Podcast
Air Street Press
Hosted by Nathan Benaich (Air Street Capital) · EN
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.
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Europe cannot rent its way to AI sovereignty
3d ago00:07:03Tap to summarizeLast week the US government ordered Anthropic to switch off its most capable model for every foreign national on earth - four days after it launched. Nathan Benaich (founder of Air Street Capital, co-author of the State of AI Report) argues this exposed the AI risk almost no one is naming: not that the machines go rogue, but that everyone outside the US and China rents their intelligence from a landlord who can cut them off at will.Adapted from remarks given at a private dinner this week, this is the case for why Europe can't regulate its way to sovereignty - and what government, industry, civil society and academia each need to do to build it instead.Read the full essay and subscribe at press.airstreet.com.
Transcribe →Introducing Perceptic: the AI operating system for drug development
3d ago00:06:30Tap to summarizeToday we announce Perceptic — the AI operating system for biopharma built by the team behind Palantir's AIP and Life Sciences practice. Coming out of stealth with a $12M seed round from Air Street Capital, Accel and angels, Perceptic is already in production at CSL and multiple top-20 pharma companies.In this piece, we unpack why the frontier labs are racing into life sciences — from Anthropic's recent Novartis CEO board appointment to OpenAI's 80-year-old Erdős proof — why pharma's next R&D leap needs an application layer the model labs can't build alone, and why this is the team to do it.
Transcribe →From discovery to design: in conversation with Ali Madani (Profluent)
6d ago00:38:01Tap to summarizeOver the past few weeks, it’s been hard to keep up with AI in biology. Profluent signed a $2.25B partnership with Eli Lilly on AI-designed gene editors, Verve put out striking base-editing data, CZ Biohub published new scaling results on protein models, and Isomorphic Labs pulled in another large raise.I couldn’t think of anyone better to discuss this with than Ali Madani, the founder and CEO of Profluent. Profluent is an AI lab building frontier models to design proteins, with the goal of taking medicine from discovering molecules nature already made to designing the ones it didn’t. I first read Ali’s ProGen paper back in 2021, DMed him on then Twitter, and wrote the largest first check from Air Street Capital into the company at inception. Last month, Profluent announced a $2.25B deal with Eli Lilly, one of the largest to date between a frontier AI biology lab and big pharma.We discuss the shift from discovery to design, why Profluent bet sequence-first while others went structure-first, the Lilly deal and large-scale DNA editing, fine-scale base editing, whether LLM-style scaling laws hold for proteins, and much more. You can either watch the interview in full here or on YouTube or read the transcript below.Timestamp timeline0:00 – Teaser: AI-designed molecules & the $2.25B Lilly deal0:22 – Intros: Nathan Benaich (Air Street Capital) & Ali Madani (Profluent)2:10 – What is Profluent, and why AI matters5:45 – The landscape: readers vs. writers7:45 – Profluent’s edge: 100B+ sequences and a wet lab9:20 – OpenCRISPR and the exponential curve12:55 – Why sequence beats structure14:50 – The Eli Lilly deal and large gene insertion16:20 – Fine-scale vs. large-scale editing18:00 – Why it’s hard: the pre-AI era and the activity/specificity trade-off20:45 – The Verve news, and scaling beyond one-offs23:45 – Rare vs. common disease26:10 – “What do you know that no one else does?”27:40 – bio × AI is an undersaturated field32:40 – When will a top-10 pharma be AI-first?34:30 – Every molecule will be designed with AITimestamp
Transcribe →Alta Ares: the Iron Dome for autonomous air defense
2w ago00:07:47Tap to summarizeAir Street Capital has led Alta Ares’s $60M Series A.In this episode, we explain why modern air defense is no longer just about intercepting threats, but doing so affordably, under jamming, and at the speed of battlefield adaptation. From Ukraine to the GCC, the old model of static shields and slow procurement is breaking. Alta Ares is building full-stack, AI-first air defense across software, sensors, command-and-control, and effectors. We believe it can become Europe’s Iron Dome for autonomous air defense.
