Benedict Evans: prediction

Transcript context

…Yeah. I mean, there's a narrow point here, which is that I would place... I don't like argument from authority. And I don't think the fact that you run AI lab suddenly gives you... Or rather, if you're going to use argument from authority, then it should be relevant to the field. So, I'm interested in Dario's opinions on where models are going to go in the next six to 12 months. I'm not particularly interested in it opinions on series of labor and market value and comparative advantage. Yeah, maybe he had a course on that at university, so did I. So, I think one needs to be a little bit cautious on what Dario says. And that's setting aside the cynical view that he's just doing that department stock, which I don't believe at all. So this kind of comes back to my point about platform shifts. Every time we have a new technology, it automates away a bunch of jobs. And then that automation, whether it's price elasticity, and the enablement of the fact that they became automated, unlock so much of new jobs. And so you go back to 1800, 90% of us were peasants, and our major concern was like, are the crops going to fail? Because then we'll all go hungry. Or worse. And so ever since then, we've been automating jobs and creating new jobs, and you can always see the job that's going to go away, and you don't know the new job because it doesn't exist yet, and it's like something that sounds dumb anyway. Like railway engineer, what's a railway? Why would that be a thing? Who would want to go that fast? And so we've had that process over and over again. This is what any first-year economic student would tell you. We've had this process over and over again since 1800. And each time you go through it, you get a bunch of frictional pain and dislocation, and a bunch of people do their jobs, and a bunch of towns get hollowed out, and it all sucks. But when you come through on the other side, we're all richer, and we're not worried about the crops failing anymore. And this is the process of the last 200 years. So then the question is, is there some a primary reason why this would be different to those? Because the internet removed a bunch of jobs, PCs removed a bunch of jobs. There aren't many people working as typesetters anymore. Or telephone operators, or typists. The internet removed a bunch of jobs. And generally the jobs that go away are crap jobs, seen retrospectively, and the new job, the better, because GDP keeps going up. So, is AI different? And so then there's kind of a couple of answers to this. One theory is, well, this is going to be way quicker. And certainly the adoption of AI is quicker than previous technologies, but this is kind of because you're turning on the shoulders of giants. So you don't need to wait for everyone to buy a piece of expensive hardware, to buy a phone or a PC, or wait for the telco to deploy broadband. That's already there. urning on the shoulders of giants. So you don't need to wait for everyone to buy a piece of expensive hardware, to buy a phone or a PC, or wait for the telco to deploy broadband. That's already there. So of course, ChatGPT can get 900 million chat users, because there's already 900 million people on the internet. When Mark Andreessen launched Netscape in what was it, '93, '94, there were like 50 to 100 million PCs on earth. So now you didn't have 900 million users then. But the point is then he didn't need to wait for phone networks or microchips. And before that, you didn't need to wait for electricity, and you didn't need to wait for mass production. So you're always standing on the shoulders of giants. There's always a compounding effect. So yeah, this is faster, but the internet was faster too. I think the other answer to this, and this kind of comes back to the professional services point is, you talk to these doomers on Twitter, and they would act like every big company is going to buy ChatGPT tomorrow, and then in two weeks time, they'll fire all their staff, and these people are mourners. This is one of many reasons why the doomers were mourns, but complete failure to understand the way the world works. And that was like the starting point why they then didn't understand anything else. Turn to a big company, enterprise software sales cycle, you'll know this better than me, enterprise software sales cycle is like 18 months, if you're lucky. This is always a problem. The enterprise sales cycle is shorter than the venture backed funding cycle. Longer rather. Longer. It takes you longer to get an enterprise deal than it takes you to go between raps. And this was always supporting the building, particularly for sectors like aerospace, or healthcare, or something. So, I know people aren't just going to tear out SAP and replace it with X, Y, Z. Maybe in like three, five, 10 years, yes, that whole estate will look radically different, and all those jobs will have changed, but it will take two, three, four, five, 10 years, and it will take time sector by sector, and it will take time for people to work out, "You could do that thing with this." And one of the companies I always remember that we looked at when I was at Andreessen Horowitz is a company called Frame.io, which is video editing, video collaboration. And there's nothing there that you couldn't have done at least five years earlier, and maybe 10 years earlier. And actually, that's kind of a bad example because that relies on a bunch of stuff like cutting edge web technologies. But if you go out and pick 10 random SaaS companies that were started the day before ChatGPT launched, how many of them could have been founded at any point in the previous 15 years? The delay was somebody realizing, "Oh, that problem exists inside that industry, and this is the way that we would solve it." It didn't all happen the day after Google Docs. It took like 10, 15, 20 years for people to invent all that stuff, and work out that you could do that with this. is is the way that we would solve it." It didn't all happen the day after Google Docs. It took like 10, 15, 20 years for people to invent all that stuff, and work out that you could do that with this. And so all of that is like, the way of saying, well, yes, it is going to be quick, but actually, no, it will kind of take a while for people to work out how to completely change how their business works.…

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