My work

AI eats the world

Every year, I produce a big presentation exploring macro and strategic trends in the tech industry. For 2025, ‘AI eats the world’ - now with video. LINK

News

Meta flips on content moderation

Meta announced that it will replace fact checking with a version of Twitter’s crowd-sourced community notes, scale back content moderation to focus on the core or urgently harmful and/or illegal categories (CSAM, terrorism, self-harm etc) while allowing broader categories of hate or offensive speech, and abandon its ‘DEI” projects. Some of this is political positioning, but that’s not the only thing to think about - see this week’s column. LINK

The week in AI

CES (the annual Vegas consumer hardware trade show) was this week, where every company is adding ‘AI’ to their products much as they added Alexa a few years ago. A lot of this ‘AI’ isn’t actually LLMs, and most companies aren’t sure what it’s best used for, but as ever there’s a lot of experimentation and product-push as the industry tries to work out whether this is a thing and if so what kind (remember Rabbit and Humane?).

Meanwhile, this is also a platform for the broader industry, and so Nvidia held a event with a huge audience to talk about consumer GPUs for gaming, but also a $3,000 developer workstation and Cosmos, a generative AI model of the physical world (now being called a ‘world model’), which has immediate applications for gaming and robots but is also one possible path to further breakthroughs in AI itself (how can a computer ‘learn’ cause and effect? Infant mammals do it by watching the world). Stepping back, the broader point might be how much Nvidia is trying to move up the AI stack and build ecosystem in ways Intel (for example) could never do. COSMOS, WORKSTATION

Microsoft’s models team are still getting into the game - this week it released version 4 of its Phi model and (how the world has changed) open-sourced it on Hugging Face. LINK

Conversely, President Biden plans more restrictions on non-US sales of Nvidia’s best AI chips, letting close allies buy them, blocking China, Iran and Russia amongst others, and creating a new tier of restrictions on how many chips countries in the rest of the world can buy. The effect would be to control the construction of AI data centres anywhere. LINK

Apple News expands

Apple’s News aggregator app doesn’t get a lot of discussion, but it’s become very big: apparently it has monthly reach of about 125m people in the USA, UK, Canada and Australia, and it’s a quarter of total readership for some publications. Now the FT reports that Apple plans to add new countries and expand coverage. LINK

TikTok tick tock

Tiktok’s last-chance hearing at the US Supreme Court this week didn’t seem to go well. There’s nothing new to say here: the deadline is Sunday 19 January (the day before Trump takes office). LINK

Expanding ad networks

We’ve been hearing for a while that demand had outstripped available inventory for Amazon’s retail ad product (over $50bn of revenue in the last 12 months) and now Amazon is expanding to provide the same intent-targeted advertising on other retailers’ websites. This makes tactical sense, but strategically, if you were a retailer would you want Amazon to have that kind of data about behaviour on your own website? LINK

Meanwhile, Comcast launched a broad industry platform aimed at getting SMEs who never previously could or would have advertised on TV to buy slots in streaming inventory, where the purchase can be much smaller and much more targeted. LINK

About

What matters in tech? What’s going on, what might it mean, and what will happen next?

I’ve spent 20 years analysing mobile, media and technology, and worked in equity research, strategy, consulting and venture capital. I’m now an independent analyst. Mostly, that means trying to work out what questions to ask.

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Ideas

There’s an explosion of think-pieces about Meta’s policy change, but this is a worthwhile summary of the view that the fact checking wasn’t really working and wasn’t believed (which does actually matter). LINK

From last year, Vitalik Buterin’s thoughts on Twitter’s Community Notes, a collective voting system that’s exactly the kind of thing that Web3 people want to build. LINK

An explainer of China’s censorship and safety standards for generative AI. LINK

Larry Summers et al published a report on past impacts of technology on employment and the likely implications for AI. LINK

Politico on Britain’s AI Policy. I’m skeptical of the entire concept of national AI strategies, but we will see. LINK

A profile of Watch Duty, the non-profit app letting everyone track the fires in Los Angeles. LINK

Two discussions of Deepseek, the (probably) very cheap model, and the hedge fund behind it. CHINA TALK, INTERCONNECTS

Outside interests

A Dieter Rams Braun B&W TV from 1964. I know I have subscribers who would rush to buy this, though getting it to show anything would be a project. LINK

Kenya’s buses are switching to electric, if they can get supply. LINK

Chick-fil-A’s lemon-squeezing robots. LINK

A firefighting aircraft over LA hit someone’s consumer camera drone. Very Gibsonian. LINK

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Benedict's Newsletter: No. 574