Transcribe →Speech-to-text at conversation speed - Angelos Perivolaropoulos, ElevenLabs
3w ago00:07:08Tap to summarizeAngelos Perivolaropoulos leads speech-to-text research engineering at ElevenLabs across Scribe v2 and Scribe v2 Realtime. From AA-WER-leading batch transcription to 150ms real-time ASR, his work powers voice agents that can listen. A RAAIS 2026 speaker profile from Air Street Press.
Transcribe →From clip-makers to simulators: Odyssey's new world models
May 1900:04:47Tap to summarizeOdyssey just shipped two new world models. Starchild-1 generates synchronized audio and video in real time at up to 24 fps, responding to streaming text, speech, or action input - the first real-time multimodal world model. Agora-1 puts up to four players into a shared simulated deathmatch on GoldenEye, with every frame each player sees generated on the fly while the model holds a shared world state across all participants.We walk through both releases, the technical contributions behind them - a causal distillation pipeline from a bidirectional audio-video foundation model, an asynchronous KV-cache that handles the audio/video clock mismatch, and a decoupled simulation/rendering architecture for the multi-agent case - and why world models are a different shape of system than the clip-makers (Veo, Sora, Kling) that have dominated generative video for three years.Odyssey is an Air Street Capital portfolio company. Jeff Hawke, Odyssey's co-founder and CTO, presents this work at RAAIS 2026 in London on June 12.
Transcribe →What it takes to ship AI under regulation - Nikolay Donets, Revolut
May 1700:04:51Tap to summarizeNikolay Donets leads ML Engineering at Revolut - the platform behind classical ML, fraud detection, time-series foundation models, and the ElevenLabs voice agents now serving customers in 30+ languages. A RAAIS 2026 speaker profile from Air Street Press.
Transcribe →State of AI · May 2026: cyber threshold, China parity, agents in real markets
May 400:27:43Tap to summarizeThe April 2026 issue of State of AI from Air Street Press. The through-line: frontier AI moved from benchmark progress to operational capability across cyber, coding, agents, and capital formation.Two frontier models cleared the UK AI Security Institute's 32-step end-to-end cyber-attack range in a single month, and AISI now estimates frontier cyber-offence is doubling every four months, down from seven months at the end of last year. We unpack what that means for the public cybersecurity stack.Microsoft and OpenAI reset their 2019 deal to non-exclusive while keeping Microsoft as primary cloud partner. Anthropic stacked another $40B from Google, $5B from Amazon (with $100B of AWS spend), and chip deals with Google and Broadcom reportedly worth hundreds of billions, and is reportedly already raising again at a $900B valuation. Sam Altman's Axios essay sketched a "superintelligence New Deal" in explicit FDR terms.Four Chinese labs (Z.ai, MiniMax, Moonshot, DeepSeek) released open-weights coding models inside a 12-day window, all landing at roughly the same capability ceiling as Claude Opus 4.6 and GPT-5.4 on agentic engineering. NIST's CAISI evaluation puts the aggregate gap closer to eight months. Both are true.Anthropic's Project Deal ran a classified marketplace of 69 Claude agents and reported that stronger agents won, and the losers did not realise it. KellyBench (from Air Street portfolio company General Reasoning) watched every frontier model lose money on a Premier League betting season under non-stationarity. Ramp's procurement agents run 3× faster.Plus eight research papers worth keeping (π0.7, the Ríos-García epistemology paper, ClawBench, the FAIR experience-replay paper, Agent-World, and others), April Investments (Ineffable Intelligence's $1.1B seed, Saronic, Cognition's $25B talks, Cursor's $50B+ talks), and Exits (Skild and Zebra, SpaceX and Cursor, OpenAI and Hiro, Cohere and Aleph Alpha, China blocking Meta's acquisition of Manus).
