2023 in AI, with Nathan Benaich

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:

• Nathan’s homepage and Twitter

• The 2023 State of AI Report

• Bringing Dynamism to European Defense

• A prediction coming true: How AI is disrupting Bangladesh’s election

• Air Street Capital is hiring a full-time Community Lead!