Benedict Evans
👤 PersonAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
Yeah.
Is it the chatbot as product where you get this blank screen
And you kind of look at it and you scratch your head and you have to think, well, what is it that I would do with this?
And then you have to form new habits around it.
Or is it that it's wrapped in a product and UI where somebody else has said it would be really useful for this, wouldn't it?
And then you look at it and go, oh, yeah, I could do that.
I think it is presently, and I'm going to get a binary statement.
I think today it has zero value for quantitative analysis.
Oh, interesting.
Because if, well, let me, let me qualify that.
Do the numbers need to be right or roughly right?
Because what all of these things do is they give you something that's roughly right and roughly accurate.
is a spectrum but it's always you don't want pi to be 3.1 depends how big the circle you're measuring is right um you know this is the line about pi that you know we can calculate it the like then however many digits we have is like enough to calculate you know the diameter of the galaxy of the universe or something but people still adding more numbers so you know there's a little bit of you know it's paradox in here you know you get infinitely close
At a certain point, it doesn't matter.
And this is, at a high level, this is some of the AGI argument, that if the thing gets infinitely close to reasoning without ever actually reasoning, does it matter?
At a certain point, if the thing is always right, if the thing is only wrong once in a billion years, does it matter that it's not always right?
The problem today is it's not wrong once in a billion years.
It's wrong a dozen times a page.
And I don't know.
So I had a very early example of this.