2024 in AI, with Nathan Benaich

Episode 142
Happy holidays! This is one of my favorite episodes of the year — for the third time, Nathan Benaich (substack.com/profile/866763-nathan-benaich) and I did our yearly roundup of all the AI news and advancements you need to know. This includes selections from this year’s State of AI Report, some early takes on o3, a few minutes LARPing as China Guys………
If you’ve stuck around and continue to listen, I’m really thankful you’re here. I love hearing from you.
You can find Nathan and Air Street Press (substack.com/profile/3353423-air-street-press) here on Substack and on Twitter (x.com/nathanbenaich), LinkedIn (uk.linkedin.com/in/nathanbenaich), and his personal site (nathanbenaich.com). Check out his writing at press.airstreet.com.
Find me on Twitter (twitter.com/spaniel_bashir) (or LinkedIn (linkedin.com/in/daniel-bashir) if you want…) for updates on new episodes, and reach me at editor@thegradient.pub for feedback, ideas, guest suggestions.

Outline
* (00:00) Intro
* (01:00) o3 and model capabilities + reasoning capabilities
* (05:30) Economics of frontier models
* (09:24) Air Street’s year and industry shifts: product-market fit in AI, major developments in science/biology, "vibe shifts" in defense and robotics
* (16:00) Investment strategies in generative AI, how to evaluate and invest in AI companies
* (19:00) Future of BioML and scientific progress: on AlphaFold 3, evaluation challenges, and the need for cross-disciplinary collaboration
* (32:00) The AGI question and technology diffusion: Nathan’s take on AGI and timelines, technology adoption, the gap between capabilities and real-world impact
* (39:00) Differential economic impacts from AI, tech diffusion
* (43:00) Market dynamics and competition
* (50:00) DeepSeek and global AI innovation
* (59:50) A robotics renaissance? robotics coming back into focus + advances in vision-language models and real-world applications
* (1:05:00) Compute Infrastructure: NVIDIA’s dominance, GPU availability, the competitive landscape in AI compute
* (1:12:00) Industry consolidation: partnerships, acquisitions, regulatory concerns in AI
* (1:27:00) Global AI politics and regulation: international AI governance and varying approaches
* (1:35:00) The regulatory landscape
* (1:43:00) 2025 predictions
* (1:48:00) Closing
Links and Resources
From Air Street Press (substack.com/profile/3353423-air-street-press):
* The State of AI Report (stateof.ai)
* The State of Chinese AI (press.airstreet.com/p/the-state-of-chinese-ai)
* Open-endedness is all we’ll need (press.airstreet.com/p/open-endedness-is-all-we…)
* There is no scaling wall: in discussion with Eiso Kant (Poolside) (press.airstreet.com/p/there-is-no-scaling-wall…)
* Alchemy doesn’t scale: the economics of general intelligence (press.airstreet.com/p/alchemy-doesnt-scale-gen…)
* Chips all the way down (press.airstreet.com/p/chips-all-the-way-down)
* The AI energy wars will get worse before they get better (press.airstreet.com/p/the-ai-energy-wars-will-…)
Other highlights/resources:
* Deepseek: The Quiet Giant Leading China’s AI Race (chinatalk.media/p/deepseek-ceo-interview-with-…) — an interview with DeepSeek CEO Liang Wenfeng via ChinaTalk (open.substack.com/pub/chinatalk), translated by Jordan Schneider (substack.com/profile/1145-jordan-schneider), Angela Shen (substack.com/profile/73772475-angela-shen), Irene Zhang (substack.com/profile/12682021-irene-zhang) and others
* A great position paper (arxiv.org/abs/2211.07819) on open-endedness by Minqi Jiang, Tim Rocktäschel, and Ed Grefenstette — Minqi also wrote a blog post (thegradient.pub/software2-a-new-generation-of-…) on this for us!
* for China Guys only: China’s AI Regulations and How They Get Made (carnegieendowment.org/research/2023/07/chinas-…) by Matt Sheehan (+ an interview (thegradientpub.substack.com/p/matt-sheehan-chi…) I did with Matt in 2022!)
* The Simple Macroeconomics of AI (economics.mit.edu/sites/default/files/2024-04/…) by Daron Acemoglu + a critique (maximum-progress.com/p/contra-acemoglu-on-ai) by Maxwell Tabarrok (substack.com/profile/18317550-maxwell-tabarrok) (more links in the Report)
* AI Nationalism (ianhogarth.com/blog/2018/6/13/ai-nationalism) by Ian Hogarth (from 2018)
* Some (lawfaremedia.org/article/eus-ai-act-barreling-…) analysis (lawfaremedia.org/article/a-comparative-perspec…) on the EU AI Act + regulation from Lawfare

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