Assertion certainty 5/5 debate potential 3/5

Evans: Generative AI is deployed in thousands of companies, unlike crypto

Benedict Evans · AI Eats the World: Benedict Evans on What Really Matters Now · May 22, 2025 · at 18:04

Technology analyst Benedict Evans contrasts generative AI's active enterprise adoption with cryptocurrency's ongoing struggle to find practical everyday use cases.

0:00 / 0:20exact quote · 20.0s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“There are hundreds and hundreds of companies who've already got this in production, doing stuff that's really useful where it works, where you understand what it is. So this is just objectively wrong to say that it's useless. It's already not, not in the way that like crypto, like we're still waiting for use cases. This is in deployment in thousands of companies from hundreds of pieces of software. Right now it's already being used and it's really useful.”

quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →

More from Benedict Evans

Opinion
Evans: OpenAI Product Chief Kevin Weil is building a thin GPT wrapper
“Kevin Wheel is building a thin GPT wrapper. I mean, I love Kevin, but like, that's his job, is to build a thin GPG wrapper.”
Benedict Evans May 22, 2025 ▶ 26:55 AI Eats the World: Benedict Evans on What Really Matters Now
Insight
Evans: AI scientists possess no special expertise on global geopolitical threats
“One of the sort of fallacies here is a sort of an appeal to authority, which is, you know, well, that person is an AI scientist, so they must know if this is a threat to world peace. No, they don't. They're an AI scientist. They don't know anything more about,…”
Benedict Evans May 22, 2025 ▶ 32:15 AI Eats the World: Benedict Evans on What Really Matters Now
Opinion
Evans: Elon Musk's autonomy and humanoid demos are fake
“It's bullshit. Yeah, but it's not a real demo. It's not working.”
Benedict Evans May 22, 2025 ▶ 1:07:07 AI Eats the World: Benedict Evans on What Really Matters Now
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Evans: VR headsets will not replace smartphones as primary computing platforms
“You're not going to wear a headset, no matter how light and cheap it is, all day outdoors. I would not have worn it walking here, even if it weighed a hundred grams and had completely perfect pass-through. Therefore, it can't replace your phone. Therefore, we …”
Benedict Evans Apr 10, 2024 ▶ 49:04 Is AI a platform shift or a paradigm shift? With Benedict Evans
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Evans: AI foundation models lack winner-takes-all network effects
“And the problem is that as far as we can see, there is no winner takes all effect or network effect in a foundation model.”
Benedict Evans Mar 19, 2026 ▶ 1:50 Benedict Evans: OpenAI’s Moat Problem & the Future of Software
Opinion
Evans: OpenAI has commodity tech and no differentiation but massive mindshare
“If you're Sam Altman, you've got a commodity technology. You've got, you're competing with people who have giant legacy cash flows. You don't have your own infrastructure. Don't really have any differentiation, but you've got massive mindshare.”
Benedict Evans Mar 19, 2026 ▶ 39:14 Benedict Evans: OpenAI’s Moat Problem & the Future of Software
Made with StarZero

Turn any episode into a week of clips.

This entire site, over 400 conversations transcribed, diarized, checked and made playable, runs on the StarZero media pipeline. Drop in your own episode and the podcast clipper finds the moments worth sharing, cuts them, captions them, and reframes them for every feed.