Another Podcast

Generative AI is the thing, and all new software will be built around it. But while everyone is experimenting and some people are getting huge value out of ChatGPT or Midjourney right now, others haven't worked out how to make it useful. Yet. So how do we find use-cases for a universal, general purpose, magical technology, and is that a crazy question?

Will the US finally break up Tiktok? Will the EU break up the App Store? And why does Temu want to keep your orders under $800?

Are there questions that an AI chatbot shouldn't answer? Should it always give the 'right answer'? Are you sure? Google has egg on its face this week, but this isn't easy, and with generative AI, we're going to re-run all the arguments and panics we had over content moderation in the last decade.  

We?re past peak TV, the charts are curving down, and Hollywood is pretty sure that streaming was a bad idea. On the other hand, music is growing strongly and might even end up bigger than CDs. Why have newspapers, books, movies, TV and music coped so differently with the internet?

Yes, we bought one. What?s it like and what can we say that we didn?t say last summer? What has Apple built, what is it for, what does it mean for Meta, and why does it cost $3,500? 

Everyone needs an AI strategy (there was an email from the CEO!) but what would that mean? How does a big company work out how to deploy a new technology? How is this the same as every other platform shift, and how might it be different? 

Every year, Benedict produces a big presentation exploring macro and strategic trends in the tech industry. Here are some of the key takeaways from this year's presentation - AI, and everything else.

Presentation - https://www.ben-evans.com/presentations 

We spent the last 30 years building structures on top or instead of the raw links of the web, from Google to TikTok? but now LLMs might read all the links for us. 

ChatGPT and LLMs can do anything (or look like they can), so what can you do with them? How do you know? Do we move to chat bots as a magical general-purpose interface, or do we unbundle them back into single-purpose software?

A conversation with Leonard Brody, Co-Founder and Executive Chairman of Caravan. How do you build brands and consumer products in a world of infinite choice and infinite media? And how does celebrity fit into that? 

Caravan

Nine months on, everyone is still trying to understand where ChatGPT will go, but one big question for us: how is this useful, for us, today? What's the product? How does this get unbundled?

What is Threads? A Twitter that doesn't suck? Something else? Could it work? 

Two weeks after Apple showed us the Vision Pro - what have they built, what is it for, what does it mean for Meta, and why does it cost $3,500? Check back in 2025.

Apple's product pages (watch some of this if you haven't already). 

Apple does VR. We watched. We took pictures. We talk about it. 

We don't know what generative AI will be (or what will happen next week), but we're starting to work out what questions to ask

Buzzfeed News dies just as Reddit and Stack Overflow say they'll charge LLMs to train on their data. Who owns content and how does distribution work in an LLM age? Are those the right questions? What should we be asking? 

Crypto crashed, metaverse was silly, and now we know that generative AI is the future of everything. Right? Well, sort of. But though the hype has moved on, the reasons web3 and VR were interesting haven't really changed. 

If you spend an hour typing prompts into MidJourney, who owns the result? There are easy answers to this, but they're probably wrong - these are new questions with new puzzles, much like radio, photography or music before. 

Generative machine learning is moving so fast it's impossible to keep up. What questions can we ask about GPT4, before everything changes again next week?

The 'ban it' snowball is getting bigger and bigger, but what problem are we solving - privacy, or propaganda? How does this scale to all the other Chinese apps? And meanwhile, how well do we pay attention to the product itself? 

Amazon sold close to $40bn of advertising last year - bigger than Prime, bigger than the entire global newspaper industry and probably more profitable than AWS. But is this really advertising, rent, or something else? And what does that mean for Google?

Blog post and charts 

Microsoft thinks (or says) that Generative ML will reset the search market, unlocking Google's market share and collapsing those 60% operating margins. Really? What would that mean?

What would generative search mean? Generative video? Indeed, Generative products? Last week we talked about how ChatGPT, LLMs and generative ML work - now, what might they mean. 

The wave of enthusiasm around ChatGPT and generative AI feels like another Imagenet moment - a step change in what ?AI? can do that could generalise far beyond the cool demos. But - it makes things up, and it doesn't actually understand anything it's doing. Probably. What does that mean? What's this for?

Chips have always been the foundation of tech, but the rest of us didn't need to pay much attention - stuff just got faster every year. But now there are actual real, big, interesting structural changes happening - what does that look like?

