Benedict Evans

So I think regulation of AI is sort of the wrong level of abstraction.

Talking about regulating AI as AI is the wrong level of abstraction.

It's like saying we're going to regulate databases or regulate spreadsheets or regulate cars.

Well, we do, but not like that.

When you regulate stuff, there are trade-offs.

You learn about this in your first year in economics class, like regulation has costs and consequences and it's not necessarily, you know, there's always a trade-off.

And often you're making product decisions or engineering decisions that do actually have trade-offs.

There's like a three-way trade-off of like what's good for the product, what's good for the consumer, what's good for competition, what's good for the company, what's good for the consumer.

Well, what's your objective?

Is your objective to have a nice press release?

No, it's to dominate AI.

A long time ago, I used to get these questions about like, how can we replicate Silicon Valley?

And I always feel like the answers to those questions as much as possible is you can't.

I mean, occasionally there are things you can do, like you can create funding structures, you can make it easy, you can try and jumpstart startup ecosystems, you can try and jumpstart funding availability.

But most of the answer is things like getting out of the way.

I think that the idea of trying to create national champions is very hard.

Now, that almost kind of becomes an economist's question rather than a technology question.

How do you create national champions?

Where has that worked?

Where has that not worked?