The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 345 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 13 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Benedict Evans: Apple will be the company to kill native apps
“Who is it that's going to kill the native app? It's going to be Apple. Apple is the company.”
Evans: Tech industry cannot spend $10 trillion annually on AI infrastructure
“We can't spend 10 trillion dollars a year on our AI infrastructure, because there isn't 10 trillion dollars a year there to spend on it.”
Evans: Current generative AI technology cannot drive daily consumer usage
“We don't see a way that consumers will use this daily rather than weekly with the technology we have right now.”
Evans: Tech industry will spend $1T to $2T on AI CapEx
“Over the next couple of years, we've got like a trillion or two trillion dollars of capex coming down the pipe, and the models get a hundred x, 200 x, if it's more efficient every year.”
Evans: Only 3 to 6 companies will build frontier AI models
“You're going to have, pick a number, three to six companies making a frontier model. Spending, no one knows, no one honest knows, like something between two hundred billion dollars and two trillion dollars a year on building these models.”
Evans: AI will drive 10x to 100x increase in total software creation
“What does this do to software, and the answer is, more software, like, way more software. I mean, all software companies exist to solve problems created by other software companies, and that was the joke in security, like, All security software exists to solve…”
Evans: The AI market will inevitably form a financial bubble
“Well, deterministically, very new, very, very big, very, very exciting, world-changing things tend to lead to bubbles. And you, I don't think anybody would dispute that you can see some bubbly behavior now, and, you know, you can argue about what kind of bubbl…”
Evans: OpenAI's Deep Research marketing case used inaccurate mobile data
“OpenAI launched Deep Research. Their whole marketing case is it goes off and collects data about the mobile market. I used to be a mobile analyst. The numbers are all wrong. Their use case of look how useful this is, their numbers are wrong.”
Evans: Claude has virtually no consumer usage despite top benchmark scores
“It's basically, the only consumer, Claude has basically no consumer usage, even though on the benchmark score it's the same. And then it's ChatGPT, and then halfway down the chart, it's Meta and Google.”
Evans: AI features will not commoditize premium smartphone hardware
“Am I going to buy the one that's a 10th of the price and just use the LLM on it? No, because I'll still want the good camera and this good screen and the good battery life.”
Evans: Any entity spending billions can acquire a frontier AI model
“There's going to be anybody who can spend a couple of hundred, you know, can spend a couple of billion dollars can have a frontier model.”
Evans: On-device AI models will fail as capability gains outpace compression
“Will we have small models running on devices? No, because the small models, the capabilities are moving too fast for the small models to shrink the small model onto the device.”
Evans: Battery costs of $200/kWh explain why Tesla loses money
“Or is it because batteries are still 200 dollars per kilowatt hour? And that's not cost competitive with gasoline, which incidentally is also a big reason why Tesla is still losing money.”
Evans: Tech dominance cycle will eventually turn for Big Tech
“It's not apparent how that cycle would turn for Google or Apple or Facebook or Amazon, but it will turn.”
Evans: Only 50 million of 1.5 billion PC users are power users
“There is this core group of people who live in Photoshop or live in Excel or live in Xcode, or live in whatever the, that is, add all of those people up, you get to maybe fifty million people out of one and a half billion PCs.”
Evans: If Daydream succeeds, Oculus risks becoming a subscale Android fork
“And so if there's a hundred Daydream devices, then the Facebook product, you could argue, ends up looking a bit like Kindle Fire. It's sort of subscale, squeezed out fork, and no one bothers developing for it.”
Evans: Smartphones will eat mass-market virtual reality
“Well, I think the basic story here is smartphones eat VR.”
Evans: Apple and Facebook will build full-stack VR while Google commoditizes hardware
“You'll have Apple and Facebook trying to do the full stack, and you'll have Google saying, well, we're going to provide the hard bit, and everything else will be a commodity around it.”
Evans: There are even odds Windows Phone disappears within a year
“It's, that, that, I would be, I think there's even odds that that product won't exist in a year.”
Evans: Smartphones will dominate VR hardware within five years
“On like a five-year view, it seems to me that this is all going to be about smartphones, because just Moore's law will drive this, and the graphics and the sensors will get there”
Evans: Apple, Google, and Facebook won the smartphone and messaging wars
“The sort of, the feeling you have in mobile right now is we're kind of at the end of one wave, and we haven't got another wave coming up yet, so we've kind of had the smartphone wars, and Apple and Google both kind of won, and we've had the messaging wars, and…”
Evans: Wintel Platform Share Will Decline to 10% of Computing Market
“The Wintel ecosystem now, as a percentage of total computing, so including tablets and smartphones and everything else, is now sort of 15% of unit sales, and it's going to go down, it's going to go maybe not 10%, but you know, it may go down to 10%”
Evans: Self-driving car insurance will cost half as much due to safety
“And those cars don't have a driver, and the insurance probably costs half as much because self-driving cars don't have accidents in the same way, because the error rate will be lower, and so the price of those self-driving, of those on-demand services will be …”
Evans: Autonomous cars will shrink personal vehicle ownership significantly
“The point is that self-driving cars, therefore, make on-demand services much, much, much bigger, and they tend to result, therefore, in many fewer people owning a car.”
