AI in 2025 – The great normalisation, with Nathan Benaich
AI in 2025 – The great normalisation, with Nathan Benaich  
Podcast: Azeem Azhar's Exponential View
Published On: Thu Dec 26 2024
Description: Nathan Benaich, Founder and General Partner of Air Street Capital, joins me to discuss AI in 2025. From runaway consumer adoption to evolving enterprise moats, from still-elusive AI-driven drug breakthroughs to the renewed vigour in robotics, several core themes stood out.1. Frontier models & AI at scaleIn 2024, we witnessed the astonishing growth of frontier models and their deployment on a massive scale. OpenAI’s GPT-4 and GPT-4 o1, Anthropic’s Claude and Google’s Gemini have all demonstrated that being “at the frontier” is increasingly the price of admission.2. Consumers, voice and infinite worldsOn the consumer side, we have reason to believe 2025 will be the year of AI-enabled workflows that feel truly natural. Voice, multimodality and integration into daily routines—like transcribing my morning thoughts during a commute—are becoming routine.3. Accelerating science & drug discoveryWhile AI accelerates lab automation and data analysis—improving reproducibility and speeding up processes—the promised “AI-designed blockbuster drug” is still in the pipeline. Clinical timelines and regulatory hurdles do not compress easily.4. Geopolitics, funding and the sovereign questionAs training costs skyrocket and models require unimaginable scale, questions mount… Who funds these massive compute requirements? Will nation-states view these labs as strategic assets, akin to telecoms or chipmakers?5. From explosive capability gains to refined utilityWe’ve grown numb to what was once astonishing—perfect speech synthesis, infinite text generation, zero-shot coding. The capabilities of models now surpass human levels in many benchmarks. The next major shifts may be subtler, or simply less obviously spectacular.Connect with us:Exponential ViewNathan Benaich  Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.