Is Sam Altman Gambling With the U.S. Economy? Sam Altman tours the Stargate AI data center in Abilene, Texas on Tuesday, Sept. 23, 2025. Sam Altman tours the Stargate AI data center in Abilene, Texas on Tuesday, Sept. 23, 2025. Welcome back to In the Loop, new twice-weekly newsletter about AI. If you're reading this in your browser, why not subscribe to have the next one delivered straight to your inbox?

Governments made a "lack of concrete progress" toward regulating artificial intelligence this year even as the question of the technology's safety rocketed up the global agenda, according to the 2023 "State of AI" report, published Thursday. The field of AI safety "shed its status as the unloved cousin of the AI research world and took center-stage [in 2023] for the first time," the report said. But amid a lack of global consensus on the way forward for regulation, the developers of cutting-edge AI systems were "making a push to shape norms" by proposing their own regulatory models. While last year it seemed that open-source efforts were taking the lead in AI, Big Tech reasserted its hold over the sector in 2023, the report said. This year, amid an ongoing shortage of powerful computer chips, the largest tech companies gained leverage both from their existing computing infrastructure and their large capital reserves, as the cash required to train large AI models continues to escalate.

When ChatGPT--the ingenious, garrulous, and occasionally unhinged chatbot from OpenAI--was asked this week how much the company behind it is worth, its responses included: "It is likely that its worth is in the hundreds of millions of dollars, if not more." Microsoft, which is rumored to be weighing a $10 billion investment in OpenAI on top of an earlier $1 billion commitment, is betting that the company is worth a lot more--despite the fact neither ChatGPT nor other AI models made by OpenAI are yet raking in huge amounts of cash. OpenAI has built several impressive and attention-grabbing demos and powers a popular autocomplete function for coders offered by Microsoft's GitHub. But despite the hype swirling around its technology, the startup hasn't created a breakout, highly lucrative product or business. "We don't really know what ChatGPT is going to be great at," says James Cham, a partner at Bloomberg Beta, an investment firm.

I recently caught up with Ian Hogarth and Nathan Benaich, who each year produce The State of AI Report, a must-read snapshot of how commercial applications of A.I. are evolving. Benaich is the founder of Air Street Capital, a solo venture capital fund that is one of the savviest early-stage investors in A.I.-based startups I know. Hogarth is the former co-founder of concert discovery app Songkick and has since go on to become a prominent angel investor as well one of the founders behind the founder-lead European venture capital platform Plural. There's always a lot to digest in their report. But one of the key takeaways from this year's State of AI is that concerns established tech giants and their affiliated A.I. research labs would monopolize the development of A.I. have been proven, if not exactly wrong, then at least premature. While it is true that Alphabet (which has both Google Brain and Deepmind in its stable), Meta, Microsoft, and OpenAI (which is closely partnered now with Microsoft) are building large "foundational models" for natural language processing and image and video generation, they are hardly the only players in the game.

AI is expanding in two key areas of human activity and market investment -- health and language. Picking up the conversation from where we left off last week, we discussed AI applications and research in those areas with AI investors and authors of the State of AI 2021 report, Nathan Benaich and Ian Hogarth. After releasing what probably was the most comprehensive report on the State of AI in 2020, Air Street Capital and RAAIS founder Nathan Benaich and AI angel investor and UCL IIPP visiting professor Ian Hogarth are back for more. Last week, we discussed AI's underpinning: Machine learning in production, MLOps, and data-centric AI. This week we elaborate on specific areas of applications, investment, and growth.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is the ultimate manifestation of the promise of technology to improve our lives. Within our lifetimes AI will become omnipresent across every segment of economic activity and within every field of human endeavour. But AI is not a single genus but a constellation of technologies that must work together in harmony. By 2030 over 50 billion devices will be connected to the Internet of Things and will include new sensor technologies which will capture and create new modalities of data. Mastering this constellation of artificial intelligence technologies is a rainbow of minds from data scientists to robot builders and AI investors.

Artificial intelligence researchers don't like it when you ask them to name the top AI labs in the world, possibly because it's so hard to answer. There are some obvious contenders when it comes to commercial AI labs. U.S. Big Tech -- Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple and Microsoft -- have all set up dedicated AI labs over the last decade. There's also DeepMind, which is owned by Google parent company Alphabet, and OpenAI, which counts Elon Musk as a founding investor. "Wow, I hate this question," Mark Riedl, associate professor at the Georgia Tech School of Interactive Computing, told CNBC when asked to pick his standouts.

LONDON – A 32-year-old venture capitalist's new fund has caught the eye of Twitter, Google execs and the billionaire founder of Clash of Clans maker Supercell. Nathan Benaich, founder and general partner of boutique VC firm Air Street Capital, announced last week that he has raised a new $17 million fund from a host of big names to invest in start-ups in the U.S. and Europe that have artificial intelligence at their core. But who is this investor and why are people in Silicon Valley and beyond so keen to back him? Benaich has straddled the worlds of venture capital and artificial intelligence for almost a decade. Unlike many VCs, he is known for having a firm grasp on the latest developments in AI and which companies are behind them.

AI is one of the most rapidly growing domains today. Keeping track and taking stock of AI requires not just constant attention, but also the ability to dissect and evaluate across a number of dimensions. This is exactly what Air Street Capital and RAAIS founder Nathan Benaich and AI angel investor, and UCL IIPP Visiting Professor Ian Hogarth have done. In the aptly titled State of AI Report 2019 published on June 28, Benaich and Hogarth embark on a 136-slide long journey on all things AI: technology breakthroughs and their capabilities, supply, demand and concentration of talent working in the field, large platforms, financing and areas of application for AI-driven innovation today and tomorrow, special sections on the politics of AI, and AI in China. Benaich and Hogarth are more than venture capitalists: They both have extensive AI background, having worked on a number of AI initiatives, from research to startups.

Tucked into a courtyard in central Paris, the 35 employees of Snips are hunched over their computers trying to put the finishing touches on a new version of the company's artificial intelligence app for smartphones. The company is packed full of big brains, many of them products of France's leading universities and a culture that is historically strong in mathematics. And they're not afraid to let you know it. Etched into winding wooden staircases that lead to Snips offices are a series of math puzzles that job recruits are asked to solve as they work their way upstairs. Snips' app wants to scan all the data across the apps on your smartphones to deliver insight about you and eventually become a hyper-smart personal assistant. But it promises to take a privacy-friendly approach by keeping all the data on your phone, where it will do the processing, rather than hoovering data up into the cloud.