But when higher taxes or welfare cuts are mentioned, support collapses.

In this episode from Munich Security Conference 2026, we explore Europe’s fiscal test: Germany’s industrial flywheel, the reality of attrition warfare in Ukraine, the broken procurement model, and the tension between welfare and warfare.

Europe has demonstrated urgency. Now it must prove permanence.

State of AI: February 2026 newsletter Feb 09, 2026

In this episode of the State of AI, we break down the growing disconnect between rapid AI capability gains and collapsing software valuations, with nearly $300B wiped from public markets in weeks. We cover the agent shock triggered by Anthropic and OpenAI’s latest releases, why investors are repricing long-term SaaS revenues, and how AI sovereignty is fracturing across U.S. policy, state-level infrastructure pushback, and China’s accelerating model and talent pipeline. We also look at the security risks of computer-use agents, the infrastructure arms race spanning GPUs, memory, power, and data centers, and the latest research breakthroughs in autonomy, medicine, and reinforcement learning. Plus, a full rundown of the month’s largest AI financings, IPOs, and acquisitions.

Learning from execution: what Sereact Cortex 1.6 reveals about real-world robotics Feb 06, 2026

AI has progressed fastest where the world can be cleanly digitized, but robotics remains stubbornly hard. In this episode, we examine Sereact’s Cortex 1.6 and what its results reveal about learning from execution rather than sparse task outcomes. We discuss why execution-level learning improves robustness, recovery behavior, and learning efficiency in real-world robotic manipulation, and what this signals for the future of deployment-first robotics.

Air Street Capital: 2025 Year in Review Jan 25, 2026

In this episode, Air Street Capital shares its 2025 year in review. We cover what changed as AI moved into large-scale deployment, from the emergence of reasoning models and agents in production to the economics of frontier AI, energy constraints, and geopolitics.

We reflect on the year across our investment portfolio, angel investments, Air Street Press, the State of AI Report, and our global community, and look ahead to what it will take to deploy AI reliably and at scale in the years to come.

European Defense Entering 2026: Spending Is Up, Production Lags Jan 16, 2026

Europe sharply increased defense spending in 2025. But money alone does not produce weapons, stockpiles, or readiness.

In this episode, we examine why Europe’s defense build-up is running into industrial limits as it enters 2026. From procurement bottlenecks and factory capacity to Germany’s surge in orders and the slow pace of production, the challenge is no longer political will - it is execution.

This is a conversation about defense as an industrial system, and why turning budgets into battlefield capability is proving harder than expected.

Read more on press.airstreet.com

PARIMA’s first regulatory approval and another wake-up call for Europe Nov 04, 2025

PARIMA, a global leader in cultivated proteins, has become the first European company to secure regulatory approval for cultivated meat, with the Singapore Food Agency granting clearance for its cultivated chicken. It’s a historic moment for Europe’s food-tech sector, but one that’s unfolding thousands of miles away from home.

Gourmey acquires Vital Meat and forms PARIMA to industrialize of cultivated food Oct 29, 2025

Building a next-generation food company.

Poolside launches Project Horizon: 2GW of AI compute Oct 27, 2025

Integrating across compute, power, and intelligence.

The State of AI Report 2025 Oct 09, 2025

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 aims to spark informed conversation about the state of AI and what it means for the future. Produced by AI investor Nathan Benaich and Air Street Capital . State of AI Report 2025 is reviewed by leading AI practioners in industry and research.

Air Street Capital partners with NVIDIA on a £2B investment to accelerate the UK AI ecosystem Sep 19, 2025

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 back the most ambitious teams building breakthrough AI products that would have seemed like magic when I started investing over a decade ago. Key to these inflection points is the infrastructure that enables them: NVIDIA computing systems. I have long argued that NVIDIA is the defining company of the AI era, powering breakthroughs in science, industry, and national strategy. This is why I’m excited to share that we are deepening that story together: Air Street Capital is partnering with NVIDIA as part of its new £2B commitment to the UK AI ecosystem.

Our investment in Delfa to fix clinical trials Aug 26, 2025

Clinical trials are the bottleneck of the pharmaceutical industry. They’re slow, expensive, and often fail, not only because the science frequently doesn’t pan out, but because the ops don’t either.

That’s why we’re leading the $3.8M Seed round for Delfa. The team is building an AI-native operating system for clinical trials, starting with patient enrolment, the most broken part of the process.

