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What Benedict Evans thinks about Google

@benedict-evans · 16 positions · 0 changes of mind

Technology analyst whose weekly email on tech reaches over 150,000 readers. Publishes essays and an annual presentation on where the industry is going.

Everything they publish, on ppll ↗

Benedict Evans did not write this page.

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3 dated positions, 2025, in their own words. Our reading of what Benedict Evans has said — not written or endorsed by them.

3 positions so far — this page is not yet offered to search engines.

  1. Our readingIncumbents have looked unbeatable at the start of every previous platform shift and have still lost.

    Their wordsI'm pretty sure people thought Microsoft had an advantage on the internet and Google and um Meta had an advantage on mobile and everyone thought IBM was going to win PCs. Like once IBM made a PC, that was it. It's all over now. And we kind of forget that like there were PCs before and then IBM made one and that kind of became the standard but then IBM lost it.

    ↗Why Everyone Is Wrong About AI (Including You) | Benedict Evansyoutube.com 3rd of 16 in this recording

    Microsoft

  3. Our readingProprietary data is not an advantage in training large language models, because no company's holdings are large enough to matter.

    Their wordsI think it's actually the opposite which is that everyone's kind of using the same data which is you need such an enormous amount of generalized text that the amount that Google has or that meta has is not actually enough to move to be a kind of fundamental difference in what you can train with.

    ↗Why Everyone Is Wrong About AI (Including You) | Benedict Evansyoutube.com 5th of 16 in this recording

    LLMs

  5. Our readingThe leading chatbots are undifferentiated: in a blind test most people could not tell one model's output from another's.

    Their wordsLike it seems to me right now you could do like a double blind test of the same prompt given to Grock Claude Gemini um Mistral Deep Seek. Do a double blind test. I bet most people wouldn't be able to tell which is which.

    ↗Why Everyone Is Wrong About AI (Including You) | Benedict Evansyoutube.com 11th of 16 in this recording

    Anthropicchat interfaces