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 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 here on Substack and on Twitter , LinkedIn , and his personal site . Check out his writing at press.airstreet.com . Find me on Twitter (or LinkedIn 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 : * The State of AI Report * The State of Chinese AI * Open-endedness is all we’ll need * There is no scaling wall: in discussion with Eiso Kant (Poolside) * Alchemy doesn’t scale: the economics of general intelligence * Chips all the way down * The AI energy wars will get worse before they get better Other highlights/resources: * Deepseek: The Quiet Giant Leading China’s AI Race — an interview with DeepSeek CEO Liang Wenfeng via ChinaTalk , translated by Jordan Schneider , Angela Shen , Irene Zhang and others * A great position paper on open-endedness by Minqi Jiang, Tim Rocktäschel, and Ed Grefenstette — Minqi also wrote a blog post on this for us! * for China Guys only: China’s AI Regulations and How They Get Made by Matt Sheehan (+ an interview I did with Matt in 2022!) * The Simple Macroeconomics of AI by Daron Acemoglu + a critique by Maxwell Tabarrok (more links in the Report) * AI Nationalism by Ian Hogarth (from 2018) * Some analysis on the EU AI Act + regulation from Lawfare Get full access to The Gradient at thegradientpub.substack.com/

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2024 in AI, with Nathan Benaich is an episode from The Gradient Podcast by Daniel Bashir.

This episode is 108:43 long.

This episode was published on Dec 26, 2024.

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