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AI eats the world (Spring 26) [pdf]

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Re: AI eats the world (Spring 26) [pdf]

#71

Post by mchusma »

flossly wrote: post #7
btucker wrote: post #4

You can find the 4 versions of Benedict's deck here: https://www.ben-evans.com/presentations I appreciate the temporal view into this thinking. My interpretation: Nov 2024: Don’t dismiss this; it may be the next platform shift. But the actual questions are still unsettled: scaling, usefulness, deployment, and business model. May 2025: The model layer is already showing signs of commoditization, so the important quest…

I think that DeepSeek may be important to that. They have a really good model that's open source, raising the bar for all other players: how good your model needs to be so you can make meaningful money on it (better than DeepSeek). Same thing happened on other places the open source offering became popular.

I think the original DeepSeek moment seemed important. And yes, the more recent model is good, but there are multiple. This commodification trend spans many different companies, including Kimi 2.5/2.6 and GLM5.1, and even Google itself with its Gemma models. There are a dozen models that exist at roughly the frontier from 6 months ago at 1/10th the cost.

Re: AI eats the world (Spring 26) [pdf]

#72

Post by kannanvijayan »

jkhdigital wrote: post #48
kannanvijayan wrote: post #37

This is a reasonably well-examined take of the situation. On the technical side, one of the additional things I've had on my mind is the potential that these mega models are in fact hiding a ton of inefficiency. The approach of simply shoving higher dimensionality and more parameters into largely tweaks to the current models has delivered results, but it feels like "mainframe" era of computing to me. Throwing reams o…

Right, the crazy thing is that much of the groundwork for the “rules-and-heuristics” mode of AI was laid down in the 70s and 80s, long before we had the raw compute power to reliably extract patterns from reality-scale inputs. Those early efforts failed miserably mostly because the rules had to be populated manually and in a ridiculously space-inefficient format (compared to the density of information in model weight…

I feel like the talk about "world models" is trying to reach at that, but cast it in different terminology. World model is just domain model, and once you're at domain model, there are multitudes of domains.

Unsupervised learning over domain rulesystems has the potential to let us define really well-defined, scoped models that behave a lot more deterministically and don't colour outside the lines, and reserve their weights for cleanly modeling the domain associations and relationships that matter.

I just asked codex the following question in the middle of my coding prompt:

  What are you thoughts on the relative strengths of ewoks vs jawans?
Answer:

  • Ewoks are stronger in direct conflict. They are organized fighters, good at
    ambushes, traps, terrain control, and coordinated attacks. On Endor, the beat
  a technologically superior force by using preparation and local knowledge.
  ....
As amusing as this may be, I really have no need or desire for my coding model to understand or be aware of ewoks and their relative strengths compared to jawans. Nor do I need it to understand the nuances of the races of middle earth. And prompt response of "I have no idea what you are talking about" to all of these would feel reassuringly scoped.

Mixture-of-Experts seems like an attempt to do this - the domain structure being extracted into specific sub-models that are presumably trained on particular domain-associated content - but it feels like this is once again the beginnings of what is possible.

Re: AI eats the world (Spring 26) [pdf]

#73

Post by [deleted] »

benedictevans wrote: post #66
shruubi wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are absolutely not a "random person on the internet", you are a very public figure with the wealth and influence available to you that could allow you to take revenge on someone who says something you don't like in real, life-altering ways. Now, I'm not saying that you would do that, but it is a shocking lack of self-awareness to think of yourself as a random person on the internet.

This is hilarious. What am I going to do? Hire a hitman? if you’re going be a dick on the Internet, you should be a dick using your real name. I don’t think that’s a threat.

[deleted]

Re: AI eats the world (Spring 26) [pdf]

#74

Post by hansmayer »

benedictevans wrote: post #50
hansmayer wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, beyond this mumbo-jumbo non-answer of yours, did you or did you not push crypto? Because if you did...it could kind of not speak for your analytical competence.

'these charts are fantasies' is a non-criticism from an anonymous moron. If there is an actual criticism of an actual point, make it. Back when people were interested in Blockchains, I explained why people in tech were interested. I'm happy to explain that again now, if anyone cared. If someone thinks that's bad, they're a fool.

