Benedict Evans is an independent analyst and former partner at Andreessen Horowitz, where he spent years as their in-house “thinker” tracking the most important technology trends. For the past six years, he’s been publishing deeply researched presentations on where tech is heading, most recently focused on AI’s transformation of the economy. His work is read by founders, investors, and operators trying to make sense of a noisy field. His most controversial opinion: AI is as big a deal as the internet or mobile—and only as big.

In our in-depth conversation, we discuss:

1. Why we’re in “1997” for AI—early, exciting, and deeply uncertain about what comes next

2. Where value will actually accrue in the AI stack

3. The anti-AI backlash, and where it may lead

4. The surprising boom in consulting and professional services at AI companies

5. Why distribution is becoming the ultimate moat as software gets easier to build

6. Why the right question about your job isn’t “What percent can AI do?” but “Is this a task or a job?”

7. Why things will probably be okay—and what you need to do to prepare

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Brought to you by:

WorkOS—Make your app enterprise-ready, with SSO, SCIM, RBAC, and more: https://workos.com/lenny

Vanta—Automate compliance, manage risk, and accelerate trust with AI: https://vanta.com/lenny

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Episode transcript: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/a-rational-conversation-on-where

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Archive of all Lenny's Podcast transcripts: https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fo/yxi4s2w998p1gvtpu4193/AMdNPR8AOw0lMklwtnC0TrQ?rlkey=j06x0nipoti519e0xgm23zsn9&st=ahz0fj11&dl=0

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Where to find Benedict Evans:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/benedictevans

• Newsletter: https://www.ben-evans.com/newsletter

• Website: https://www.ben-evans.com

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Where to find Lenny:

• Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com

• X: https://twitter.com/lennysan

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennyrachitsky/

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In this episode, we cover:

(00:00) Introduction to Benedict Evans

(02:19) What people aren’t pricing in about AI’s impact

(06:24) Why we’re in the 1997 moment of AI

(09:44) The unexpected boom in professional services and consultants

(17:44) Why distribution is becoming the ultimate moat

(23:17) The coming job transformation: what’s real vs. panic

(27:33) Why AGI definitions keep shifting

(38:11) Where value will accrue: models vs. applications

(42:55) Distribution wars: Google, Meta, Apple, and OpenAI

(48:12) The anti-AI sentiment and backlash

(53:11) How to raise kids in an AI future

(58:27) What jobs to steer toward or away from

(59:20) The question nobody’s asking about AI

(1:06:25) How to be successful in this coming future

(1:08:43) AI corner

(1:11:43) Lightning round

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Referenced: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/a-rational-conversation-on-where

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Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email podcast@lennyrachitsky.com.

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Lenny may be an investor in the companies discussed.

A bit of a lull before the BUILD conference next week. Highlights this week include: Claude Opus 4.8 is now available in Microsoft Foundry: Anthropic's most capable Opus model is now available in Microsoft Foundry, built for complex coding, reliable multi-step agentic tasks, and document-heavy enterprise analysis that holds context across longer sessions. Automate evaluations Microsoft Foundry: A walkthrough of Foundry's evaluation tooling, covering end-to-end run tracing, on-demand synthetic test datasets, automated red-team attacks, AI-driven root-cause analysis of failures, and runtime guardrails such as Task Adherence that inspect every tool call. Azure Functions MCP extension now supports MCP Prompts: The Azure Functions MCP extension now supports MCP prompt triggers in public preview, completing coverage of all three core Model Context Protocol primitives (tools, resources, and prompts) for building MCP servers on Azure Functions.

In Analytics: Incremental Liquid Clustering in Microsoft Fabric: Faster, smarter, and truly incremental: Now in Fabric Runtime 2.0, Incremental Liquid Clustering re-clusters only the data that needs it, keeping clustering time roughly flat as tables grow rather than rising linearly, which makes OPTIMIZE costs far more predictable. From Excel to Delta Tables - Simplifying Excel Data Ingestion with Shortcut Transformations Preview: Fabric's Shortcut Transformations (Preview) now extend their zero-code ingestion experience to Excel, letting teams bring spreadsheet data into Delta tables the same way they already do with CSV, Parquet, and JSON.

In preview Public Preview: Azure Site Recovery Support for Performance Plus Managed Disks: Azure Site Recovery can now replicate virtual machines that use Performance Plus enabled managed disks (Premium SSD, Standard SSD, and Standard HDD), giving high-IOPS and high-throughput workloads Azure-to-Azure disaster recovery with consistent performance across primary and secondary regions during replication, test failover, and full failover. How to use Instance Mix with Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets: Instance Mix lets a Flexible-orchestration Virtual Machine Scale Set define up to five compatible VM sizes under a single "Mix" SKU, so Azure can choose from that list at scale-out based on your allocation strategy to ease regional capacity, quota, and pricing constraints.

Finally, Entra Automation: Users, Groups, and Conditional Access: A tutorial on using Microsoft Graph PowerShell to automate Entra ID user creation, security groups, group membership, and Conditional Access policies, with report-only mode for validating changes safely before enforcement.

