Ways to think about machine learning

Everyone has heard of machine learning now, and every big company is working on projects around ‘AI’. We know this is a Next Big Thing. But we don’t yet have a settled sense of quite what machine learning means - what it will mean for tech companies or for companies in the broader economy, how to think structurally about what new things it could enable, and what important problems it might actually be able to solve.

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The death of the newsfeed

What do we do now that there’s more in the newsfeed than we can possibly read? Can the algorithmic sample ever actually work, or do we swing back to 1:1 messaging? How do Stories rebundle that? And what happens to all the traffic that the newsfeed provides? 

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SocialBenedict Evans
Steps to autonomous cars: where, not when

We talk a lot about levels of autonomy, and ask when the first ‘fully autonomous’ cars will appear. That might be the wrong way to look at it - there will be lots of different kinds of ‘autonomy’, and the ‘where’ and ‘what’ may matter as much as the ‘when’. 

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CarsBenedict Evans
Bridges and LIDAR

A bridge product says 'of course x is the right way to do this, but the technology or market environment to deliver x is not available yet, or is too expensive, and so here is something that gives some of the same benefits but works now.'  Sometimes that’s a great business, and sometimes it’s doomed. 

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Presentation: Ten Year Futures

This autumn I gave the keynote at Andreessen Horowitz's annual 'Tech Summit' conference, talking about the state of tech and what's likely to happen in the next decade: mobile, Google / Apple / Facebook / Amazon, innovation, machine learning, autonomous cars, mixed reality and crypto-currencies.

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Benedict Evans
Does Facebook control the Newsfeed?

The fashion industry does not set fashions - it proposes them. It tries to work out the mood and the zeitgeist and looks for ideas that might express that. The same, increasingly, for Facebook - it cannot really decide how people use its products or what they see, only propose. 

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SocialBenedict Evans