State of AI with Nathan Benaich

Latest Episodes:

State of AI 2026: My conversation with Matt Turck Oct 30, 2026

Show notes

AGI in 2027, scientific superintelligence, world models, and putting AI to work.

In this audio edition of my Air Street Press essay, I reflect on my conversation with Matt Turck on the MAD Podcast. I share how agents are changing my investment research, why scientific judgment is the next frontier, and how world models could help train robots and test autonomous systems.

I also discuss AI for cyber defense and an idea I would love someone to build: a Genius Bar for AI that helps people put the technology to practical use.

Watch the full interview
Explore the State of AI Report 2026
Subscribe to Air Street Press

State of AI Report 2026: AI is building AI Oct 08, 2026

Show notes

What changed in artificial intelligence in 2026, and what comes next? From AI agents helping build better AI to advances in robotics, the State of AI Report 2026 examines the breakthroughs, businesses, and risks shaping the field.I’m Nathan Benaich, founder of Air Street Capital and author of the State of AI Report. In this 34-minute walkthrough, I explain the findings that matter most across research, industry, politics, and safety, then share our predictions for the next 12 months.In this video:• The competition between OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google, and the rise of Chinese open models• AI agents automating research and taking on longer tasks• Robotics, world models, and autonomous driving• AI adoption, company growth, and the impact on jobs• NVIDIA, GPU demand, and the data center buildout• Sovereign AI, government policy, and control over frontier models• AI safety, cybersecurity, and the risks of agents acting in real systems• Our predictions for the year ahead, including AGI in 2027Read the full report, including charts and sources: https://www.stateof.ai/Get ongoing AI analysis through the State of AI newsletter on Air Street Press: https://press.airstreet.com/Learn more about Air Street Capital: https://www.airstreet.com/Which prediction do you disagree with most? Tell me in the comments.

Our investment in Jack & Jill: a job market that works for you Sep 15, 2026

Show notes

Jack & Jill has raised a $40 million Series A led by Air Street Capital to build AI agents for careers and recruiting. In this episode of State of AI, Nathan Benaich explains why he backed founders Matt Wilson and Saaras Mehan, and the opportunity to make personal talent representation available to everyone.

Jack gets to know your skills, passions, and career ambitions. Jill learns what companies need from their next hire. Together, they have arranged 25,000 interviews without candidates submitting applications. Nathan explores how ongoing conversations can lead to better introductions, why both talent and employers need a brand they trust, and how your next opportunity could extend beyond a conventional job search.

Explore Jack & Jill.

From Air Street Press. Subscribe to State of AI with Nathan Benaich, read the State of AI Report, and leave a rating - it helps the show.

0:00 Why we invested in Jack & Jill

1:21 A candidate is much more than their resume

3:38 Meet Jill, your company’s recruiting agent

4:58 Your next move might surprise you

Europe’s defense startups struggle to test their way to a contract Aug 26, 2026

Show notes

Europe is promising to rearm, but its defense startups often cannot access the realistic test ranges needed to win contracts. Drawing on conversations with a dozen founders and operators, Nathan Benaich examines the scarce slots, fragmented permits, unsuitable facilities and missing procurement follow-through slowing new systems. He argues for mission-ready ranges, clear paths from successful tests to orders and a cross-border campaign passport for reusable paperwork.

AI needs science’s search history Aug 13, 2026

Show notes

Scientific papers preserve the happy path and lose the abandoned experiments and arguments that produced it. Starting with Alasdair Russell's genome editing group at the CRUK Cambridge Institute, Nathan Benaich examines whether scientific search histories could teach AI research taste. The essay explains why logs are not automatically training data, how selective labels hide the outcomes of rejected experiments, and what autonomous laboratories and Registered Reports can contribute. From Air Street Press. Subscribe at press.airstreet.com, read the State of AI Report at stateof.ai, and leave a rating - it helps the show.

Poolside’s model factory is shipping: Laguna S 2.1 and the Desktop Assistant Jul 29, 2026

Show notes

Poolside trained Laguna S 2.1 on 4,096 NVIDIA H200s and published the open weights sixty days later. The 118-billion-parameter mixture-of-experts model runs multi-hour autonomous coding sessions, handles up to a million tokens of context, and fits quantized on a single desktop-class machine.

Nathan Benaich of Air Street Capital walks through the Model Factory that made that schedule possible, the system co-founders Jason Warner, GitHub’s former CTO, and Eiso Kant built to take a research idea to a production run in under a week. The episode covers the 409,000 training environments behind the model, the 50-minute session in which it built a browser rendering engine with no human intervention and no ability to see its own output, why the licenses attached to open weights differ so sharply between Poolside, Tencent and Moonshot, and what it means for a company to run a capable coding model inside its own security boundary rather than renting one through an API.

Read the full piece: press.airstreet.com Poolside’s launch post: poolside.ai/blog/introducing-laguna-s-2-1 Evaluation trajectories: trajectories.poolside.ai RAAIS 2025 - Eiso Kant, Inside poolside’s path to AGI: press.airstreet.com/p/eiso-kant-poolside-ai-raais-2025

From Air Street Press. Subscribe at press.airstreet.com, read the State of AI Report at stateof.ai, and leave a rating - it helps the show.