Studio Atelico raises $5M to build the AI-first games studio Aug 14, 2025

We’re excited to announce Air Street Capital’s lead investment in Studio Atelico’s $5M Seed round, alongside friends including Chris Ré (Stanford), Thomas Wolf (Hugging Face), and Alex Ratner (Snorkel), to back a team on a mission to redefine the role of generative AI in games.

Guide to AI: August 2025 Aug 03, 2025

Welcome to the latest issue of your guide to AI, an editorialized newsletter covering the key developments in AI policy, research, industry, and start-ups over the last month.

Profluent’s OpenCRISPR-1 published in Nature magazine Jul 31, 2025

Gene editing has the potential to solve fundamental challenges in agriculture, biotechnology and human health. CRISPR-based gene editors derived from microorganisms, although powerful, often show notable functional tradeoffs when ported into non-native environments, such as human cells1. Artificial-intelligence-enabled design provides a powerful alternative with the potential to bypass evolutionary constraints and generate editors with optimal properties. Here, using large language models2 trained on biological diversity at scale, we demonstrate successful precision editing of the human genome with a programmable gene editor designed with artificial intelligence. To achieve this goal, we curated a dataset of more than 1 million CRISPR operons through systematic mining of 26 terabases of assembled genomes and metagenomes. We demonstrate the capacity of our models by generating 4.8× the number of protein clusters across CRISPR–Cas families found in nature and tailoring single-guide RNA sequences for Cas9-like effector proteins. Several of the generated gene editors show comparable or improved activity and specificity relative to SpCas9, the prototypical gene editing effector, while being 400 mutations away in sequence. Finally, we demonstrate that an artificial-intelligence-generated gene editor, denoted as OpenCRISPR-1, exhibits compatibility with base editing. We release OpenCRISPR-1 to facilitate broad, ethical use across research and commercial applications.

Defense AI company Delian Alliance Industries raises a $14M Series A Jul 29, 2025

No one is coming to save Europe. We must build new primes here and now.

From move 37 to drug design Jul 22, 2025

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’t 19×19, it’s the human body. The stakes? The future of drug discovery and human health.

Isomorphic Labs, the biotech spinout from DeepMind, has declared a radical mission: solving disease. It's not a metaphor. It’s a systems-level wager that the same kinds of models that cracked Go can crack biology. Not only by digitizing wet labs, but by encoding the dynamics of biomolecules into machine-learnable substrates. If AlphaGo marked the start of AI systems inventing strategies never before seen in human play, Isomorphic wants AI to invent medicines we’d never stumble across in the lab.

This is a moonshot, a bet that biology is information science, and machine learning is our best bet at learning its language.

What comes after the peace dividend Jul 17, 2025

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's Special Projects Group, for a candid conversation about one of the most taboo, yet increasingly urgent topics in tech: AI and defense.

The timing couldn’t be more acute. The war in Ukraine has shown how low-cost drones and software can upend conventional military doctrine. More recently, the escalation of hostilities with Iran has further underscored the volatility of global security and the growing relevance of digital warfare and drone-enabled asymmetric tactics. In the U.S., a second Trump administration has accelerated European defense policy, with Germany, Poland, France, and others pushing military spending to levels unseen since the Cold War. The European Commission plans to deploy €800 billion toward defense by 2029.

So: where does that money go? For once, not just to the legacy primes. There’s an opening for new entrants, namely startups building fast, iterating with operational focus, and pushing beyond the traditional defense hardware playbook.

The frontiers of pixel generation Jul 15, 2025

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 model for controllable image and video generation. The talk gave a rare look under the hood of one of the most technically ambitious and commercially relevant AI-first companies to emerge in Europe.

Andreas is no stranger to the field. He was among the original researchers behind Stable Diffusion and later worked with Stability AI before striking out on his own to build the model he always wanted: a unified, fast, and open infrastructure for pixel generation, whether from text, images, or combinations of the two.

Your guide to AI: July 2025 Jul 13, 2025

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 Jul 10, 2025

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 was clear: voice was broken, and they were going to fix it.

Today, ElevenLabs is one of the fastest-moving companies in the agentic voice space. Their platform powers narration for authors, dubbing for studios, real-time agents for enterprises, and everything in between. At the 9th Research and Applied AI Summit in London, Mati and I recounted the story of how they got here, and where they're going next, and lessons learned for any founder building in AI.

2025 is the year of open-endedness Jul 08, 2025

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, long-time researcher at Google DeepMind and one of the few voices charting a credible path toward AI systems capable of doing science.