Within and Activision, but also PA Semi and Android - how do we think about big tech buying stuff, and why is it hard for regulators?

When machine learning started really working, back in 2012-13-14, the demos were amazing, but it wasn't immediately obvious how universal the applications would be. The same with Generative AI now - now - the demos are cool, but what will they mean? How will this generalise to change search or law firms?

What does Anker have to do with Mr Beast, Amazon ads or Aesop? A chat about unbundling ecommerce and building brands in a world of infinite media. 

What can we say about a ?crypto? crash if we?re not crypto people, nor Wall Street people? How much does it matter?

Every now and then, big company CEOs all read the same tech trends piece and send the same email - "what's our strategy for this?!" And in 2022, there were a lot of "metaverse?!" emails. But what does 'metaverse' mean, can you have a strategy for it, and do you even need to care? Probably not. 

Generative AI looks like second wave of ML hat might be as big a deal as the Imagenet wave from 2013 or so. What questions can we ask?

What does Adobe's purchase of Figma tell us about the ways that software is changing, and the kinds of tools that people build and use? And, how long until the antitrust lawsuit arrives?

?Software eats the world?, and now it?s eating TV, but then what? Pretty soon software seems to stop mattering, and all the questions become TV questions, fashion questions, or music questions, while tech moves on to something else. 

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Adam Neumann's latest venture shines a light on some of the interesting questions that arise, such as: What is this, what could it be, and can it work? Can this person make it work? As well as, is this the kind of deal we should be doing? Do we understand this?

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What does a light on a restaurant table say about the failure of smart home startups? Or Shein?

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The US is fundamentally rethinking its approach to competition, and M&A, and tech, and big tech buying startups. The FTC trying  to block Meta from buying Within is the test case for all of those. How many interesting problems can we cover in 30 minutes?

When big tech buys small tech

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What does 'focus' mean for a trillion dollar company? Amazon is buying doctors and Apple might be a bank - should we change our assumptions for what these kinds of companies would never do? How does the point of leverage change?

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Five years ago AI was everything, but attention moved on (Metaverse! Crypto!) and ?Applied AI? became useful but boring. Now things like DALL-E look cool, but what are they useful for? What?s the second wave?

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Advertising is $700bn - after IDFA and the cookie apocalypse, what else is breaking apart and where do things land?

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The more that governments, regulators, policy-makers and activists demand that tech works differently, the more argument there is, and the more that tech people and companies people say ?no!?  But what does it mean when a tech company, or indeed any company in any industry, says ?no?? 

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Shein added 60k new products in the last week - double Zara and H&M's total combined stock. Netflix made more shows last year than the entire US TV industry back when it start streaming. What happens when you remove physical limits? What's the feedback cycle?

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What do we mean when we say 'the metaverse'? And what do we mean by interoperability?

It's far more useful to get specific about how we think about the future of the internet. What will it do and not do? How will it work and not work? If we are going to make predictions and be wrong, we might as well be wrong in specific ways.

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Elon made a lot of noise this week, but what else was going on? We chat about half a dozen things that happened in tech this week, all of them more interesting than the bird company. 

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Netflix missed its numbers, but what's really going on in streaming? Is this a tech company, and does it have winner-takes-all effects? Or are all the questions to ask really about television? And whatever happened to the Apple TV?

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Elon is on manoeuvres, but what are the problems? Has he thought about this at all? Why has Twitter always been such a mess, and why is it such a tiny company? 

?Big tech? is big and scary, but do they care about your market? They could come in, yes, and make a mess, but would that make any sense for them? And, do you look like a seal?

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Web3 will remake networks, content and online publishing - apparently. But how many cycles have we been through, how much do the forms, networks and intersections change, and what does it mean to own your data? Is that even possible? 

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A chat about Ukraine without pretending we know about Russia, geopolitics and Ukraine. Rather we will focus on some of the things happening in and around tech with regards to this. And we are absolutely conscious these may not be the most important things happening right now.

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Crypto is so big and yet so unclear that we can?t even agree what to call it. What does ?web3? mean, what might it mean, how do we ignore the noise, and what questions might matter?

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Everything comes out of Covid (we hope), especially retail. US ecommerce penetration jumped forward a little and the UK a lot, but what kinds of companies, brands and stories can be created now that everything and anything can be online?

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