State of AI with Nathan Benaich

Nathan Benaich (Air Street Capital)

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

  1. 1 day ago

    Compute scarcity is an engineering problem

    Angelos Perivolaropoulos, a research engineer at ElevenLabs, on turning GPU scarcity into an inference-engineering problem: how to serve far more users on the same hardware, from batching to frontier architecture changes. Recorded at RAAIS 2026. 00:00 Introduction: ElevenLabs and the GPU squeeze 00:38 The question: how to scale when you can't add capacity 01:11 About Angelos: Scribe, speech-to-text and text-to-speech 01:56 GPU scarcity meets exponential demand 02:44 What a token actually costs: compute vs memory bandwidth 03:38 Prefill, decode and the KV cache 05:53 Batching and continuous batching (1 → 15 users/GPU) 08:37 FP8 quantization and quantize-aware training (→ 20) 11:29 Speculative decoding and multi-token prediction (→ 28) 15:13 Compressing the KV cache: TurboQuant and distillation (→ 70) 17:27 Frontier architectures: MLA, linear attention, state-space (→ 140) 20:39 Trade-offs: nothing is free 22:03 Q&A: papers vs production, token subsidies, TTS evals

    8 min

  2. 2 days ago

    State of AI: Compute Index 2026

    The fifth State of AI Compute Index, in collaboration with Zeta Alpha. After a soft 2025, open AI research citations rebounded in 2026 - and NVIDIA still appears in ~91% of them. But the bigger story has moved off the page: Hopper is now the live installed base, Blackwell is mostly still pipeline, and frontier labs have started buying compute by the gigawatt. Nathan walks through what changed, what didn't, and why "GPU count" is becoming the wrong question. Read the full piece and explore the live charts: https://www.stateof.ai/compute Chapters (00:00) What's new in v5 - citations, infrastructure, and gigawatts(01:25) The breather was short: 2025 was a pause, not a rollover(03:15) NVIDIA at ~91%, and the challengers - AMD, Huawei, Apple, TPU(05:05) Inside NVIDIA: the handover from A100 to Hopper to Blackwell(06:55) Startup silicon fragments - Groq, Cerebras, and the NVIDIA deal(08:20) Hopper is the installed base: 460k deployed GPUs(09:50) Blackwell is mostly pipeline: 80% still announced(11:00) The demand side, measured in gigawatts(12:15) Looking ahead, and why a GPU order isn't a clusterLinks: Full index and charts: https://www.stateof.ai/computeState of AI Report: https://www.stateof.aiAir Street Press: https://press.airstreet.comIf you found this useful, rate State of AI with Nathan Benaich five stars and share it with someone building in AI infrastructure - it genuinely helps.

    15 min

  3. 5 days ago

    STARK: Europe's next defense prime

    Air 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

    5 min

  4. 6 days ago

    How Revolut runs AI at scale

    Nikolay 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 scale 1:24 The problem: classical ML and three libraries 2:54 The 2022 shift to API-served models 4:25 Four internal groups, four sets of needs 9:39 The decision: govern the use case, not the model 10:54 One central gateway vs. distributed libraries 14:10 Performance monitoring and drift detection 17:33 Lesson: fallback chains and the silently-dead model 20:02 Lesson: frontier vs. non-frontier cost (up to 8x) 20:48 Lesson: the platform is the org chart 22:59 Case study: from Rita to AIR 26:40 Voice support at scale 28:21 AIR, the in-app assistant 30:25 Q&A: human oversight, hallucinations, AI as judge

    8 min

  5. 23 Jun

    Odyssey raises $310M Series B for world models

    Odyssey 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.

    7 min

  6. 22 Jun

    Macrodata: robots need a data refinery

    Macrodata 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.

    4 min

  7. 21 Jun

    Europe cannot rent its way to AI sovereignty

    Last 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.

    7 min

  8. 21 Jun

    Introducing Perceptic: the AI operating system for drug development

    Today 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.

    7 min
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About

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

Information

  • Creator
    Nathan Benaich (Air Street Capital)
  • Years Active
    2021 - 2026
  • Episodes
    133
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Nathan Benaich (Air Street Capital)
  • Show Website
    State of AI with Nathan Benaich

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