In his closing talk at RAAIS this year, Hughes argued that we’re entering a new phase in the evolution of artificial intelligence: one where open-endedness becomes the central organizing principle. Not just solving problems, but defining them. Not just predicting the next token, but surfacing previously unknown unknowns. If he’s right, the next generation of AI systems won’t just be tools, they’ll be participants in the scientific process itself.

AI, power, and politics at RAAIS 2025 Jul 03, 2025

At this year's RAAIS, we convened a panel with Lionel Laurent (Bloomberg), Chris Yiu (Meta), and Benedict Macon-Cooney (Tony Blair Institute) to dissect the uneasy relationship between AI and the state. This conversation, grounded in experience across Whitehall, Big Tech, and Brussels, pulled no punches on where things stand and what still needs to change.

Inside poolside’s path to AGI with Eiso Kant Jul 01, 2025

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 from the co-founder of one of the most ambitious AI companies in the world. Instead, Kant opted for a more experimental approach: a candid walkthrough of poolside’s beliefs, software systems, and bets on how to build AGI. The result was one of the most revealing sessions of the summit.

Kant’s message was clear: if you want to compete at the frontier of model capabilities, the secret isn’t just scale, it’s iteration speed. And to iterate fast, you need infrastructure that matches the ambition of your research. This is the thesis behind poolside’s “model factory,” a production-grade system for turning ideas into results at industrial speed.

State of AI Compute Index v4 (June 2025) Jun 30, 2025

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, AMD, ASICs, FPGAs, and AI semi startups, as well as updates to A100 H100/200 cluster sizes. We also include new data on the most and least commonly used chips for specific research topic areas.

State of AI Report Compute Index in collaboration with Zeta Alpha.

The AI rollup mirage and the risk of repeating old mistakes Jun 27, 2025

Across the technology investing world, investors are scaling their bets on a seductive thesis: Generative AI will transform low-margin service businesses into high-margin software companies. Several well-known platform venture firms have committed billions to this strategy and have begun to make their bets.

This essay is co-authored by Nathan Benaich and Nikola Mrksic, CEO of PolyAI.

From research to production with Gemini and Paige Bailey Jun 26, 2025

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: “I’m going to show you how to automate significant parts of your work.” Generative models are now a co-author, a debugger, a lab assistant, a video editor. And increasingly, models are doing the work behind the curtain while you coach and edit. Here’s her talk and a narrative of the key insights:

Ten years of RAAIS. Day one in AI. Jun 24, 2025

A decade is a familiar yardstick for measuring progress. In that time, we tend to expect steady, incremental change. Historically, meaningful change tends to unfold slowly. In AI, however, the last ten years has been a story of "gradually, then suddenly". The weekly model launches we are now accustomed to feel incremental in the heat of the moment, but a ten-year look back reveals a landscape transformed by something that feels closer to magic.

At our 9th Research and Applied AI Summit (RAAIS), we brought together the people building the next decade. Researchers, founders, and policymakers who have gone from writing foundational papers to deploying infrastructure and policies at global scale. And if there’s one thing they agree on, it’s this: ten years in, we are still at the beginning.

‘Sovereign AI’ is political branding. The reality is closer to digital colonialism Jun 09, 2025

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 for free.

Guide to AI: June 2025 Jun 08, 2025

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 Jun 02, 2025

Our read of the UK's Ministry of Defence Strategic Defence Review 2025.

Research and Applied AI Summit: celebrating 10 years May 30, 2025

Bringing you the best of AI today and what’s coming tomorrow.

Hedera Dx raises €15M Series A May 30, 2025

Scaling on-site precision oncology infrastructure and real-world data.

Is the EU AI Act actually useful? May 27, 2025

Born pre-GPT-4 to shape the world of GPT-7.

What Wall Street didn't see coming May 23, 2025

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 May 20, 2025

Where politics and power meet AI.

In recent months, a subtle but politically astute rebranding has propagated across the AI industry. Leading figures like NVIDIA’s Jensen Huang and OpenAI’s Sam Altman are no longer calling the backbone of AI infrastructure "AI data centers." Instead, they refer to them as "AI factories."

At first glance, this might seem like hype-driven marketing speak. But the intent and implications of this linguistic shift are anything but trivial. The rebranding is deeply political, aligning Silicon Valley’s ambitions with nationalist industrial policy, particularly the Trump-era vision of reshoring American manufacturing.

Guide to AI: May 2025 May 11, 2025

Welcome to the latest issue of your guide to AI, an editorialized newsletter covering the key developments in AI policy, research, industry, and start-ups over the last month.

Delian Alliance Industries launches Interceptigon autonomous strike systems May 08, 2025

Expanding its product range as an emerging defense prime.

