In episode 104 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir speaks to Nathan Benaich.Nathan is Founder and General Partner at Air Street Capital, a VC firm focused on investing in AI-first technology and life sciences companies. Nathan runs a number of communities focused on AI including the Research and Applied AI Summit and leads Spinout.fyi to improve the creation of university spinouts. Nathan co-authors the State of AI Report.Have suggestions for future podcast guests (or other feedback)? Let us know here or reach us at [email protected] to The Gradient Podcast:  Apple Podcasts  | Spotify | Pocket Casts | RSSFollow The Gradient on TwitterOutline:*

Intro*

Updates in Nathan World — Air Street’s second fund, spinouts, *

Events: Research and Applied AI Summit, State of AI Report launches*

The State of AI: main messages, the increasing role of subject matter experts* Research*

Open and closed-source*

Benchmarking and evaluation, small/large models and industry verticals*

“Vibes” in LLM evaluation*

Codegen models, personalized AI, curriculum learning*

The exhaustion of human-generated data, lukewarm content, synthetic data*

Opportunities for AI applications in the natural sciences*

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback and alternatives*

Industry*

ChatGPT and productivity*

General app wars, ChatGPT competitors*

Compute—demand, supply, competition*

Export controls and geopolitics*

Startup funding and compute spend*

Politics*

Calls for regulation, regulatory divergence*

AI safety*

Nathan’s perspective on regulatory approaches*

The UK’s early access to frontier models, standards setting, regulation difficulties*

Jailbreaking, constitutional AI, robustness*

Predictions!*

Generative AI misuse in elections and politics (and, this prediction coming true in Bangladesh)*

Progress on AI governance*

European dynamism*