Black Forest Labs FLUX 3: from video generation to robot control Jul 27, 2026

Show notes

Description:
Black Forest Labs has launched FLUX 3, a multimodal foundation model that learns jointly from images, video and audio within a single architecture, and mimic robotics has released FLUX-mimic, a video-action model built on that backbone and being tested on real assembly work in Audi's Production Lab. Nathan Benaich of Air Street Capital, an investor in Black Forest Labs, reads his Air Street Press essay on why a model trained to predict how scenes evolve turns out to be a usable robot controller. Covers the FLUX 3 preference results against Runway Gen-4.5, Grok Imagine Video, Kling v3 Pro, Seedance 2.0 and Gemini Omni Flash; how a lightweight action decoder reads the video prediction path without ever generating video; the frozen-backbone ablation against π0.5; the 101-millisecond system reaction time on a single RTX 5090; and what Air Street's own robotics deal flow says about where the constraint really sits.

Chapters (estimated at ~150 wpm, slide proportionally against final audio):

0:00 A robot arm in Audi's Production Lab
0:40 What Black Forest Labs and mimic released
1:20 Early access and open weights
1:50 The preference-test results
2:40 What a model must represent to predict video
3:30 Reading actions off the video path
4:20 The frozen-backbone ablation
5:00 101 milliseconds, and the Audi tasks
5:50 What we see in robotics deal flow
6:30 The road to physical intelligence

Links: FLUX 3 · FLUX-mimic (BFL) · FLUX-mimic (mimic) · Odyssey Series B · BFL Series B ·

The case for intelligence beyond language Jul 21, 2026

Show notes

Raia Hadsell, VP of Research at Google DeepMind, makes the case that intelligence is more than language: the same recipe that learns the patterns of text can learn the patterns of any complex system. She walks through DiffusionGemma and text diffusion, the Genie world models, and DeepMind's robotics stack, where world models now generate training data you cannot tell from the real thing. Recorded at RAAIS 2026.

Timestamps

0:00 Introduction (Nathan Benaich)

0:35 From philosophy to DeepMind: the frontiers of intelligence

2:37 The twenty-year lesson: one recipe for complex systems

4:34 DiffusionGemma and the Gemma 4 open models

5:32 How text diffusion works

7:34 Speed, self-correction, and the sudoku test

10:51 World models: better agents need better worlds

12:56 Genie 1 to Genie 3

15:01 Genie 3 demos: typing a world into being

18:20 World models for education

19:38 Grounding Genie in Street View

20:41 Robotics: a brain and a spine

23:14 Gemini Robotics-ER 1.6 and Boston Dynamics' Spot

24:42 The vision-language-action model

25:45 The data bottleneck and closing the loop

27:24 Beyond language: the domains still to crack

Europe’s air defense gap Jul 16, 2026

Show notes

At RAAIS 2026, Nathan Benaich sits down with Hadrien Canter, co-founder and CEO of Alta Ares, the air-defense company building AI-guided interceptors to shoot down cheap drones and cruise missiles. They get into why Europe has lost air superiority for the first time in modern history, what the data loop looks like when you run it on a freezing front line instead of a laptop, why "quantity is the quality" in the industrialization race, and how the talent pool is shifting toward European defense. Recorded live at RAAIS 2026 in London.

Chapters

00:00 — Introducing Hadrien Canter and Alta Ares

00:47 — 2022 in Ukraine, and how Europe lost air superiority

03:23 — The Series A and the Airbus partnership

05:13 — The data loop, edge AI, and the three phases of a mission

08:22 — What no simulation can reproduce

10:09 — Hiring for the mission; defense as the precondition for peace

12:36 — Open research questions and the human in the loop

14:22 — How the adversary uses AI: evasive Shaheds, drone mesh, China

17:27 — Two interceptors, and why quantity is the quality

20:50 — Iron Dome math, budgets, and peace-time vs war-time

23:41 — Q&A: keeping pace with a fast-changing front

26:31 — Q&A: talent and the shift toward European defense

29:30 — Q&A: re-arming without permanent war

32:56 — Freedom doesn't come for free

From driving the world to dreaming it Jul 14, 2026

Show notes

World models are the bet that AI should learn the world by watching it and acting in it, not just by reading about it. At RAAIS 2026, Odyssey co-founder and CTO Jeff Hawke makes the case: a world model is a neural simulator - an interactive stream of pixels that runs in real time, models physics, and answers back.

He walks through Odyssey's four research fronts - streaming interactive pixels (Odyssey-2), joint audio and video (Starchild-1), shared multiplayer worlds (Agora-1, demoed live as a fully generated game of GoldenEye), and PROWL, which sends a reinforcement-learning agent to find and fix a world model's own failures - and argues the field is at its GPT-2 moment: promising, but pre-ChatGPT, with the GPT-3-style commercial unlock still ahead.

Recorded at the 10th Research and Applied AI Summit (RAAIS), London, June 2026.

Timestamps

00:00 Intro: Nathan on Odyssey and world models

01:05 Jeff Hawke: from self-driving to world models

01:40 The bet — a missing form of intelligence

02:40 Why world models suddenly matter (the late-2025 flip)

03:16 What a world model actually is (and isn't)

04:45 The neural simulator

06:34 Two principles: end-to-end learning and generality

07:19 The "GPT-3 of world models" and four research themes

08:46 Odyssey-2: streaming, interactive pixels

10:33 Starchild-1: generating audio and video together