💡 The AI Revolution is Just Beginning

Artificial intelligence can be hard to keep up with. It’s a highly technical field, and major leaps forward happen so frequently that it’s hard to make sense of one breakthrough development before the next one has arrived.

That’s where my latest podcast guests come in: Nathan Benaich and Ian Hogarth. Their annual ‘State of AI’ report takes stock of the major developments in artificial intelligence, as well as predicting a path for our near future.

The authors know their stuff. Nathan is the General Partner of Air Street Capital, a venture capital firm investing in AI-first technology and life science companies. Ian Hogarth is the founder of concert-discovery service Songkick, used by 17 million people worldwide. He’s also an angel investor in more than 100 startups, and a Visiting Professor at UCL. They’ve seen the inner workings of dozens of companies with artificial intelligence at the core of what they do.

The podcast (like their report) is brimming with insight into what AI is doing, and what it might do next, in areas from drug discovery to warfare. It’s a clear, precise look at how the great general-purpose technology of our age is changing the world right now.

You can listen to my conversation with Nathan and Ian on all podcast platforms, including Apple Podcasts and Spotify, or read a transcript of it here.

The Big Idea

I asked Nathan which AI advance of the last 12 months represented a big breakthrough – a Sputnik moment. He pointed to work being done by DeepMind, Salesforce and others that use natural language processing (NLP) – AI techniques that analyse and replicate human language – to read protein sequences and determine how they work.