Benedict Evans

I'm sure there's a bunch of books and papers about where does industrial policy work?

Where does it not work?

From a technology analyst perspective, I think of this in terms of, A, what are you doing that would make this harder?

And B, think of this as just more startups.

If you do like this ridiculous law that California had a year or two ago, if you treat this as like nuclear weapons...

And you say this is incredibly dangerous and we need to have it under extremely tight control so that nobody does anything bad with it.

Which is basically the EU approach.

Go back to your economics class.

Policies have trade-offs.

To govern is to choose.

You're making a choice when you do that and you're choosing that has costs.

Personally, like most people in tech, I think the idea that this is all going to kind of produce bioweapons and take over the world and kill us all is just idiotic.

I think it's just a bunch of kind of childish logical fallacies within that.

But you have to be conscious.

You say if we're going, you know, the kind of the Biden approach to generative AI very explicitly was to say this is sort of social media 2.0.

Like social media to one was terrible and destructive and bad.

And I think there's a

I don't agree with that.

I think there's a huge dose of moral panic within that.

But be that as it may, if you make a decision that says we are deliberately and explicitly going to make it really hard to build models and really hard to start a company that builds models and really hard to do anything with any of this stuff, then guess what?