Evans: Autonomous vehicles will travel in 150 mph highway pelotons
“You could start having pelotons of cars. So you've got 15 cars all going down the highway two feet behind each other at a 150 miles an hour.”
Evans: Tech's center of gravity shifted from Seattle and Finland to China
“So it used to be that you would go to Microsoft or entity Docomo or Nokia or Intel to find out the future. And you'd go to Seattle, and you'd go to Finland, and you'd go to Japan to see the future. And that's not true anymore. Now it's about Apple and Google, …”
Evans: Public tech companies are not in a valuation bubble
“There is no bubble. There's no valuation. There's no inflated valuations in public companies.”
Apple missed streaming music like Google missed social media
“Yeah, I mean, I think, well, for music, there's no question that music, Apple dominated music, and they missed the transition to streaming completely, just as Google missed social completely.”
Evans: Global annual photos taken likely reaches 10 to 100 trillion
“Even if you just add up the numbers from Facebook and Snapchat, Facebook and Instagram and WhatsApp and so on, you get to about eight or nine hundred billion photographs taken last year. And that's just, sorry, shared. So if there were eight or nine hundred bi…”
Evans: Google generates more revenue on iOS than on Android
“You know, Google is making more money on iOS and Android right now.”
Evans: Only 25% of active iPhone users have installed Google Maps
“There's probably four hundred million iPhones in use, a bit over four hundred million iPhones on use. Only a quarter of those have installed Google Maps.”
Evans: Automakers will not be disintermediated by software providers
“Car is still basically kind of about driving, at least until we've got self-driving cars, and even then, you know, it's all basically about how you put the bits of metal together. So I don't think I think they're going to be squeezed out in quite the same way,…”
Evans: Google contracts block OEMs from selling both Google and forked Android
“Well, the problem for them is that Google's contract says you're not allowed to sell a forked and uncompatible and open version of Android. And, or if you do, you can't sell a single phone that has Google services on it.”
Evans: Android destroyed vast wealth for mobile hardware manufacturers
“Google were actually afraid of Microsoft rather than afraid of Apple, and so they created this mobile phone platform that's been Enormously successful for Google, vast destroyer of wealth for the entire manufacturing industry”
Evans: Mobile apps will be re-bundled within five years
“We've had this massive unbundling, and that unbundling is getting more and more complex and sophisticated, and it's all going to get bundled back up again at some point, in some way, in like five years.”
Evans: Tesla is outselling all other premium car manufacturers in US
“In fact, Tesla is now out selling the other premium car manufacturers in the USA.”
Evans: Gaming stream viewership is larger than Netflix, HBO, or ESPN
“Watching people play games is now bigger than Netflix, or bigger than HBO, or bigger than ESPN.”
Evans: Crypto and machine learning will shift tech away from centralization
“Now we have two new fundamental layers. We have crypto, and we have machine learning, which among other things will swing away from centralization.”
Evans Compares Maturity of AI, Crypto, Mixed Reality, and Autonomy
“For autonomy, we are still very much down in the muddy hole in the ground, digging foundations. Mixed reality is just sort of moving out of that to the point that you can throw the frame up. For cryptocurrency, the frame has gone up. We're just trying to work …”
Evans: Everything the internet did to media will happen to retail
“Everything that the internet did to media will happen to retail.”
Evans predicts Level 5 autonomous vehicles are 5 to 10 years away
“And that level five is probably five to 10 years away with the emphasis on 10 years, depending on who you talk to.”
Evans: WhatsApp rivals global SMS volume with only 30 engineers
“Even more dramatically, WhatsApp is doing almost as many messages a year as an entire global SMS system, and it's doing that with just 30 engineers.”
Evans: Telecom stocks stayed flat despite 2,000x mobile data growth
“Mobile data traffic has risen by something like one and a half to 2000 times, and the mobile networks collectively have revenue of about a trillion dollars, and they spend about two hundred billion dollars a year on CapEx, and the stocks have been flat for 20 …”
Evans: Microsoft, Meta, and Google spending over 50% of revenue on CapEx
“Microsoft, Meta, and Google are all on, in line to spend over 50% of revenue on CapEx this year.”
Evans: Continuous AI scaling could eliminate human software coding
“Cause in principle, if the models keep scaling, nobody's going to write code anymore. You'll just, I say to the model, like, Hey, can you do this thing for me?”
Evans: ChatGPT has 800-900 million weekly active users, 5% paying
“ChatGPT has got eight or nine hundred million weekly active users. Five percent of people are paying.”
Evans: Google and OpenAI cannot reliably execute Apple's Siri vision
“I mean, Google, I don't think Google or OpenAI could deliver the Siri demo that Apple gave two years ago. I mean, they could really do the demo, but they couldn't like consistently reliably make it work.”
Evans: Current AI cannot replace humans outside tightly constrained guardrails
“The stuff we have now is not a replacement for an actual person outside of some very narrow and very tightly constrained guardrails, which is why, you know, Demis' point that it's absurd to say that we have PhD level capabilities now.”