A search engine is a vast mechanical Turk - a reinforcement learning engine that uses human activity to understand the web. PageRank used signal from links created by people, but once people started using Google at scale, that usage itself created far more signal: which results you clicked on, how you changed your searches to get better results, and...

My old boss Marc Andreessen liked to say that every failed idea from the Dotcom bubble would work now. It just took time - it took years to build out broadband, consumers had to buy PCs, retailers and big companies needed to build e-commerce infrastructure, a whole online ad business had to evolve and grow, and more fundamentally, consumers and businesses...

It can feel a little odd to write about anything other than generative AI these days, but I sometimes remind people that all the things that we were talking about in October 2022 are still there. E-commerce is still growing (it’s now 40% of non-food retail in the UK!), Amazon has a $50bn ad business, peak TV is over, and Meta is still investing in VR...

No-one outside Apple has really used any Apple Intelligence features yet. It won't launch until the autumn, in stages, and even then it won't work on 80 or 90% of the iPhone installed base, since it needs on-device processing that’s only on the iPhone 15 Pro. Nothing is ever as good as the demos (except the original iPhone), Apple might mess up the...

I will fly to India on Monday for a brief trip, and so I just spent an hour struggling through a very buggy online visa application process. Once I’d finished, since I now know what’s involved, I asked ChatGPT 4o about it. Most of these points are partially or completely wrong. ...

The...