Welcome to F# Weekly,

A roundup of F# content from this past week:

News

• Angel Munoz: Mibo.Raylib 1.0.0 is Out – F# micro framework for code-first Raylib games
• Loïc Denuzière: Domain Modeling Made Functional is in the Functional Programming Humble Bundle

Microsoft News

• Doing More with GitHub Copilot as a .NET Developer
• Give Your .NET MAUI Android Apps a Material 3 Makeover
• A hypothetical redesign of System.Diagnostics.Process to avoid confusion over properties that are valid only when you are the one who called Start – The Old New Thing
• How Azure Chaos Studio ships with hermetic Aspire end-to-end tests | Aspire Blog
• What’s new in Microsoft Foundry | May 2026 | Microsoft Foundry Blog
• Improve your agentic developer tools by grounding in Microsoft Learn – Microsoft for Developers
• Verification-driven tooling prompts for fast-moving codebases – ISE Developer Blog
• How AI coding agents actually use your technology – Microsoft for Developers
• Visual Studio Code 1.122
• Visual Studio May Update – Plan, Review, Refine – Visual Studio Blog

Videos

• Ryan Riley: Development Process using AI – Episode 403
• .NET AI Community Standup: .NET + AI at Build 2026: What’s Coming Next? – YouTube
• .NET Data Community Standup: 8 Real-World Query Anti‑Patterns (and How to Fix Them) – YouTube

Blogs

• Urs Enzler: Event Sourcing – Why We Built Our Own Library
• How I use Rider for F# web development | by Vladimir Shchur | May, 2026 | Medium

Highlighted projects

• EHotwagner/FS-Skia-UI: Experimental F# desktop UI toolkit built on SkiaSharp and Vulkan using an Elmish Model-View-Update model
• mrLSD/riscv-fs: F# RISC-V Instruction Set formal specification
• fable-compiler/Fable: F# to JavaScript, TypeScript, Python, Rust, Erlang and Dart Compiler (Fable 5.1.0 released)

New Releases

• Pulsar.Client 3.16.0
• Fable 5.1.0
• SQLProvider 1.5.21
• FsShelter 5.2.1
• WoofWare.Myriad.Plugins 9.1.6
• Fesh 0.32.3
• Bristlecone 3.1.1
• Polars.FSharp 0.5.0
• Fable.TypedJson 0.4.0
• UnionConfig 0.4.1
• CommandTree 0.5.1
• Falco.UnionRoutes 0.3.2
• Mibo.Raylib 1.0.0
• SwaggerProvider 4.1.0
• Serde.FS 1.0.0-beta.1

That’s all for now. Have a great week.

If you want to help keep F# Weekly going, click here to jazz me with Coffee!

We are happy to announce that we have just released Cordova iOS 8.1.0! This is one of Cordova's supported platforms for building iOS applications.

This release contains fixes for several bugs that were reported against the 8.0.1 version.

• cordova-ios@8.1.0

To upgrade:

cordova platform remove ios
cordova platform add ios@8.1.0

To install:

cordova platform add ios@8.1.0

Release Highlights

• Fix for Ionic WebView plugin

  Re-add an implementation of the deprecated shouldOverrideLoadWithRequest:navigationType: selector because the Ionic WebView plugin relies on it.

• Fix /_app_file_/ URLs not working

  During refactoring of the URLSchemeTask handler for cordova-ios 8, an error was introduced where /_app_file_ URLs were treated as being relative to the resources directory rather than as filesystem paths.

• Fixes various build issues

Changes include:

Fixes:

• GH-1653 fix(actions): fix CDVURLSchemeHandlerTest warnings
• GH-1652 fix(actions): IPhone 16e not found on macOS 26 for latest OS
• GH-1640 fix: NSInternalInconsistencyException: "No response has been sent for this task" - second attempt
• GH-1637 fix(build): Target a generic iOS simulator for building
• GH-1632 fix(ionic): Add workaround for Ionic WebView plugin
• GH-1618 fix(xcode): Fix library search paths for target
• GH-1621 fix(xcode): Ensure we do NFD normalization on PRODUCT_NAME
• GH-1616 fix(spm): Ensure the deployment target always gets set
• GH-1606 fix(webview): Ensure scheme task is always finished
• GH-1610 fix(scheme): Fix /app_file/ URLs not working
• GH-1612 fix(spm): Set deployment target in Package.swift
• GH-1597 fix: ignore spm build artifacts

Others:

• GH-1650 chore: remove redundant Hello World template files
• GH-1647 chore(deps): bump @xmldom/xmldom from 0.8.12 to 0.8.13
• GH-1634 doc: keepCallback and setKeepCallbackAsBool: of CDVPluginResult
• GH-1646 chore(deps): bump lodash from 4.17.23 to 4.18.1
• GH-1644 chore(deps): bump @xmldom/xmldom from 0.8.11 to 0.8.12
• GH-1642 chore(deps): bump picomatch
• GH-1639 chore: update package-lock
• GH-1635 chore: Fix improperly ignored deprecation warning
• GH-1633 chore: Bump patch level for ongoing dev work
• GH-1628 chore: Fix missing licence headers
• GH-1627 release(8.0.1): Update release notes and version
• GH-1623 chore(ci): draft release
• GH-1624 chore: cleanup license headers
• GH-1625 chore: add DEVELOPMENT.md & cleanup README.md
• GH-1622 refactor(versions): Refactor version code for test reliability
• GH-1619 chore(deps): Update to latest jasmine & c8 versions
• GH-1614 doc(readme): improve badges
• GH-1601 chore: Remove compileBitcode from export options
• GH-1611 chore: set swift-tools-version to 5.9
• GH-1599 chore(deps): bump lodash from 4.17.21 to 4.17.23
• GH-1598 Add missing trailing new line
• GH-1592 doc(readme): add minimum iOS version
• GH-1591 doc(readme): add Link to iOS Platform Guide
• GH-1588 chore: update release audit workflow & license headers