Blockchain as a technology was something a lot of people were interested in. I am curious about Bitcoin - the monopoly money of the real world. The questions was simple: did you, or did you not, promote Bitcoin? Anyone who would promote a fake, un-regulated "currency" would not be someone whose opinion I care about.

Re: AI eats the world (Spring 26) [pdf]

#75

Post by percivalskunk »

throwaw12 wrote: post #2

> What happened the last time that everything changed? * Hardware era (pre 1995s) -> IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Apple * Internet era (1994-2001) -> Amazon, Google, Meta, Salesforce * Mobile era (iPhone+ era) -> Uber, Mobile Games, Youtube, Snapchat, Tiktok, Airbnb * Cloud era (AWS+ era) -> AWS, GCP, Azure, Snowflake, Databricks and bunch of other data & database startups AI era (ChatGPT+ era) -> Change is inevitable

[dead]

Re: AI eats the world (Spring 26) [pdf]

#76

Post by vanuatu »

dwa3592 wrote: post #43
dwa3592 wrote: post #13

>>Companies report ‘annualised’ revenue, defined as sum of previous 4 weeks multiplied by 13. why is it multiplied by 13?

this took a bit of a mathematical turn because of my poor phrasing. what i was actually intrigued by was how does revenue of 4 weeks become "annualized" by just multiplying it with 13.

Lets say you work at a startup that is growing insanely fast and you want to report financial metrics to investors, media etc. You can't use annual recurring revenue because 2026 is not over yet, and your company is so young it doesn't make sense to look back to last year. You can't use YoY because it would be some obscene figure (100000%) that definitely won't hold.

So the two best metrics are annualized recurring revenue (take last month * 12 or last 4 weeks * 13) and QoQ growth %.

There are two caveats:

- If the revenue is high quality (e.g. annual enterprise contracts, good NRR), then last 4 weeks * 13 is actually a conservative estimate as your company will likely continue to grow.

- But if the revenue is more volatile (e.g. consumption, token usage, bad NRR) then annualized recurring revenue can be used to hide worse performance because companies will juice revenue one month and report high "ARR"

Re: AI eats the world (Spring 26) [pdf]

#78

Post by hansmayer »

benedictevans wrote: post #52
lorecore wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here you go: https://en.cryptonomist.ch/2018/11/01/benedict-evans-cryptoc...

Nope. This is the exact quote. Crypto today has a lot in common with both the internet in 1993 and the internet in 1999. Huge potential with few of the use cases invented yet, combined with froth, scams and delusion. This makes it easier to dismiss (“useless AND a scam!”). But dismissing crypto as a useless scam is much like looking at Usenet, Cuecat and Boo .com and dismissing the internet. It mistakes applications…

I dunno... but those self-quotes sound a lot like at least implying that "missing out on crypto" would be like missing out on early days of Internet. You also seem to try and retrofit "blockchain" instead of "crypto", but these are two different things - blockchain is a technology, crypto is a form of play-money based on that technology, just like it's older brother, the monopoly-money, is based on the technology of paper (but not much else).

Re: AI eats the world (Spring 26) [pdf]

#79

Post by dwa3592 »

vanuatu wrote: post #76
dwa3592 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this took a bit of a mathematical turn because of my poor phrasing. what i was actually intrigued by was how does revenue of 4 weeks become "annualized" by just multiplying it with 13.

Lets say you work at a startup that is growing insanely fast and you want to report financial metrics to investors, media etc. You can't use annual recurring revenue because 2026 is not over yet, and your company is so young it doesn't make sense to look back to last year. You can't use YoY because it would be some obscene figure (100000%) that definitely won't hold. So the two best metrics are annualized recurring r…

I see but it's still predicted annual revenue. I can understand people not liking the word 'predicted' here because it is more grounding but that's what it is in the end? I guess i understand it now. thanks.

Re: AI eats the world (Spring 26) [pdf]

#80

Post by hansmayer »

dist-epoch wrote: post #14

It will literally eat the world. Just like we crowded out wild animals in a few reserved areas, so will AI data centers crowd us out. To quite Ilya Sutskever: > I think it’s pretty likely the entire surface of the earth will be covered with solar panels and data centers.

> To quite Ilya Sutskever:

Who made Ilya Sutskever, or any other LLM-bonehead the Grand Prophet of Humanity? Why the fuck is his opinion on that relevant? Of course he will shill for data centers.

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