Air Street Press

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.

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. 

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

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.

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.

Discussion on the economic impacts of powerful frontier models in AI, trade-offs between cost and performance, challenges in scaling AI models for general intelligence, and the importance of technical pragmatism in AI development.

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

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. 

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