

Air Street Press
Nathan Benaich (Air Street Capital)
As an AI-native investor, we believe it’s important to be a hands-on contributor to the community. Since our earliest days, we’ve been building in public - whether that’s sharing our perspectives on the direction of the field, emerging best practice for building AI-first companies, organizing meet-ups, and campaigning for policy change.
Air Street Press brings together all of our content under one umbrella. Subscribe to listen to our analysis, portfolio news, Guide to AI monthly newsletter, annual State of AI Report, and our policy work.
Air Street Press brings together all of our content under one umbrella. Subscribe to listen to our analysis, portfolio news, Guide to AI monthly newsletter, annual State of AI Report, and our policy work.
Episodes
Mentioned books

Jul 23, 2024 • 4min
Our investment into Odyssey
Powering breakthrough visual storytelling with AI-first visual effects for Hollywood.

Jul 7, 2024 • 28min
Guide to AI - July 2024
The podcast covers updates from an AI summit, new government in Safety Island, AI industry shifts, tech tensions between U.S. and China, copyright disputes in music, advancements in text-to-video tech and 3DGen, ESM3 language model introduction, ESM3 for protein sequences, PathChat AI assistant for pathology, robotics framework with VLMs like GPT-4V, QWEN-VL, and RootLM, and recent funding highlights in AI companies.

Jun 11, 2024 • 16min
Alchemy is all you need
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.

Jun 6, 2024 • 15min
California’s AI bill was an avoidable disaster
What went wrong and how to prevent this from happening again.

Jun 4, 2024 • 10min
Who remembers capsule networks?
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 Others thought that the paper would probably be out of date in a few months.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?

Jun 2, 2024 • 30min
Your guide to AI: June 2024
Highlights include discussions on AI safety commitments, turmoil at OpenAI, challenges in AI control, NVIDIA's dominance, advancements in AI technology with new models like GPT-4-0, IEA 23 multilingual LLMs, AlphaFold 3 AF3, and efficiency in optimization methods. Also covers recent AI sector funding activities.

May 30, 2024 • 16min
Chips all the way down
If foundation model economics is alchemy, what does that mean for hardware?
Read more at press.airstreet.com

May 28, 2024 • 12min
Dynamism and defense: six months on
Revisiting our work on European readiness.
It’s been close to six months since we published our report covering the challenges early-stage defense companies face in Europe. Since then, we’ve seen a rush of defense-related announcements from European governments, speculation about the future of US support for the Ukrainian war effort, and the Russian military continuing to step up its offensive.
Given the pace of developments, we’re re-examining our initial work and assessing what’s changed, what hasn’t, some points we didn’t evaluate last time, and where we go from here.

May 24, 2024 • 6min
Gorillas, hype cycles, and my MIT EmTech talk
Yesterday, I was the opening act at the MIT Tech Review EmTech Digital conference, where I spoke about how easy it is to miss step changes in AI progress among the day-to-day swirl.
This prompted a series of reflections, which I’ve laid out in this blog.

May 5, 2024 • 31min
Guide to AI - May 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.