Essays - Benedict Evans

The typical big American company today has hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of different pieces of software.

There are only two things you can say with certainty about token prices: we’re in a supply crunch, and this is unstable.

It would be really nice if we had some way to analyse which jobs, companies and industries were exposed to AI, and if we could assign scores, and build charts, and map that against the progress of large language models.

“Jakub and Mark set the research direction for the long run.

Any consumer internet system with critical mass becomes, in part, a Mechanical Turk.

In the early days of the consumer Internet, a lot of metrics floated around and no-one was clear what to measure or what it meant.

This chart is very ‘glass half-empty or half-full?’

I made this slide for a presentation I’m giving next week, but I think it’s worth picking up and talking about in its own right.

People have been claiming that Apple has forgotten how to innovate since the early 1980s, or longer - it’s a standing joke in talking about the company.

Most what I do for a living is research and analysis.

“Do, or do not- there is no try” Every week, there’s a new model, a new approach, and something new to play with.

A search engine is a vast mechanical Turk - a reinforcement learning engine that uses human activity to understand the web.

My old boss Marc Andreessen liked to say that every failed idea from the Dotcom bubble would work now.

It can feel a little odd to write about anything other than generative AI these days, but I sometimes remind people that all the things that we were talking about in October 2022 are still there.

No-one outside Apple has really used any Apple Intelligence features yet.

I will fly to India on Monday for a brief trip, and so I just spent an hour struggling through a very buggy online visa application process.

The manuscript for ‘A Logic Named Joe’ In 1946, my grandfather, writing as ‘Murray Leinster’, published a science fiction story called ‘A Logic Named Joe’.

There’s a story in one of Georges Simeon’s 1930s detective stories that I think about sometimes when talking about a certain kind of AI problem.

This image comes from a book by Martin Honeysett called ‘Microphobia’, published in 1982.

In the late 1990s, the UK Post Office deployed a new point-of-sale computer system, built for it by Fujitsu.