Transcribe →The next gene editor will be designed: Profluent + Lilly, $2.25B
Apr 2800:06:28Tap to summarizeProfluent just announced a multi-program strategic partnership with Eli Lilly to develop AI-designed recombinases for genetic medicine — worth up to $2.25 billion in milestones, plus tiered royalties on net sales.In this episode, Nathan unpacks why this deal matters far beyond the headline number. CRISPR taught us how to fix typos in the genome. The harder problem — and arguably the larger one — is editing at the kilobase scale: replacing whole paragraphs of DNA at a chosen genomic address. That's the route to therapies for the long tail of genetic disease driven by patient-level mutational heterogeneity, from cystic fibrosis to inherited hearing loss to retinal dystrophy.Recombinases have always been the right class of enzyme for this job. They've also been stuck for decades because their targeting specificity is encoded directly in the protein structure, with no equivalent of CRISPR's modular guide RNA. That makes recombinases a near-perfect problem for foundation-model protein design — and it's exactly the bet Profluent has been building toward since their 2024 work designing novel Cas enzymes from scratch.We cover: why kilobase-scale editing is the next frontier of genetic medicine; why recombinases were intractable until AI; how Profluent's foundation-model platform changes the picture; why Lilly is the right partner; and what the world looks like if you can name a genomic address and get a designed editor back.
Transcribe →State of AI Report: 2026 newsletter
Apr 1200:36:40Tap to summarizeEpisode DescriptionWelcome back to the State of AI! In this packed Q1 2026 episode, we dive into a quarter defined by unprecedented geopolitical friction, staggering capital concentration, and the rapidly blurring lines between commercial cloud infrastructure and national defense.From a constitutional showdown between Anthropic and the Trump administration to the first-ever kinetic military strike on commercial data centers, the stakes for frontier AI have never been higher. Plus, we break down Anthropic’s explosive $19B ARR sprint, the escalating "distillation wars" with Chinese AI labs, and the historic $1.25 trillion merger between xAI and SpaceX.If you want to understand where the frontier is heading next, you can't miss this one.The Pentagon Standoff: Anthropic's $200M DOD contract, its refusal to drop safety guardrails, and the ensuing White House blacklist and federal lawsuit.Cloud as a Theater of War: Breaking down the unprecedented Iranian drone strikes on AWS data centers in the Middle East.Revenues Go Vertical: How Anthropic surged to a $19B ARR on the back of Claude Cowork, and OpenAI's massive $50B strategic alliance with Amazon.The Model Treadmill: The rapid succession of new model releases, including Claude Sonnet 4.6, Gemini 3.1 Pro, and GPT-5.4.The Distillation Wars: Inside the industrial-scale IP theft by Chinese labs cloning Claude, and the $2.5B NVIDIA GPU smuggling bust.Safety Meets Reality: Sabotage risks, machine-speed SQL injections, and the UK AI Safety Institute's chilling findings on AI-assisted cyber attacks.The Physical Layer & NIMBYism: The pushback against hyper-scale data centers and NVIDIA's complete exit from the China-compliant chip market.Breakthrough Research: From zero-loss cache compression (TurboQuant) to an Australian entrepreneur curing his dog's cancer with AlphaFold.Historic Mega-Deals: OpenAI's record-shattering $110B raise and xAI's trillion-dollar merger into SpaceX.00:00 - Intro, Air Street Capital Epoch 3, & RAAIS 202601:28 - Geopolitics: Anthropic vs. The White House03:12 - The Iran-AWS Conflict & Cloud Warfare04:12 - Financials: Anthropic's $19B ARR & OpenAI's Hyperscaler Strategy08:04 - The Model Treadmill: Claude Sonnet 4.6, Gemini 3.1 Pro, & GPT-5.408:56 - Open Source, IP Warfare, & the $2.5B Smuggling Ring10:44 - AI Safety: Catastrophic Sabotage & The Sabotage Risk Report13:20 - Data Center NIMBYism & The Contested Physical Layer16:00 - Research Highlights: UK AISI, TurboQuant, & World Action Models22:40 - Investments & Exits: OpenAI's $110B Round & The SpaceX/xAI MergerStay Connected:Love hearing what you’re up to! Hit reply to our newsletter or connect with us at the upcoming Air Street AI meetups in SF (April 28) and NYC (May 14). We are also actively recruiting Research Analysts for the State of AI Report—reach out if you live and breathe this space.Produced by the State of AI & Air Street Press.In This Episode, We Cover:Episode Timestamps (Estimated):
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