Another Podcast (Benedict Evans, Toni Cowan-Brown)

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 

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?

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

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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. 

A quarter century after 'don't be evil', a judge has found that Google is abusing its monopoly in search. But no-one knows what happens next, and whether this ruling will change anything. Will Apple build a search engine? Will ChatGPT change search? Does it matter? There are many more questions than answers. 

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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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?

Online advertising is worth $300bn, and yet almost no-one that doesn't work on an ad team really understands much of it. So what is the cookie apocalypse, what does it mean, and where is the money and power moving? No, we don't know either. 

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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. 

Why hasn't tech disrupted mobile network operators? Smartphones changed everything about mobile, and yet the networks are all still there with pretty much the same business. Does software always matter? At what level of the stack? And what's the read-across to cars?

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This is a follow-up to our conversation on Ad Tech with someone who knows a little more about this space than we do - Jeremy White, Executive Editor WIRED UK.

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It's easy to say what tech companies want from AI, but much harder to talk about the product strategy - they're all pretty much the same. "Just build a better model!" Where does that go? Can they differentiate? What would it mean to differentiate a product that can do 'everything' - what would different everythings be? 

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. 

Benedict and Toni discuss remote work, collaboration and conferences in 2022.

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Benedict and Toni discuss changing habits, digital transformation and Shopify.

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

Benedict and Toni talk about data, buzzwords and TED talks.

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The new iPhones are boring, and why that's interesting. Plus, Apple and Epic stumble towards a new App Store model, and - Real Soon Now - Apple! glasses! and! cars! It's the Apple metronome. 

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Benedict and Toni talk about newsletters and more specifically, Substack.

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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 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. 

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.  

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? 

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?

'Digital transformation' sounds like a terrible marketing slogan, but it describes a pretty basic generational change in how big companies do tech. Why is that interesting if you're not a big company? 

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How do we look at China if we're *not* China experts?

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We can talk all day about crypto, or VR or Facebook, but how might we talk about *everything* in tech? What are the frameworks and tools to structure the noise? 

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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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?

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

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). 

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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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?

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

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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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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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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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?

‘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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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?

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

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

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? 

Why do we watch WWDC? Did Apple do anything that matters if you don't own an iPhone? And what's the war on privacy?

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‘Metaverse’ is the buzzword of the moment, yet it doesn’t really exist as more than a label on a whiteboard, and many of the ideas it tries to combine might not happen, or not like that. This might be the new ‘information highway.’ But however it works, some kind of break-out of new devices, new experiences and new kinds of popular culture seems pretty easy to believe in.

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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?

Benedict and Toni talk about what comes after the smartphone, and whether even matter. Maybe the models of how to think about this question have more to offer us than the question itself.

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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. 

Benedict and Toni discuss  the ongoing debates surrounding app stores, but specifically Apple's app store.

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Benedict went from being a consultant to an analyst to having his own business, but in essence, he's always been an analyst. Toni went from policy to consultancy, then from B2B sales to Formula 1. After four years of doing the podcast, we thought it would be interesting to sit down and discuss how we got here and talk all things Formula 1.

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? 

Benedict and Toni talk about Formula 1 and 50s experimental aircraft, and how they overlap in interesting ways with technology, innovation, and creation.

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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?

The barrier to entry to gaming is lower than it has ever been. But are there more gamers today? Are more 10-year-olds playing games today than they did 10 years ago? And why are we more focused on what is happening in this space?

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Benedict and Toni talk about the latest big antitrust push - the US (both states and FTC) versus Facebook. Will it work? And how to contrast it with the laws the EU will announce this week?

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One thing is obvious in tech, there are so many questions worth exploring. In 2022,  we are thinking about cars and infrastructure, crypto and web3,  AR and VR,  games and regulations. It's less about hat we focus on maybe, and more about how we think about these topics and what questions are worth paying attention to. 

For the past decade, Benedict has given an annual presentation on the state of technology, and he did the latest at Slush in Helsinki last month. In this episode we discuss some of the challenges and issues that he tried to cover.

You can find the full presentation here - https://www.ben-evans.com/presentations 

Benedict and Toni talk about the latest Slack acquisition by Salesforce and what this means for the whole 'future of work' thing.

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‘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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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?

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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As we go into the summer, we know a lot more about generative AI than we did six or nine months ago - or at least, we have better questions. 

Benedict and Toni discuss  the best ways to tell compelling stories with charts.

The presentation we discussed 

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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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Another episode on our theme ‘how to talk about X if you’re not in the field’ - this time ‘Web3’, the new brand name for crypto. How do we ignore the noise (SO much noise) and think about where and how this will be useful?

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Benedict and Toni discuss why games  matter and their place within the tech industry.

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Benedict and Toni discuss Amazon and solving problems.

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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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There are two strands to this story: the second phase of Facebook which is the Metaverse (which we previously spoke about on the podcast) and Facebook actually changing its name to Meta. If and when you decide to create a new brand because the existing brand comes with a lot of baggage, a marketing person would probably suggest you fix the problems first, and then decide how to communicate the rebrand. So why would Facebook move to ‘Meta’ today?

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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? 

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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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? 

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?

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 

This is a follow-up to our conversation on Chinese tech with someone who knows a lot more about this space than we do - Lillian Li, who writes the weekly newsletter, Chinese Characteristics.

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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 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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A conversation about creativity, working with tech and optimism with Nicolas Roope, agency and startup co-founder who has ridden many of the revolutions we talk about on this show.

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Benedict and Toni discuss the new forms of social, and specifically Clubhouse, the latest social audio app.

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Tech regulation and the problems that prompt it to fill every headline. But is structural change coming? Who will this affect? Who will notice?

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Benedict and Toni discuss how ecommerce shot up in lockdown and what habits may be sticking.

Ecommerce charts: Link

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