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.
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Outline:
(00:00) Intro
(02:00) Updates in Nathan World — Air Street’s second fund, spinouts,
(07:30) Events: Research and Applied AI Summit, State of AI Report launches
(09:50) The State of AI: main messages, the increasing role of subject matter experts
Research
(14:13) Open and closed-source
(17:55) Benchmarking and evaluation, small/large models and industry verticals
(21:10) “Vibes” in LLM evaluation
(24:00) Codegen models, personalized AI, curriculum learning
(26:20) The exhaustion of human-generated data, lukewarm content, synthetic data
(29:50) Opportunities for AI applications in the natural sciences
(35:15) Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback and alternatives
(38:30) Industry
(39:00) ChatGPT and productivity
(42:37) General app wars, ChatGPT competitors
(45:50) Compute—demand, supply, competition
(50:55) Export controls and geopolitics
(54:45) Startup funding and compute spend
(59:15) Politics
(59:40) Calls for regulation, regulatory divergence
(1:04:40) AI safety
(1:07:30) Nathan’s perspective on regulatory approaches
(1:12:30) The UK’s early access to frontier models, standards setting, regulation difficulties
(1:17:20) Jailbreaking, constitutional AI, robustness
(1:20:50) Predictions!
(1:25:00) Generative AI misuse in elections and politics (and, this prediction coming true in Bangladesh)
(1:26:50) Progress on AI governance
(1:30:30) European dynamism
(1:35:08) Outro
Links:
2023 in AI, with Nathan Benaich