Podcast
State of AI with Nathan Benaich
Hosted by Nathan Benaich (Air Street Capital) · EN
The State of AI podcast from Nathan Benaich - investor at Air Street Capital and author of the State of AI Report, the most widely read analysis of AI, published every year since 2018.
Two things, every week. Short, opinionated breakdowns of what's actually moving in AI: frontier research, the geopolitics, and the capital. And long-form interviews and playbooks with the founders and scientists building the field - the people behind companies like ElevenLabs, Profluent, Synthesia, Wayve, Black Forest Labs and Anthropic.
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33episodes
Episodes
Newest firstAll episodes
STARK: Europe's next defense prime
Jun 2600:04:48Tap to summarizeAir Street Capital backs Stark, the German multi-domain defense company, in its €500M led by Founders Fund and Sequoia. In this episode, we discuss why cheap, software-defined unmanned systems in the air and at sea are the decisive lesson of Ukraine, and why we think co-founder and CEO Uwe Horstmann - a Project A GP and Bundeswehr reservist - is building the German neoprime Europe needs. Round led by Sequoia and Founders Fund, with the NATO Innovation Fund, Project A, and Air Street.Links: stark-defence.com · full post at press.airstreet.com · YouTube version
Transcribe →How Revolut runs AI at scale
Jun 2500:08:17Tap to summarizeNikolay Donets, Head of Machine Learning Engineering at Revolut, on what it takes to run AI across more than 70 million customers, 200+ products, and 40+ countries - and why the hard part is no longer the model but the control plane around it: one gateway, a use-case-based governance layer, fallback chains, cost controls, and mandatory human oversight. Recorded at RAAIS 2026.Chapters:0:00 Intro - Revolut's AI at scale1:24 The problem: classical ML and three libraries2:54 The 2022 shift to API-served models4:25 Four internal groups, four sets of needs9:39 The decision: govern the use case, not the model10:54 One central gateway vs. distributed libraries14:10 Performance monitoring and drift detection17:33 Lesson: fallback chains and the silently-dead model20:02 Lesson: frontier vs. non-frontier cost (up to 8x)20:48 Lesson: the platform is the org chart22:59 Case study: from Rita to AIR26:40 Voice support at scale28:21 AIR, the in-app assistant30:25 Q&A: human oversight, hallucinations, AI as judge
Transcribe →Odyssey raises $310M Series B for world models
Jun 2300:06:34Tap to summarizeOdyssey just raised a $310M Series B at a $1.45B valuation to build world models. We wrote the first check into the seed back in July 2024, so in this episode we walk through what the team has actually built, and why it is more interesting than "AI video."The short version: the scarce input for world models is experience. We get into how Odyssey is attacking that on three fronts. Starchild-1 gives world models sound, generating audio and video together in real time. Agora-1 is a learned game engine that drops four players into the same generated world, frame by frame. And PROWL lets a model hunt down its own failures and train on them.Along the way we cover why a world model is not a video generator, what self-driving taught Oliver Cameron and Jeff Hawke, and where this goes next for robotics, agents, and simulation.From Air Street Press. Read the full piece at press.airstreet.com.
Transcribe →Macrodata: robots need a data refinery
Jun 2200:04:24Tap to summarizeMacrodata just raised a $4M pre-seed, led by Air Street, to build the data layer for robotics. The team behind FineWeb - Guilherme Penedo and Hynek Kydlíček - is bringing the discipline that made open LLMs work to messy physical-world robot data, through their open-source framework Refiner. We cover why physical AI is the next scaling paradigm, what Refiner does, and why we wrote the first check. From Air Street Press. Read the full piece at press.airstreet.com.
Transcribe →Europe cannot rent its way to AI sovereignty
Jun 2100:07:03Tap 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
Jun 2100:06:30Tap 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)
Jun 1800:38:01Tap 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
Jun 900:07:47Tap 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
May 3100:07:08Tap 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.
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