Benedict Evans

It seems to me right now you could do like a double blind test of the same prompt given to Grok, Claude, Gemini, Mistral, Deep Seek.

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 as their defaults.

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 actually change the experience of what a smartphone is, what the ecosystem is?

Does it end up kind of getting Microsofted in the sense that...

It's funny, I suppose my take on AI, controversial take on AI, rather like my controversial take on crypto is being a centrist in that it 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.

At a minimum, it's more like a computing thing.

And then you've got people going around saying, no, this is more like, you know, the electricity or the industrial revolution or, you know, transhumance 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 10 or 15 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 a whole bunch of different weird new questions, just like there were a bunch of different weird new questions before.