Benedict Evans
87 statements across 42 episodes · 11 bullish · 24 bearish · 1 people on the record · first statement Nov 2, 2020 by Benedict Evans · across every show →
On the record as a speaker too: Benedict Evans's record, appearances and statements → this page counts the times other people say the name.
Everything said about Benedict Evans, oldest first
Nov 2, 2020 neutral
Evans: Tech regulation needs a concrete product theory, not just legal theory
“I think the challenge here is, like, and I phrase this another way, that you kind of need to have a theory of, you know, competition law, or privacy law, or speech law, or something, and then you need to have, you know, a theory of harm. What is the problem th…”
Nov 23, 2020 positive
Nov 23, 2020 neutral
Evans: UK weekly online retail spending stepped up from £1.6B to £1.9B
“Online retail was, what, 1.6 billion a week in April. And it went up to 1.9, and is now at a, 1.9, and is now about Well, and then it wobbled down a bit, 1.9. So it kind of, you had this, you had a curve going up and you've got to step up and it's basically co…”
Jan 3, 2021
Jan 3, 2021 negative
Jan 3, 2021 positive
Evans: Newsletters monetize better than websites because emails feel physically tangible
“Secondly, I feel like an email has more, like, physicality and more tangible value, so it feels like you've got a thing that you still have and can own, and you're getting, it's coming to you, so it feels like you're getting this ongoing service, as opposed to…”
Jan 10, 2021
Evans: Building social competitors requires network data, defeating individual data portability
“If you wanted to make an Instagram competitor, I would like to see everything that you've posted and everything that you'd like, and I also want to see everyone you follow and everything they like, because that's what Instagram uses to give me recommendations.…”
Jan 10, 2021 negative
Evans: EU communication privacy law inadvertently banned child abuse scanning
“So late, late in December, the EU had passed a law on privacy of communications platforms, which basically said you're not allowed to look at what people are saying to each other. And suddenly realized, just as this was about to go into effect in mid-December,…”
Jan 10, 2021
Jan 17, 2021 neutral
Evans: Western analysis of Chinese tech repeats 1990s Japanese iMode errors
“I think there's a real parallel to that and how people talk about a lot of Chinese services now, because you can't go there, even if you go there, you can't use it, you can't use the products, you can install it, but you can't, like, nothing works if you're no…”
Jan 31, 2021
Evans: Every analytical chart fits one of four narrative archetypes
“I basically make four kinds of chart which is, this is going up a lot, this is going down a lot, these two things are exactly, these two things are very different, or these two things that you don't think are the same are the same. And so every chart is a diag…”
Jan 31, 2021
Evans: Lengthening a time series makes recent chart trends look visually larger
“Very basic trick to make a trend look bigger is to have a longer time series. Because then, instead of having your five percent change spread across the whole width of the slide, it's all squashed up over into the right hand side of the slide, so the change lo…”
Feb 7, 2021
Pizza dominates food delivery because it survives transportation better than burgers
“Takeaway pizza is bigger than hamburger, hamburger, takeaway pizza is bigger than takeaway hamburger, because takeaway pizza survives better than hamburger, which survives better than X, and it's why, you know, pasta and noodles, and some kinds of Indian food …”
Feb 7, 2021
Feb 28, 2021 neutral
Feb 28, 2021 neutral
Evans: By 2022 COVID fears will fade, but 2019 normalcy won't return
“This time next year, it now feels pretty likely, like unless there's another, like, asteroid hits the Earth, that we'll be sorted back. We won't be worrying about getting COVID, put it like that. We will not be back to normal in the sense that we will, you kno…”
Mar 14, 2021 neutral
Evans: Distinguishing on-device from server ad profiling is purely theological
“What exactly is the difference between Google knowing you're a woman with young children, and having that on a data center in Oregon, and Apple knowing, and your iPhone knowing that you're a woman with young children, and showing you an ad targeted at women wi…”
Jun 21, 2021 neutral
Evans: Tech Workers Outside Ad Teams Do Not Understand Advertising
“My basic thesis on advertising is that no one who doesn't work in ad tech understands any of it. Particularly people in tech. No one in tech who doesn't work on an ad tech team understands advertising. Like no one at Google who doesn't work on the advertising …”
Jun 21, 2021 neutral
Jul 5, 2021 negative
Evans: Emailing files flattens structured data to lowest common denominator
“And every time you email something, every time you save a file, you're kind of flattening out all of that context and that history and the structure data to it and turning it back into a PDF. It's like the lowest common denominator.”
