2023 in AI, with Nathan Benaich

In episode 104 of The Gradient Podcast, Daniel Bashir (twitter.com/spaniel_bashir) speaks to Nathan Benaich (twitter.com/nathanbenaich).
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 (ft.com/content/bd1bc5b4-f540-48f8-9cda-75c19e5…))
* (1:26:50) Progress on AI governance
* (1:30:30) European dynamism
* (1:35:08) Outro
Links:
* Nathan’s homepage (nathanbenaich.com) and Twitter (x.com/nathanbenaich?s=20)
* The 2023 State of AI Report (stateof.ai)
* Bringing Dynamism to European Defense (airstreet.com/blog/european-defense-procurement)
* A prediction coming true: How AI is disrupting Bangladesh’s election (ft.com/content/bd1bc5b4-f540-48f8-9cda-75c19e5…)
* Air Street Capital is hiring a full-time Community Lead (linkedin.com/posts/nathanbenaich_community-lea…)!

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