What matters in tech? Newsletter, essays and presentations by Benedict Evans.
Visit ben-evans.com → On Hacker News May 2013 – Sep 2026
Tech Industry & Business 33AI & Machine Learning 7Society, Policy & Culture 5Networking & Internet 1Life, Learning & Writing 1
OpenAI has some big questions. It doesn’t have unique tech. It has a big user base, but with limited engagement and stickiness and no network effect. The incumbents have matched the tech and are leveraging their product and distribution. And a lot of the value and leverage will come from new experie
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
OpenAI’s Deep Research is built for me, and I can’t use it. It’s another amazing demo, until it breaks. But it breaks in really interesting ways.
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?
As machine learning starts working, how does that change Google, Apple and the smartphone interface? What companies get reshaped around machine learning?
It’s very tempting to imagine that AI turns everyone into a tool-builder - now everyone can just ask the model to make the software they need, and apps as we know them are dead. I think that misunderstands how most people think and where software actually comes from, and more importantly, it isn’t
Machine learning is the new centre of tech, and like all big new things there are issues. ‘AI bias’ is much-discussed right now: machine learning finds patterns but sometimes it finds the wrong one, and it can be hard to tell.