Nov 8, 2021
Evans: Tech analysis without frameworks is like listing barbarian battles
“If all you can do is tell me that one barbarian king defeated another somewhere in the Central Asia what use are you to the public? What does this tell me? Who cares? So if all you can tell me is that Amazon has ads now, Or that there's a new fast fashion app …”
Nov 15, 2021 positive
Evans: Cryptocurrencies are fundamentally open-source computers, not just digital gold
“Cryptocurrencies for want of a better term are not fundamentally about replacing gold and fiat currency and being a store medium of storage. That's just sort of the one of the early and obvious applications. What you're really seeing here is a way to run an op…”
Mar 7, 2022 neutral
Mar 7, 2022 neutral
Mar 14, 2022 neutral
Mar 14, 2022 bearish
Benedict Evans: Audience Portability Fails Creators Without Platform Scale and Discovery
“And yes, the people who followed me on the old system will see me on new one, but the other half of it is a new one has got to have billions of users because Otherwise, in a sense, why am I going there? If not, because it's, you know, question A might be I don…”
Apr 18, 2022 bearish
Evans: Never use Twitter's newsletter product because they will abandon it
“I would, if anyone asked me about starting a newsletter, and I would say, well, you could do this, you could do that, do not, under any circumstances, use the Twitter one, because I just don't have any faith that they won't fuck it up, or they won't get bored …”
May 16, 2022
Evans: Forecasters should make specific predictions to be wrong in useful ways
“It's always kind of much more useful to try and find the middle ground between, like, of course you can't predict what we'll be doing on the internet in 15 years' time, but to try and get specific about, well, what is it that you think that would do or not do,…”
May 16, 2022 bullish
Evans: Winning VR/AR platforms will be open ecosystems like iPhone
“The ones that will win will be ones that are open platforms in the way that the iPhone was an open platform. And I do mean deliberately to say the iPhone is an open platform. It has millions of apps and billions of downloads. It's an open platform. That's what…”
May 26, 2022 neutral
Evans: Online retailers redirect store rent savings into shipping and advertising
“Another big piece of it, of course, is that instead of spending the money on advertising, they spend the money, instead of spending the money on rent, they spend the money on advertising. So, you know, there's no, there's, you know, it's like a law of thermody…”
Jul 18, 2022 bearish
Jul 18, 2022 bearish
Evans: Most AI researchers believe AGI requires fundamental new breakthroughs
“So I think most people in AI research think, no, we need an unknown number of further breakthroughs of principle, and we don't know what those are or when those would happen, and so we don't, we can't predict when we would have AGI, although there doesn't appe…”
Aug 15, 2022 neutral
Evans: Battery and LED components have diffused completely into standard lighting
“And what sort of interested me about this was that this isn't technology anymore. It's not software, it's not Silicon Valley, it's not even, I mean, it's probably coming out of Shenzhen in some form, but it's no longer the tech industry, it's the lighting indu…”
Aug 23, 2022 positive
Evans: A wave of non-software company creation is coming across retail
“Like, there is clearly going to be a wave of new company creation, right? Outside of software. So whether that's apparel, or retailing, or restaurants, all sorts of things, like the whole basis of how you buy stuff online changes.”
