What matters in tech? Newsletter, essays and presentations by Benedict Evans.| Benedict Evans
Microsoft and IBM each dominated their generation of tech, and they each lost that dominance, not because of anything they did, nor because of anti-trust, but because the business they controlled stopped being the centre of tech.| Benedict Evans
What’s going to happen in ecommerce and retail? TV? TV ads? Retail? Brands? Online advertising? There are half a dozen huge industries where all of the cards are being thrown up in the air, and no-one really knows where they’re going to land.| Benedict Evans
What do we do now that there’s more in the newsfeed than we can possibly read? Can the algorithmic sample ever actually work, or do we swing back to 1:1 messaging? How do Stories rebundle that? And what happens to all the traffic that the newsfeed provides?| Benedict Evans
It matters that Apple’s new Siri will be late, and it matters more that Apple didn’t realise. Is it more than that?| Benedict Evans
AI metrics| Benedict Evans
Meta has spent at least $50bn on VR and AR so far, but we’re still in the VR winter: the devices aren’t good enough or cheap enough and the user base is flat. But no matter how good the devices get, how many people will care?| Benedict Evans
Hundreds of millions of people have tried ChatGPT, but most of them haven’t been back. Every big company has done a pilot, but far fewer are in deployment. Some of this is just a matter of time. But LLMs might also be a trap: they look like products and they look magic, but they aren’t. Maybe we ha| Benedict Evans
Everyone has heard of machine learning now, and every big company is working on projects around ‘AI’. We know this is a Next Big Thing. But we don’t yet have a settled sense of quite what machine learning means - what it will mean for tech companies or for companies in the broader economy, how to| Benedict Evans
Every year, I produce a big presentation exploring macro and strategic trends in the tech industry. New in May 2025, ‘AI eats the world’.| Benedict Evans
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? What are the products?| Benedict Evans
If you put all the world’s knowledge into an AI model and use it to make something new, who owns that and who gets paid? This is a completely new problem that we’ve been arguing about for 500 years.| Benedict Evans
ChatGPT and generative AI will change how we work, but how different is this to all the other waves of automation of the last 200 years? What does it mean for employment? Disruption? Coal consumption?| Benedict Evans
The wave of enthusiasm around generative networks feels like another Imagenet moment - a step change in what ‘AI’ can do that could generalise far beyond the cool demos. What can it create, and where are the humans in the loop?| Benedict Evans
