The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish Benedict Evans: The Patterns Everyone Else Misses
1558 snips
Sep 2, 2025 
Benedict Evans, a renowned technology analyst, shares his insights on AI and platform shifts. He discusses why AI isn't the next electricity but a monumental change since the iPhone. The conversation reveals vulnerabilities of giants like Google and addresses what regular users truly do with AI. Evans emphasizes the need for critical thinking in assessing AI's impact and offers advice for students navigating this new landscape. This dialogue reshapes how we perceive technology's evolution and its real-world implications.
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AI Is A Major Platform Shift, Not A Metaphor
- Benedict Evans frames AI as the biggest shift since the iPhone, not as all-encompassing as electricity or the industrial revolution.
- He predicts AI will be a dominant platform for 10–15 years before becoming 'just software'.
Platform Shifts Hide Where Value Flows
- Platform shifts are messy and unpredictable in how value and winners emerge, as with the internet and mobile.
- Evans uses historical analogies (browsers, iPhone, elevators) to show we often missee how change plays out.
Data Isn't A Wide Moat For LLMs
- Data advantage is weaker than assumed because modern LLMs need enormous, widely available text corpora.
- Anyone with funding can access similar web-scale data, making the training-data moat less defensible.
