AI Eats the World? A Reality Check with Benedict Evans
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Mobile didn't need to wait for the Internet. The Internet didn't need to wait for PCs, and PCs didn't need to wait for consumer electronics and semiconductors and so on. So you've always got this accelerating adoption.
Benedict Evans is a tech analyst known for his presentation AI eats the world. He sees AI differently than the world, spotting patterns others miss, and dives into how people really use AI.
They built this amazing piece, incredibly sophisticated, very expensive global infrastructure with enormous growth in use all the time, and it changed all of our lives, and we all pay for it. And they didn't make any money from it because all the value moved up stack. The place that's got product market fit right now is coding. And Swapi, it's gone from, whatever it was, 9,000,000,000 run rate the at end of last year to $47,000,000,000 run rate now. But that's all software, isn't it? So what happens when someone else in some other field gets something to work? One of the characteristics of tec
Yo. Google said that the risk of underinvesting is riskier than overinvesting.
Investors are kind of looking at all these companies and saying
Every major technology platform shift creates the same challenge, separating what we know from what we're guessing. AI is already changing software development, reshaping infrastructure spending, and forcing companies to rethink products and workflows. But many of the biggest questions remain open. Who captures value? What becomes a product? What gets automated? And what entirely new categories emerge? Benedict Evans has spent years studying how previous technology waves unfolded, from PCs and the Internet to smartphones and cloud computing. This conversation, we discuss what AI has already ch
Thank you.
Last time you were here, we were discussing the first iteration of your presentation, AI Eats the World. You wrote it almost a year and a half ago. At this point, you always begin your presentation with what are the big questions. But I'm curious this time before getting to the questions going forward, I want you to reflect on what have we learned since you originally made the presentation? What's played out? And let's reflect back.
What's changed in last year? So I think we have much more of a sense of diverging product strategy. We have much more of a sense of kind of competitive tension that goes beyond just make a bigger model faster with more compute. We've had several iterations of OpenAI strategy in particular from sort of everything all at once yesterday to, oops, no, maybe we should double down on coding, clearly agentic coding started working. And so, all the focus in tech has kind of narrowed in massively onto that as something that has absolute product market fit in the sense that the customers are pulling it
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