My biggest takeaways from
@benedictevans:
1. Weāre in 1997 for AIāitās as big a deal as the internet or mobile, and only as big a deal as the internet or mobile. Weāre at the stage where most stuff kind of doesnāt work yet, most of what people will build hasnāt been built, and itās not clear how any of it will work when it does. Some people in tech have bought clusters of Mac Minis, while even among 13-to-18-year-olds, only about 15% to 20% are daily active users of AI. The companies that win may not exist yet, and the use cases that matter most are probably invisible to us today.
2. Every technology wave brings ways to ruin peopleās lives, deliberately or by accident, and we need to be conscious of that without panicking. Every wave of technologyādatabases in the 1970s, social media in the 2010s, AI todayācreates new ways to harm people. We need to be conscious of these risks, build safeguards, and hold people accountable. But we also canāt let fear of potential harms stop us from capturing the benefits. The goal is thoughtful deployment, not paralysis.
3. Things will probably be okayābut āon averageā hides a lot of individual pain. Weāve been automating jobs and creating new jobs since 1800. Each time, you can see the jobs that will disappear but not the new jobs, because they donāt exist yet. We go through frictional pain, dislocation, people lose jobs, towns get hollowed out, and it all sucks. But we come through richer, and weāre not worried about crops failing anymore.
4. If youāre worried about your job, the worst thing you can do is stick your head in the sand and declare AI evil. Yes, some professions face major questions, particularly if youāre an associate or would have been thinking about becoming one. The pyramid structure of professional services may fundamentally change. What helps is submerging yourself in AI, understanding what you can do with it, how it changes things, and how you can be a great hire in this new environment. That may still not be enough, but itās the only path forward.
5. The history of accounting shows us how automation often increases employment rather than decreasing it. Despite adding machines, punch cards, mainframes, databases, ERP systems, cloud software, spreadsheets, and PCs, the number of accountants keeps going up. This is the Jevons paradox: when you make something cheaper or easier, you donāt do the same amount of work for less money. You often do vastly more because the ROI changes.
6. Distribution is becoming a more valuable moat as software gets easier to build, which favors incumbents. As AI makes building software cheaper and faster, the market gets noisier. More products launch, more companies compete for attention, and breaking through becomes harder. This means distributionāthe ability to reach customers and get them to use your productāmatters more than ever.
7. Foundation AI model companies wonāt have lasting pricing power, and value will likely accrue up the stack. The models donāt seem to have network effects, so thereās no winner-takes-all dynamic. If you have indefinite competition between three to six foundation model providers, and the models look like undifferentiated commodities to users, why would anyone have pricing power? The current pricing chaosāpeople spending $1.5 million on inference in a monthāis temporary disequilibrium, like someone getting a $50,000 mobile data bill in 2010. The steady state will look different.
8. OpenAI and Anthropic are buying consultancies and PE firms. This seems counterintuitiveāarenāt these the companies that should need consultants least? But the reality is that companies donāt have people sitting around waiting to reimagine all their internal workflows and figure out which could be automated with AI. Thatās a project requiring five to 10 people spending months working it out, then actually implementing it across vertical and horizontal systems.
9. The fundamental question isnāt whether AI automates your jobāitās whether your profession is a "task" or a job. Some jobs are just tasks, and when you automate the task, the job disappears (i.e. elevator attendants). But in most professions, the task you think youāre being paid for isnāt actually what youāre being paid for. McKinsey doesnāt get hired to produce a 75-slide deckāthey get hired to walk through your enterprise, understand the politics, talk to customers, and figure out what you actually need to do. The deck is just the artifact.
10. The anti-AI backlash is real, and a fuzzy mass of different concerns, some real and some notāmuch like the social media backlash. There are tangible concerns: electricity bills went up in some places, though this applies to very few locations objectively. The water consumption issue is largely false; data centers use about 0.017% of U.S. water consumption. There are real questions about jobs, though economists canāt yet find clear consensus in the data about AIās employment impact. Thereās also the culture war over AI-generated content and āAI slop.ā The challenge is that all of this creates political pressure even when the underlying facts are unclear or contested.