State of AI with Nathan Benaich

Latest Episodes:

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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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.