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‘Metaverse’ is the buzzword of the moment, yet it doesn’t really exist as more than a label on a whiteboard, and many of the ideas it tries to combine might not happen, or not like that. This might be the new ‘information highway.’ But however it works, some kind of break-out of new devices, new experiences and new kinds of popular culture seems pretty easy to believe in.
over 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 77 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.

13 hours ago 3 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

12 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.”

2 days ago 3 votes
Deep Impact

Soundtrack: The Hives — Hate To Say I Told You So In the last week or so, but especially over the weekend, the entire generative AI industry has been thrown into chaos. This won’t be a lengthy, technical write-up — although there will be some inevitable technical complexities,

3 days ago 6 votes
India’s open arms approach to AI

The Modi government has dedicated $1.2 billion to building the country’s AI capabilities, and U.S. firms are receiving a warm welcome.

3 days ago 7 votes