Episodes
Generative AI is the thing, and all new software will be built around it. But while everyone is experimenting and some people are getting huge value out of ChatGPT or Midjourney right now, others haven't worked out how to make it useful. Yet. So how do we find use-cases for a universal, general purpose, magical technology, and is that a crazy question?
Published 04/01/24
Will the US finally break up Tiktok? Will the EU break up the App Store? And why does Temu want to keep your orders under $800?
Published 03/13/24
Published 03/13/24
Are there questions that an AI chatbot shouldn't answer? Should it always give the 'right answer'? Are you sure? Google has egg on its face this week, but this isn't easy, and with generative AI, we're going to re-run all the arguments and panics we had over content moderation in the last decade.
Published 03/03/24
We’re past peak TV, the charts are curving down, and Hollywood is pretty sure that streaming was a bad idea. On the other hand, music is growing strongly and might even end up bigger than CDs. Why have newspapers, books, movies, TV and music coped so differently with the internet?
Published 02/16/24
Yes, we bought one. What’s it like and what can we say that we didn’t say last summer? What has Apple built, what is it for, what does it mean for Meta, and why does it cost $3,500?
Published 02/08/24
Everyone needs an AI strategy (there was an email from the CEO!) but what would that mean? How does a big company work out how to deploy a new technology? How is this the same as every other platform shift, and how might it be different?
Published 01/29/24
Every year, Benedict produces a big presentation exploring macro and strategic trends in the tech industry. Here are some of the key takeaways from this year's presentation - AI, and everything else.
Published 12/17/23
We spent the last 30 years building structures on top or instead of the raw links of the web, from Google to TikTok… but now LLMs might read all the links for us.
Published 10/29/23
ChatGPT and LLMs can do anything (or look like they can), so what can you do with them? How do you know? Do we move to chat bots as a magical general-purpose interface, or do we unbundle them back into single-purpose software?
Published 10/22/23
A conversation with Leonard Brody, Co-Founder and Executive Chairman of Caravan. How do you build brands and consumer products in a would of infinite choice and infinite media? And how does celebrity fit into that?
Published 10/15/23
Nine months on, everyone is still trying to understand where ChatGPT will go, but one big question for us: how is this useful, for us, today? What's the product? How does this get unbundled?
Published 08/17/23
What is Threads? A Twitter that doesn't suck? Something else? Could it work?
Published 07/21/23
Two weeks after Apple showed us the Vision Pro - what have they built, what is it for, what does it mean for Meta, and why does it cost $3,500? Check back in 2025.
Published 06/18/23
Apple does VR. We watched. We took pictures. We talk about it.
Published 06/05/23
We don't know what generative AI will be (or what will happen next week), but we're starting to work out what questions to ask
Published 05/01/23
Buzzfeed News dies just as Reddit and Stack Overflow say they'll charge LLMs to train on their data. Who owns content and how does distribution work in an LLM age? Are those the right questions? What should we be asking?
Published 04/24/23
Crypto crashed, metaverse was silly, and now we know that generative AI is the future of everything. Right? Well, sort of. But though the hype has moved on, the reasons web3 and VR were interesting haven't really changed.
Published 04/16/23
If you spend an hour typing prompts into MidJourney, who owns the result? There are easy answers to this, but they're probably wrong - these are new questions with new puzzles, much like radio, photography or music before.
Published 04/02/23
Generative machine learning is moving so fast it's impossible to keep up. What questions can we ask about GPT4, before everything changes again next week?
Published 03/27/23
The 'ban it' snowball is getting bigger and bigger, but what problem are we solving - privacy, or propaganda? How does this scale to all the other Chinese apps? And meanwhile, how well do we pay attention to the product itself?
Published 03/20/23
Amazon sold close to $40bn of advertising last year - bigger than Prime, bigger than the entire global newspaper industry and probably more profitable than AWS. But is this really advertising, rent, or something else? And what does that mean for Google?
Published 03/12/23
Microsoft thinks (or says) that Generative ML will reset the search market, unlocking Google's market share and collapsing those 60% operating margins. Really? What would that mean?
Published 02/12/23
What would generative search mean? Generative video? Indeed, Generative products? Last week we talked about how ChatGPT, LLMs and generative ML work - now, what might they mean.
Published 02/06/23
The wave of enthusiasm around ChatGPT and generative AI feels like another Imagenet moment - a step change in what ‘AI’ can do that could generalise far beyond the cool demos. But - it makes things up, and it doesn't actually understand anything it's doing. Probably. What does that mean? What's this for?
Published 01/30/23