Benedict Evans has been calling tech shifts for decades. Now he says forget the hype: AI isn't the new electricity. It's the biggest change since the iPhone, and that's plenty big enough. We talk about why everyone gets platform shifts wrong, where Google's actually vulnerable, and what real people do with AI when nobody's watching. Evans sees patterns others don't. This conversation will change how you think about what's actually happening versus what everyone says is happening. ----- Approximate Timestamps: (00:00) Introduction (01:04) What's your Most Controversial Take On AI? (05:11) Platform Shifts - The Rise Of Automatic Elevators (10:07) Profit Margins In AI (26:37) What Are The Questions We Aren't Asking About AI (39:41) What Benedict Uses AI For (44:21) Thinking By Writing (47:35) Can AI Make Something Original? (52:31) Advice for Students In The Age Of AI? (59:32) Who Will Win The AI Race? (1:11:09) What Is Success For You? ----- Thanks to our sponsors for this episode: SHOPIFY: Sign up for your one-dollar-per-month trial period at www.shopify.com/knowledgeproject ReMarkable for sponsoring this episode. Get your paper tablet at reMarkable.com today NOTION MAIL: Get Notion Mail for free right now at notion.com/knowledgeproject ----- Upgrade: Get a hand edited transcripts and ad free experiences along with my thoughts and reflections at the end of every conversation. Learn more @ fs.blog/membership ------ Newsletter: The Brain Food newsletter delivers actionable insights and thoughtful ideas every Sunday. It takes 5 minutes to read, and it’s completely free. Learn more and sign up at fs.blog/newsletter ------ Follow Shane Parrish X @ShaneAParrish Insta @farnamstreet LinkedIn Shane Parrish Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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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...
I want to start with your most controversial take on AI.
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. And then in 10 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 at each platform shift, I would imagine. What's the same?
Well, 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 dot-com bubble was different to like the late 80s 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.
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