Biology has scaling laws too May 06, 2025

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 Apr 06, 2025

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 Apr 04, 2025

Building European maritime supremacy.

Staking your ground Mar 23, 2025

Why startups should push an ambitious public-facing agenda from day one

Guide to AI: March 2025 Mar 02, 2025

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! Feb 18, 2025

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 focus these events on a) best practices that entrepreneurs and researchers can learn from and b) attracting the very best contributors and heavily curating event attendance to make sure that everyone makes high-value connections. Each event will host circa 100 people and to facilitate connections we share the list of attendees ahead of time so you’re able to get a head start on meeting those you want to connect with. You’ll also get access to our 350+ strong Air Street Community on Slack, which hosts members from across all of our global city meetups, so you can keep in touch with folks.

Our investment in Fern Labs Feb 09, 2025

$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 Feb 04, 2025

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 ensure the report remains at a manageable length, lots of material doesn’t make it into the final version. We’re bringing Air Street Press some of the research that didn’t make the original cut, along with our own reflections.

Read more on press.airstreet.com and www.stateof.ai

Guide to AI: January 2025 Feb 01, 2025

Welcome to the latest issue of your guide to AI, an editorialized newsletter covering the key developments in AI policy, research, industry, and start-ups over the last month.

UK defence and dynamism Jan 26, 2025

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-and-dynamism

Vibe shifts: Microsoft and Google on AI Jan 23, 2025

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 Jan 21, 2025

Final 2024 statistics for AI chip usage across NVIDIA, Google, Huawei, Apple, AMD, Cerebras, Cambricon, Graphcore, Groq, SambaNova, and Intel Habana in the State of AI Report Compute Index.

Announcing Sereact's €25M Series A Jan 20, 2025

Scaling AI-first software for general purpose robotics.

AI-first biology: five years on Jan 19, 2025

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-biology-five-years-on

Vibe shifts: is AI still an existential risk? Jan 17, 2025

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 believed in defy their sceptics. At the same time, the terms of big macro debates in the field seemingly change overnight. In this “vibe shifts” series, we’ll be diving into some of these stories and drawing a few lessons for entrepreneurs and investors.

Here we dive into the vibe shift around existential risk.

Profluent unveils Protein2PAM Jan 14, 2025

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 Jan 12, 2025

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.com/p/how-not-to-build-a-drone

Air Street: 2024 year in review Jan 10, 2025

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 Street Press, the State of AI Report, and our community engagement.

2024's greatest hits on Air Street Press Dec 22, 2024

We share our best essays from 2024 on Air Street Press.

The AI energy wars will get worse before they get better Dec 22, 2024

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 likely aren’t coming to the rescue.

Odyssey launches Explorer and welcomes Pixar founder to the Board Dec 19, 2024

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 odyseey.systems

Jeremy Kahn (Fortune) on Mastering AI Dec 17, 2024

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 Superpowered Future was published by Simon and Schuster in the U.S.

In this episode, we interview Jeremy about his new book!

You can subscribe for more at press.airstreet.com

State of AI outtakes #3: US politics Dec 15, 2024

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 ensure the report remains at a manageable length, lots of material doesn’t make it into the final version. We’re bringing Air Street Press some of the research that didn’t make the original cut, along with our own reflections.

You can read more on press.airstreet.com and check out the full State of AI Report 2024 at www.stateof.ai

Street talk #1 - 13 December 2024 Dec 13, 2024

Every month, we produce the ⁠Guide to AI⁠, an editorialized roundup covering geopolitics, hardware, start-ups, research, and fundraising. But so much happens in the AI world, that weeks can feel like years. So on off-weeks for Guide to AI, we’ll be bringing you three things that grabbed our attention from the past few days…

You can subscribe for more at press.airstreet.com

Being first is a moat Dec 12, 2024

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 examples from ElevenLabs, Perplexity and Synthesia. As well as some failure cases like Internet Explorer and ActiveX.

You can subscribe at press.airstreet.com

Vibe shifts #1: Intel Dec 10, 2024

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 of these stories and draw a few lessons for entrepreneurs and investors. First off: Intel Corporation.

Subscribe to read more at press.airstreet.com

You can read this post at airstreet.com/intel

Guide to AI - December 2024 Dec 08, 2024

Welcome to the latest issue of your guide to AI, an editorialized newsletter covering the key developments in AI policy, research, industry, and startups over the month of November 2024.

