Founder and General Partner of Air Street Capital, a venture capital firm investing in AI-first companies. I co-author the annual State of AI Report, weekly essays on AI progress, playbooks and geopolitics on Air Street Press, and the monthly Guide to AI newsletter. I also founded The Research and Applied AI Summit, a community for entrepreneurs and researchers in AI, and serve as Managing Trustee of The RAAIS Foundation, a UK-registered charity with a mission to advance education and research in artificial intelligence for the common good. We offer grants for open source projects, research and education. I am also leading Spinout.fyi, a policy research initiative that seeks to improve university spinout creation starting with open anonymised data on deal terms. In 2023, the UK Government accepted policy reforms originally proposed by Spinout.fyi and recommended their implementation across the university sector. I earned an M.Phil and Ph.D. in computational and experimental cancer research as a Gates and Dr. Herchel Smith Scholar at the University of Cambridge, and a BA in biology from Williams College. I’ve published research that leverages both experimental and computational approaches to understand how we might stem the fatal spread of cancer around the body.
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Episode 448
Nathan Benaich
Investing on the Front Lines of the AI Arms Race | Nathan Benaich
Founder and General Partner of Air Street Capital, a venture capital firm investing in AI-first companies. I co-author the annual State of AI Report, weekly essays on AI progress, playbooks and geopolitics on Air Street Press, and the monthly Guide to AI newsletter. I also founded The Research and Applied AI Summit, a community for entrepreneurs and researchers in AI, and serve as Managing Trustee of The RAAIS Foundation, a UK-registered charity with a mission to advance education and research in artificial intelligence for the common good. We offer grants for open source projects, research and education. I am also leading Spinout.fyi, a policy research initiative that seeks to improve university spinout creation starting with open anonymised data on deal terms. In 2023, the UK Government accepted policy reforms originally proposed by Spinout.fyi and recommended their implementation across the university sector. I earned an M.Phil and Ph.D. in computational and experimental cancer research as a Gates and Dr. Herchel Smith Scholar at the University of Cambridge, and a BA in biology from Williams College. I’ve published research that leverages both experimental and computational approaches to understand how we might stem the fatal spread of cancer around the body.
In Episode 448 of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Nathan Benaich, founder and general partner of Air Street Capital and the creator of the annual State of AI Report, an open-access compendium that tracks advances across AI research, industry, policy, and geopolitics.
Nathan Benaich and Demetri spend the first hour of their conversation exploring some of the most important AI breakthroughs of the year. They unpack the DeepSeek moment, dig into some of the advancements made by the latest reasoning models, and discuss why there appears to be a regression in capabilities across certain domains in artificial intelligence at the same time as we are seeing marked improvements in reasoning-heavy use cases like coding and scientific research.
The second hour turns to a conversation about the commercial implications and geopolitical dynamics of the AI arms race, including China’s strategy to become the leader in open-weight models and tooling. They look at what industries, sectors, and professions may be most ripe for disruption, where the investment opportunities are, whether we’re in a bubble comparable to the 1990s Internet boom, and how export controls, energy constraints, and regulatory red-tape could play an outsized role in shaping the trajectory of the current arms race.
Lastly, Kofinas and Benaich examine where along the AI stack most of the value is likely to accrue—from the underlying picks and shovels, through the foundation models, to the apps that ride on top of them—and what all this means for labor markets, education, and the cadence of scientific discovery.
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Founder and General Partner of Air Street Capital, a venture capital firm investing in AI-first companies. I co-author the annual State of AI Report, weekly essays on AI progress, playbooks and geopolitics on Air Street Press, and the monthly Guide to AI newsletter. I also founded The Research and Applied AI Summit, a community for entrepreneurs and researchers in AI, and serve as Managing Trustee of The RAAIS Foundation, a UK-registered charity with a mission to advance education and research in artificial intelligence for the common good. We offer grants for open source projects, research and education. I am also leading Spinout.fyi, a policy research initiative that seeks to improve university spinout creation starting with open anonymised data on deal terms. In 2023, the UK Government accepted policy reforms originally proposed by Spinout.fyi and recommended their implementation across the university sector.
I earned an M.Phil and Ph.D. in computational and experimental cancer research as a Gates and Dr. Herchel Smith Scholar at the University of Cambridge, and a BA in biology from Williams College. I’ve
Demetri Kofinas is a media entrepreneur and financial analyst whose mission is to help uncover the hidden forces and pivotal patterns shaping our lives. His contrarian perspective and critical-thinking approach has helped hundreds of thousands of people make smarter, informed decisions. This same methodology has helped guide Demetri’s decision-making as an early-stage investor and as a creator of several innovative media properties and live events.
Demetri Kofinas is a media entrepreneur and financial analyst whose mission is to help uncover the hidden forces and pivotal patterns shaping our lives. His contrarian perspective and critical-thinking approach has helped hundreds of thousands of people make smarter, informed decisions. This same methodology has helped guide Demetri’s decision-making as an early-stage investor and as a creator of several innovative media properties and live events.
Demetri Kofinas is a media entrepreneur and financial analyst whose mission is to help uncover the hidden forces and pivotal patterns shaping our lives. His contrarian perspective and critical-thinking approach has helped hundreds of thousands of people make smarter, informed decisions. This same methodology has helped guide Demetri’s decision-making as an early-stage investor and as a creator of several innovative media properties and live events.
Demetri Kofinas is a media entrepreneur and financial analyst whose mission is to help uncover the hidden forces and pivotal patterns shaping our lives. His contrarian perspective and critical-thinking approach has helped hundreds of thousands of people make smarter, informed decisions. This same methodology has helped guide Demetri’s decision-making as an early-stage investor and as a creator of several innovative media properties and live events.
Demetri Kofinas is a media entrepreneur and financial analyst whose mission is to help uncover the hidden forces and pivotal patterns shaping our lives. His contrarian perspective and critical-thinking approach has helped hundreds of thousands of people make smarter, informed decisions. This same methodology has helped guide Demetri’s decision-making as an early-stage investor and as a creator of several innovative media properties and live events.