Aug 23, 2022 negative
Evans says he would not have invested in Adam Neumann's Flow
“Meanwhile, meanwhile, I still wouldn't have done the deal, but hey, that, that's why I'm, that's, maybe that's why I'm not taking this call on my goal stream between Santa Monica and Miami Beach, my Santa Monica and Miami Beach offices, as I run my venture fir…”
Oct 31, 2022 negative
Oct 31, 2022 bearish
Oct 31, 2022 negative
Evans: Software productivity advances via automation and ML, not bigger screens
“I don't think the direction of travel of software is bigger screens. I don't think the direction, or more fundamentally, is not about showing you more information. It's not about having more rows in the spreadsheet. It's having less rows in the spreadsheet and…”
Nov 29, 2022
Evans: Google Trends for 'Best' Are Rising While 'Cheap' Searches Decline
“I have a trend, a chart I often show of Google trends for best versus cheap. Cheap is going down and best is going up. The point being that you used to use the internet for price comparison. You knew what you wanted. You went to the internet and searched cheap…”
Dec 5, 2022 bullish
Evans: AI has become universal across software and major enterprises
“And now, of course, I'd be surprised if there's any company in tech that doesn't have 200 AI projects. Or that isn't based on AI. This has basically just become a universal thing throughout the whole software, the software industry, and most other big companie…”
Dec 5, 2022
Evans: Machine Learning Turns Logic Problems Into Statistics Problems
“And so this was, there was this sort of whole class of problem where, which people say easy for people to do, hard for people to describe. So something like calculating a mortgage is hard for people to do, but easy to describe. It's very easy to write down the…”
Dec 11, 2022
Evans: Tech markets consolidate via S-curves where incremental improvements cannot win
“The competitive threat in tech is generally not someone doing the same thing as you, but better. Or let me kind of qualify that. Each market sort of goes for an S-curve, and there's like an early period where everyone's fighting it out to win. So this is like …”
Dec 11, 2022
Feb 6, 2023 bullish
Evans: Dismissing generative AI over early errors misses the conceptual breakthrough
“And clearly you should be more, if you look at it and you say, well, it makes cats, but the cats have four, have three legs. If you say, well, yeah, it can make some text, but the text isn't very good and it's got mistakes in it. You're frankly, you're an idio…”
Feb 6, 2023
Evans: UX and platform shifts create discontinuities that produce breakout companies
“Just shifting the UX and the platform is often kind of a discontinuity that creates new companies. And so you have that when you go to cloud, you get Salesforce. When you go to mobile, you get not just Instagram, but also Snapchat, and then TikTok”
Feb 6, 2023 bullish
Evans: Custom video effects and actor swaps will run on iPhone apps
“Now, what, now, I, well, what is the point in which I say, okay, I would actually like to see that, but I would like to see Don Rickles instead of Go Forever. That, that is not 20 people in a production studio and a whole pile of SFX. That is going to be an iP…”
Feb 6, 2023
Mar 27, 2023 negative
Evans: Closing AI models cannot stop proliferation because machine learning is out
“They basically, they suddenly stopped disclosing anything and they say this is because they worry this is going to lead to producing Skynet. And so they want to keep the whole thing under control, which is, is, is another topic, which is that the whole thing i…”
Mar 27, 2023 neutral
Mar 27, 2023 neutral
Evans: AI mistakes are easier to hide in images than in text
“The point is that, that images are both much higher bandwidth, but also much higher noise. And so the mistakes can be kind of hidden in the noise that, like, the clouds aren't quite right. If you're not a meteorologist, you don't know, and you don't, and you a…”
Mar 27, 2023 neutral
Evans: AI summarizing news without links raises deeper issues than search engines
“If you're going to, you know, build a new system that will just tell you what the story was without linking or giving you credit, that's very different from you know, what Google and Facebook do, which is you search for a new story and they tell you where to r…”
Apr 2, 2023
Apr 2, 2023
Apr 24, 2023 neutral
Evans: Demanding citations from LLMs is a category error
“Asking and asking chat GPT for a source. That's not what it is or how it works. Because one answer is the source is the internet. Two or 300,000 things. The second answer is that when you've said, please give me a source, what these systems do is they give you…”
Apr 24, 2023 bearish
Evans: Layering search logic on LLMs like Bing Chat is unscalable
“They've layered this, all this logical structure on top of it. So you've got the statistical engine and then they've tried to layer on top this other stuff where it isn't an LLM. So it actually does give you a source, but also that of course becomes unscalable…”
May 1, 2023 negative
May 1, 2023 neutral
May 1, 2023 bearish
May 1, 2023 neutral
May 1, 2023
Jul 21, 2023 positive
Aug 17, 2023 negative
Evans: ChatGPT has not fit into personal workflows after nine months
“Nine months in, I'm an early adopter. I do all sorts of stuff. I've been pushing and pushing and pushing ChatGPT. I haven't really found anything that's useful for me. That's not, it's not useful. That's, I haven't found something that fits into my workflows.”
Oct 29, 2023 negative
Oct 29, 2023 negative
Dec 17, 2023 neutral
Dec 17, 2023 neutral
Jan 29, 2024 neutral
Jan 29, 2024 bearish
Evans: Enterprise AI deployment takes three years, not three months
“This stuff does, yes, this stuff happens for the sake of argument, but it does not happen in three months or three, it takes three years. The deployment for that is going to take, yes, the actually turning it into software that's not just ChatGPT.”
