Date: 28-Dec-2025

Hey {{first_name | AI enthusiast}},

This edition: We take a “subscribers-only", look into a presentation released by Benedict Evans about the state of AI. Benedict Evans is a technology analyst and strategist known for his deep commentary over 25 years, on macro trends in tech, mobile, media, and AI.

There is a nice little presentation that Notebook LM created for me and it is a great summary with powerful visuals.

Plus- What NVIDIA achieved with its acquisition (sorry, Acquihire), of Groq. As a bonus, I have attached the copy of the Series A memo that Chamath Palihapitaya wrote when his firm invested in Groq. A great guide for VCs and hard tech startups, alike!

And our Guest writer, Nisha Pillai is back and is fine-tuning her personal assistant, Leo, that she built using Claude.

Hope you enjoy it!

— Renjit Philip

PS: If you want to check out how to implement AI agents in your business and get more revenue with the same number of employees, speak to me:

The AI revolution feels chaotic and unprecedented. Billions in investment, breathless headlines, anxiety about being left behind. But this pattern has repeated every 10 to 15 years for half a century.

New technologies follow a predictable S-curve through three phases.

First, they arrive as "stupid toys" that nobody takes seriously. Rich people buy them, skeptics dismiss them, and their potential remains unclear.

Then comes the inflection point. The technology starts working, its value becomes obvious, and everyone scrambles to catch up. Investment floods in, careers pivot overnight, and the steep part of the curve begins.

Finally, the boring phase arrives. The revolutionary becomes ordinary, invisible infrastructure we take for granted. Nobody thinks about using an "automatic" elevator anymore; they just use an elevator.

Platform shifts destroy dominant players with brutal efficiency.

Microsoft ruled the PC era with an iron grip. When smartphones arrived, that dominance meant nothing. They became "irrelevant for a decade" because control over PC software had zero value in mobile ecosystems.

History shows that pioneering companies rarely win. Dozens of forgotten manufacturers built PCs before Apple and IBM. Nokia explored mobile internet years before the iPhone, but early ideas like WAP turned out to be dead ends.

Being first often means being too early to understand what the market actually wants.

Three familiar patterns are playing out right now.

Big tech is spending $400 billion on AI infrastructure this year, rivaling the annual capital expenditure of entire global industries. This isn't speculative venture capital; it's defensive spending by profitable giants who believe underinvestment poses greater risk than overinvestment.

AI models from different companies converge on similar performance scores, often within 5 to 10 percent of each other. The underlying technology is becoming a commodity, just like PC hardware or web browsers did.

The real battle will be won by building better products, user experiences, and distribution channels on top of the models.

But here's the crucial difference: we don't know AI's limits.

Past platforms had clear physical constraints. Phones couldn't fly or have year-long battery life.

With AI, we lack the fundamental theoretical model to explain why these systems work so well. This could be a shift on the scale of the internet, or something more profound like electricity itself. The ceiling remains unknown.

The final stage of every technological revolution is complete absorption into daily life.

Online dating went from weird joke to 60 percent of all new relationships in the USA. It solved a fundamental problem so effectively that it became the default.

AI scientist Larry Tesler captured this perfectly in 1970: "AI is whatever machines can't do yet, because once it works, it's not AI anymore."

Advanced image recognition was cutting-edge AI a decade ago. Today it's just a standard feature that sorts photos on phones.

The mind-blowing AI tools of today will become tomorrow's boring infrastructure that nobody thinks about. And by then, innovators will already be tinkering with the next "stupid toy" that becomes the next platform shift.

Download this presentation on the key points of the talk given by Benedict.