AI in 2025 – The great normalisation, with Nathan Benaich

Azeem Azhar's Exponential View

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 scale

In 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 worlds

On 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 discovery

While 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 question

As 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 utility

We’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.

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