Benedict Evans: evaluation

Transcript context

…Yeah. I want to go in a slightly different direction. Something that I'm curious if you're following is just the anti-AI sentiment that feels like is growing. It feels like if you've seen these surveys, AI is less popular than ICE, people are trying to stop data centers from being built. I think Eric Schmidt just did a commencement speech and people were booing him every time he mentioned AI. Just like, "What do you think is going on? Where do you think this goes over time?" It's interesting. And it's a big sort of fuzzy mass of different stuff, I think. There is tangible, like my electricity bill went up, which applies actually in a very small number of places, objectively, but it did, and this is a question. The water thing is weird because it's just completely fake. And I should explain what I mean here. Data centers use water for cooling. It's mostly closed loop, but the number of data centers relative to the total amount of water use in the USA is tiny. I actually went and dug into this that the Livermore lab did a study at the end of 2024 where they estimated US data center water consumption. And it came out at about 0.017% of US water consumption. Now, obviously if you live in a small town and you've got one well and they capped the well and gave all the water to the data center, then you're really pissed off. But that's a planning problem. That's not a data center problem. In generality, yes, this is data centers of what, like 5% of US energy, and might grow at 1% a year for the next five years, one percentage point a year, but the water stuff is just nonsense. And then you get into more tangible like, well, what is happening with this? Is it taking jobs away? Where you can watch a bunch of three-hour podcasts of economists talking to each other and the main answer is we really don't know yet. There's a bunch of charts that kind of say yes and a bunch of charts that kind of say no. And clearly there's a slowdown in employment of 18 to 24 year olds, but that seems to be the same for people who do and don't have degrees, and the same for people in fields that look exposed to AI and feels that they look exposed to AI. So there's a lot of econometric argument about this. And I mean, there's a broader point here, in fact, which is a different point here, that we have very little data on what's going on in AI, from anyone. The model labs don't tell us anything. They don't give us any meaningful usage information. They give us these weird studies of people, how many people use this for this and that. They don't give us a daily active use number. We do not have a daily active user number for us for ChatGPT. It's crazy. And all the data comes from academic economists trying to back stuff out of BLS surveys. Or consultancies and marketing agencies like spending a whole bunch of money to survey 20,000 people and saying, "What are you doing with this stuff?" We don't have good data on what's going on and how many people are really using this, but to the employment question, hence there's a lot of people looking through all the stuff that the US census collects and trying to work out, "Well, where can we see this? Can we see productivity? What could we see?" And the answer right now I think is there's no clear consensus that we're seeing an impact on jobs, but of course, politically that doesn't matter. e this? Can we see productivity? What could we see?" And the answer right now I think is there's no clear consensus that we're seeing an impact on jobs, but of course, politically that doesn't matter. If you're a student and you can't get a job, and that clearly is an issue, whether it's because of AI or whether it's because of Trump and tariffs is a different question. Then you get niche things like people who draw book covers for young adult romance novels are very upset that now you can get a picture of a naked woman on back of a dragon flying through a volcano without paying them. I'm sorry, I'm being deliberately unkind, but there's a little... And particularly novelists, people who write eBooks, there's a huge culture war over whether it's okay to use AI. There's this whole sort of AI slop question, and obviously you show the number that like 30, 40% of your podcasts are generated by AI. There's a big fuzzy massive questions. Some of this, I think it's a little bit like the backlash we had around social, but much more compressed. And like social, some of the backlash around social was true, and some of it was sort of true, and some of it wasn't. Always like exemplified in the whole Facebook sells your data thing, which is just, A, not true, and B, the people who believe it are absolutely adamant that of course it's true, and you're obviously a lunatic for suggesting otherwise. It's like the line from Jonathan Swift that you can't reason somebody out of an idea that went reasonably to. So you get this kind of wide, it was a long answer question, but you've got this wide spread of ideas just as you kind of did with social. There's like 20 different things, some of which are really real, and some of which are really not real. And a lot of which are kind of a fuzzy mess in the middle. All of which means that meanwhile, you've got Trump saying he wants a new executive order on dangerous models, which I actually don't think is the thing that drives the backlash. The worrying about myth or cyber, I don't feel like that's a main street America conversation, but that's the thing that got Trump interested in this stuff again.…

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