Apr 1, 2024 neutral
Evans: LLMs are rebundling the curation that influencers unbundled from magazines
“Influences unbundling for magazines and TV, but mostly for magazines. And of course, LLM then, you know, ChatGPT goes off and reads the whole web and synthesizes it for you, so it's bundling all the influences back up to the top again”
Apr 1, 2024
Apr 1, 2024
Evans: Generative AI requires error tolerance or easily verifiable mistakes
“So you need to have a use case where either it doesn't matter if it's not a hundred percent right, which is, you know, Give me 50 ideas for slogan for a new brand of toothpaste. Like there's not, you're not, there's not like a complete. There's no right answer…”
Jul 1, 2024 positive
Jul 1, 2024 neutral
Evans: 33% to 50% tried ChatGPT, but daily active users are 1% to 5%
“And the top line is basically that in a bunch of developed world countries, something between a third to a half of people have already tried ChatGPT.
And so that's a very glass half full kind of statement.
On the other hand, the number of people you've turned …”
Jul 1, 2024 neutral
Dec 20, 2025 neutral
Evans: Frontier general-purpose AI models are at parity and indistinguishable
“The first of them is, like, the models are all basically the same. The general purpose model, the general purpose use cases, the models are all basically the same. And from week to week, the leader changes. They're all within a couple of percentage points of e…”
Dec 20, 2025 bearish
Dec 20, 2025 bearish
Evans: AI foundation models lack network effects and sustainable moats
“There's no network effect that we know of yet. And so unlike previous kinds of software platform shift, there's not any Obvious strategy in building the models where you can make yours better than everybody else's by doing that, following that plan. Well, you …”
Feb 23, 2026 bullish
Evans: Dismissing AI as useless is like calling the internet useless in 1999
“I still see people who say, no, it's just like a stochastic parrot. It doesn't do causation. It doesn't work very well. It's got hallucinations. It's all useless. These people are morons. Like, they are just idiots. But they're idiots in the sense of somebody …”
Feb 23, 2026 neutral
Feb 23, 2026 neutral
Evans: The machine learning wave ten years ago was not transformative
“I mean, the last wave of AI was machine learning, 1015 years ago now, 10 years ago, really. That was not transformative across everything. It was a new bunch of stuff that everybody could build, and there were a bunch of new companies with it, but it wasn't th…”
Feb 23, 2026 neutral
Evans: AI works best where critics are angriest about it
“The fields where AI is actually works best right now are the fields where people are really angry about it and sure it's useless. ... Whereas the fields where it doesn't, really doesn't quite work, or needs an awful lot of other stuff around it, The fields whe…”
Feb 23, 2026 negative
Evans: Creators most upset about AI art lack originality
“The really unkind thing one could say is that the people who are most upset about AI art are the people who are making stuff that has no particular authenticity originality. I mean, if you, if you've made, if you wrote 10 vampire romance books last year and yo…”
Feb 23, 2026
Evans: I will not publish writing that ChatGPT could generate
“One of my, the ways I would think about what I'm writing is I've written this. Is this what anybody else would say? Is this just saying what everybody knows or everyone thinks? Well, then I won't publish it. And now I just say, well, is this what ChatGPT would…”
Jul 15, 2026
Jul 24, 2026
Evans: Domain expertise differs fundamentally from software product design capability
“If you're a great accountant, or a great video editor, or a great graphic designer, or a great salesperson, or a great lawyer, those are different skills to being the person who's going to work out the right way to make a really great piece of legal discovery …”
Jul 24, 2026 negative
Evans: Making tool-creation easier will not turn enterprise employees into builders
“You're not the right person to see all of those problems. You're also not the right person to get everybody to use this. And so there's just this kind of huge gap between we give everyone a tool that can make stuff, and therefore everyone is going to make new …”
Aug 16, 2026 negative
Evans: Giving enterprise employees Copilot or ChatGPT has not worked well
“Step one was give everybody co-pilot, and that didn't work too well, because it's kind of, or Claude or ChatGPT, because it's kind of like being in 1997 and giving everybody a web browser. Okay, this is the future, but it's not, that's not, what was the produc…”