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If you put all the world’s knowledge into an AI model and use it to make something new, who owns that and who gets paid? This is a completely new problem that we’ve been arguing about for 500 years.
a year ago

More from Essays - Benedict Evans

Are better models better?

Every week there’s a better AI model that gives better answers. But a lot of questions don’t have better answers, only ‘right’ answers, and these models can’t do that. So what does ‘better’ mean, how do we manage these things, and should we change what we expect from computers?

a week ago 24 votes
Competing in search

A quarter century after 'don't be evil', a judge has found that Google is abusing its monopoly in search. But no-one knows what happens next, and whether this ruling will change anything. Will Apple build a search engine? Will ChatGPT change search? Does it matter?

5 months ago 66 votes
Competing in search

A quarter century after ‘don't be evil’ a judge has found that Google is abusing its monopoly in search. But no-one knows what happens next, and whether this ruling will change anything. Will Apple build a search engine? Will ChatGPT change search? Does it matter?

5 months ago 53 votes
The AI summer

Hundreds of millions of people have tried ChatGPT, but most of them haven’t been back. Every big company has done a pilot, but far fewer are in deployment. Some of this is just a matter of time. But LLMs might also be a trap: they look like products and they look magic, but they aren’t. Maybe we have to go through the slow, boring hunt for product-market fit after all.

6 months ago 72 votes
The VR winter continues

Meta has spent at least $50bn on VR and AR so far, but we’re still in the VR winter: the devices aren’t good enough or cheap enough and the user base is flat. But no matter how good the devices get, how many people will care?

6 months ago 78 votes

More in startups

DeepSeek: Links and Memes (So Many Memes)

How a Chinese AI lab spun out of a hedge fund shook up the entire tech industry.

18 hours ago 4 votes
Andrew Rose, part 2: solving coordination

A longer and more chaotic follow-up conversation in which Andrew and I dive into the weeds of our differing approaches to solving coordination.

3 hours ago 2 votes
Patrick Collison interview + at least five interesting things (#58)

Patrick interviews me; the energy transition; Americans die young; family and fertility; educating the poor; AI and growth

17 hours ago 2 votes
Andrew Rose on building communities and institutions

yes, Nothing Human now has a podcast!

4 hours ago 2 votes
Non-Western founders say DeepSeek is proof that innovation need not cost billions of dollars

The Chinese app has just “blown the roof off” and “shifted the power dynamics.”

3 days ago 3 votes