State of AI with Nathan Benaich

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From move 37 to drug design Jul 22, 2025

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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.

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