Air Street Press

Welcome to the latest issue of your guide to AI, an editorialized newsletter covering the key developments in AI policy, research, industry, and startups over the last month.

Biorisk is real, but we’re having the wrong debates. Could the AI-first bio tools we use to design life-saving vaccines also be used to evade the screening protocols of DNA synthesis companies? How easy is it for non-state actors to use these tools? How worried should we be? We dive into all of this and more in this article on Air Street Press. Read more at: https://press.airstreet.com/p/bio-defen...

What a four day meltdown tells us about standards and scrutiny.

Reflections on the State of AI Report, by Air Street Capital.

The State of AI Report aims to provide a comprehensive overview of everything you need to know across AI research, industry, politics, and safety. To ensure the report remains at a manageable length, lots of material doesn’t make it into the final version. We’re bringing Air Street Press readers some of the research that didn’t make the original cut, subsequent follow-up work, and our reflections.

Shifting creative control from companies to people.

Why storytelling matters from inception to IPO and beyond.

Welcome to the latest issue of your guide to AI, an editorialized newsletter covering the key developments in AI policy, research, industry, and startups over the last month.

At the end of July, the UK Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology commissioned Matt Clifford, Chair of the Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA), to produce a roadmap on how the government can harness the benefits for AI to drive growth and productivity. As part of this work, Alex attended a roundtable at 10 Downing Street and stakeholders have been invited to share thei...

On “Agentic AI”: This week, we’re asking how far along this road we are towards agentic AI, looking at some of the more promising research threads, and assessing where value might be found in the meantime

Openness is not a strategy. Given our past advocacy for open source and skepticism of the ‘bigger is always better’ paradigm, we felt it worth asking if these breakthroughs mark a tipping point in AI research and commercialization. As ever, the answer is … complicated.

While we work on the State of AI Report 2024, this summer edition covers our 8th Research and Applied AI Summit , held in London on 14 June.

Today we're asking if something approaching ‘general intelligence’ did begin to become available, does it invalidate our thesis that alchemy doesn't scale?

We dive into the SOTA from Chinese AI labs, the chip wars, sanctions, and loopholes.

At Air Street, we search for ideas that are non-consensus today but have the potential to flip into being voted consensus by the market in a few years' time. We see this in founders who are working on unfashionable ideas that are difficult to pull off. These teams have a deep-seated conviction that the weight of evidence is on their side and the timing is right to chip away at the problem. 

The generative AI copyright wars took a new turn recently, when the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) announced that it was suing music generation services Suno and Udio for massive infringement of copyright. The lawsuit alleges the systematic unauthorized use of copyrighted works to train the two companies’ models and points to how some of their output either closely resembles or d...

Powering breakthrough visual storytelling with AI-first visual effects for Hollywood.

Welcome to the latest issue of your guide to AI, an editorialized newsletter covering the key developments in AI policy, research, industry, and startups over the last month.

There are also specific dynamics at play in the frontier model space that will likely prevent the market from correcting in the near future. These have the potential to impact the entire AI value chain, from the chipmakers through to investors and founders.

What went wrong and how to prevent this from happening again.

We recently stumbled across the first ever Hacker News thread discussing  Attention Is All You Need , the landmark paper that describes the transformer architecture. The work had come out in the summer of 2017, but it took a while for the wider AI community to begin to grasp its significance and build on it.  Most commenters at the time expressed interest or admiration. Some didn’t understand it....

Guide to AI is an editorialized newsletter covering the key developments in AI policy, research, industry, and startups over the last month. Produced by Air Street Capital.

If foundation model economics is alchemy, what does that mean for hardware? Read more at press.airstreet.com

Revisiting our work on European readiness. It’s been close to six months since we  published our report  covering the challenges early-stage defense companies face in Europe. Since then, we’ve seen a rush of defense-related announcements from European governments, speculation about the future of US support for the Ukrainian war effort, and the Russian military continuing to step up its offensive....

Yesterday, I was the opening act at the MIT Tech Review EmTech Digital conference, where I spoke about how easy it is to miss step changes in AI progress among the day-to-day swirl. This prompted a series of reflections, which I’ve laid out in this blog.