Read more at press.airstreet.com and guideto.ai

Street talk #1 - 6 December 2024 Dec 07, 2024

Every month, we produce the Guide to AI, an editorialized roundup covering geopolitics, hardware, start-ups, research, and fundraising. But so much happens in the AI world, that weeks can feel like years. So on off-weeks for Guide to AI, we’ll be bringing you three things that grabbed our attention from the past few days…

Guide to AI - November 2024 Dec 06, 2024

Welcome to the latest issue of your guide to AI, an editorialized newsletter covering the key developments in AI policy, research, industry, and startups over the last month.

Bio-defense(less)? Dec 05, 2024

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 screening protocols of DNA synthesis companies? How easy is it for non-state actors to use these tools? How worried should we be? We dive into all of this and more in this article on Air Street Press.

Read more at: https://press.airstreet.com/p/bio-defenseless

Reflections on Reflection Nov 02, 2024

What a four day meltdown tells us about standards and scrutiny.

AI isn't the dotcom bubble Oct 31, 2024

Reflections on the State of AI Report, by Air Street Capital.

State of AI outtakes #1: scaling in defense Oct 26, 2024

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 ensure the report remains at a manageable length, lots of material doesn’t make it into the final version. We’re bringing Air Street Press readers some of the research that didn’t make the original cut, subsequent follow-up work, and our reflections.

Our investment in Patina Systems Sep 17, 2024

Shifting creative control from companies to people.

Good technology doesn’t speak for itself Sep 15, 2024

Why storytelling matters from inception to IPO and beyond.

Guide to AI - September 2024 Sep 01, 2024

Welcome to the latest issue of your guide to AI, an editorialized newsletter covering the key developments in AI policy, research, industry, and startups over the last month.

Rediscovering the UK's AI ambition Aug 22, 2024

At the end of July, the UK Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology commissioned Matt Clifford, Chair of the Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA), to produce a roadmap on how the government can harness the benefits for AI to drive growth and productivity. As part of this work, Alex attended a roundtable at 10 Downing Street and stakeholders have been invited to share their thoughts in writing with the taskforce.

As believers in openness as a driver of progress, we share our unvarnished views publicly, not just behind closed doors. So in that spirit, we’re sharing our submission in full.

Open-endedness is all we’ll need Aug 15, 2024

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 threads, and assessing where value might be found in the meantime

The cathedral and the bazaar Aug 08, 2024

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 asking if these breakthroughs mark a tipping point in AI research and commercialization. As ever, the answer is … complicated.

Guide to AI - August 2024 Aug 04, 2024

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 Aug 03, 2024

Today we're asking if something approaching ‘general intelligence’ did begin to become available, does it invalidate our thesis that alchemy doesn't scale?

The State of Chinese AI Aug 01, 2024

We dive into the SOTA from Chinese AI labs, the chip wars, sanctions, and loopholes.

The power of non-consensus Jul 30, 2024

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' time. We see this in founders who are working on unfashionable ideas that are difficult to pull off. These teams have a deep-seated conviction that the weight of evidence is on their side and the timing is right to chip away at the problem.

The generative AI copyright wars took a new turn recently, when the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) announced that it was suing music generation services Suno and Udio for massive infringement of copyright. The lawsuit alleges the systematic unauthorized use of copyrighted works to train the two companies’ models and points to how some of their output either closely resembles or directly copies various iconic songs.

Our investment into Odyssey Jul 23, 2024

Powering breakthrough visual storytelling with AI-first visual effects for Hollywood.

Guide to AI - July 2024 Jul 07, 2024

Welcome to the latest issue of your guide to AI, an editorialized newsletter covering the key developments in AI policy, research, industry, and startups over the last month.

Alchemy is all you need Jun 11, 2024

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 have the potential to impact the entire AI value chain, from the chipmakers through to investors and founders.

California’s AI bill was an avoidable disaster Jun 06, 2024

What went wrong and how to prevent this from happening again.

Who remembers capsule networks? Jun 04, 2024

We recently stumbled across the first ever Hacker News thread discussing Attention Is All You Need, the landmark paper that describes the transformer architecture. The work had come out in the summer of 2017, but it took a while for the wider AI community to begin to grasp its significance and build on it.

Most commenters at the time expressed interest or admiration. Some didn’t understand it. Others thought that the paper would probably be out of date in a few months. And one person asked what it could do for capsule networks.

But whatever happened to capsule networks?

Your guide to AI: June 2024 Jun 02, 2024

Guide to AI is an editorialized newsletter covering the key developments in AI policy, research, industry, and startups over the last month.

Produced by Air Street Capital.

Chips all the way down May 30, 2024

If foundation model economics is alchemy, what does that mean for hardware?