Why Everyone Is Wrong About AI (Including You) | Benedict Evans

It seems to me right now, you could do, like, a double blind test of the same prompt given to Grock, Claude, Gemini, Mistral, Deepsea. I bet most people wouldn't be able to tell which is which. Benedict Evans is a technology analyst known for his insightful takes on platform shifts in the tech industry. He sees AI differently than others. He spent decades spotting patterns others miss and dives into how people really use AI. Why is it that somebody looks at this and gets it and goes back every week, but only every week? The very high level threat to Google is that you have this moment of discontinuity in which everybody resets their priors that we consider set of faults. And so it's no longer just the default that you go and use Google. There's this sort of question for Apple around, does this not actually change the experience of what the smartphone is, what the ecosystem is? Does it end up kind of getting Microsofted in the sense that I wanna start with your most controversial take on AI. It's funny. My I suppose my take on AI, controversial take on AI, rather like my controversial take on, crypto as being a centrist in that seems to me very clear this is, like, the biggest thing since the iPhone. But I also think it's only the biggest thing since the iPhone. And there's a bunch of people who think, no. It's much more than that. It's, minimum. It's more like computing. And then you've got people going around and saying, no. This is more like, you know, the electricity or the industrial revolution or, you know, transhumanism or something. My sort of base case is to say, this is kind of another platform shift, and all the new stuff will be built around this for the next ten or fifteen years. And then there'll be something else. And so the impact on employment will be kind of like the impact on employment from the other platform shifts and the impact on the economy and productivity and intellectual property. And there'll be there'll be a whole bunch of different weird new questions just like there were a bunch of different weird new questions before. And then in ten years time, it'll just be software. Put this in historical context for us with other platform shifts. Everybody's saying this time is different, which everybody does that each platform shift out of the margin. What's the same? Well, that's the there's a there's a famous book about, financial bubbles called This Time is Different. Because people always say this time is different, and it always is. Like, the .com bubble was different to, like, the late eighties and the Japanese financial bubble was different to, you know, pick any other bubble you want. They're always different. But that doesn't mean they're not a bubble. And the same thing here, I have a diagram I use a lot from, 1995. …