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.
Subscribe to the newsletter at press.airstreet.com and www.stateof.ai
34episodes
Episodes
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A letter from the Munich Security Conference
Feb 2200:10:36Tap to summarizeEuropean voters say they support higher defense spending. But when higher taxes or welfare cuts are mentioned, support collapses.In this episode from Munich Security Conference 2026, we explore Europe’s fiscal test: Germany’s industrial flywheel, the reality of attrition warfare in Ukraine, the broken procurement model, and the tension between welfare and warfare.Europe has demonstrated urgency. Now it must prove permanence.
Transcribe →State of AI: February 2026 newsletter
Feb 900:30:41Tap to summarizeIn this episode of the State of AI, we break down the growing disconnect between rapid AI capability gains and collapsing software valuations, with nearly $300B wiped from public markets in weeks. We cover the agent shock triggered by Anthropic and OpenAI’s latest releases, why investors are repricing long-term SaaS revenues, and how AI sovereignty is fracturing across U.S. policy, state-level infrastructure pushback, and China’s accelerating model and talent pipeline. We also look at the security risks of computer-use agents, the infrastructure arms race spanning GPUs, memory, power, and data centers, and the latest research breakthroughs in autonomy, medicine, and reinforcement learning. Plus, a full rundown of the month’s largest AI financings, IPOs, and acquisitions.
Transcribe →Learning from execution: what Sereact Cortex 1.6 reveals about real-world robotics
Feb 600:08:51Tap to summarizeAI has progressed fastest where the world can be cleanly digitized, but robotics remains stubbornly hard. In this episode, we examine Sereact’s Cortex 1.6 and what its results reveal about learning from execution rather than sparse task outcomes. We discuss why execution-level learning improves robustness, recovery behavior, and learning efficiency in real-world robotic manipulation, and what this signals for the future of deployment-first robotics.
Transcribe →Air Street Capital: 2025 Year in Review
Jan 2500:13:07Tap to summarizeIn this episode, Air Street Capital shares its 2025 year in review. We cover what changed as AI moved into large-scale deployment, from the emergence of reasoning models and agents in production to the economics of frontier AI, energy constraints, and geopolitics.We reflect on the year across our investment portfolio, angel investments, Air Street Press, the State of AI Report, and our global community, and look ahead to what it will take to deploy AI reliably and at scale in the years to come.
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