The Calls
Dated predictions and their status, on one timeline. Left of today: already assessed. Green held up, red didn't hold up, amber partly. Right: still open; when a dot's date hits, the ledger checks it again against the public record.
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Next up (6)
1532 days left 2030-11-23
2051 days left 2032-04-25
Evans: Linear TV ad slots will disappear within 10 years
“Half of the ad, global ad industry is still on TV. And that's not going to be there in 10 years' time, or it won't be quote unquote TV. I mean, this is this whole, what is TV? You know, is Disney, you know, if you watch it on your smartphone, if you watch YouT…”
2072 days left 2032-05-16
Evans: Mass consumer blockchain adoption is 5 to 10 years away
“And, you know, if one looks at, you know web three, it's sort of realistic to say, you know, what point are we going to see hundreds of millions of people using a consumer, mass market consumer app that's built on a blockchain? Well, not next year. And sort of…”
2072 days left 2032-05-16
Evans: Billions using smart glasses as primary computing is a decade away
“And the same thing for quote-unquote metaverse, which is, you know, what point do we think we might have billions of people wearing something that looked like a pair of glasses as their main or only computing experience? And is that, that, and that's a sort of…”
2289 days left 2032-12-19
Closed calls (37) the full record →
Benedict Evans: AI model training costs will drop as efficiency improves
“And those are all, those points on that plot, all of like historically have gone up and to the right, but now they're going to start going down because the models get more efficient and people work out better ways of training them when you optimize all the ind…”
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…”
Evans: Generative AI will create a massive flood of automated search spam
“You're going to have people generating content in response to what they think search traffic is automatically. So you will have automatically generated video with automatically generated voice targeting search queries at massive scale. There will be a new floo…”
Evans: Generative AI will expand to video and precise creative workflows
“It's probably, I feel like there's a whole second wave of what you can do with this stuff. And it will get to video, and it will get much more specific and precise and controllable, and it will answer a lot of sort of make me 20 options of X and Y and Z that h…”
Apple will maintain Google defaults while routing specialized queries to AI
“Apple will carry on treating Google as the default general search engine. They'll just peel more stuff out into their own foundation model or into chat TPT or into booking.com.”
Evans: Text-to-video AI generating specific human actions is roughly five years away
“Well, today, certainly make me a picture that says people doing this, and certainly, and then it will be make me a video that says, that shows people doing this, and that's, You know, that's sort of five years away or something.”
Evans: OpenAI will face half a dozen competitors
“I'm not sure, you know, there would be a big debate about whether OpenAI is worth anything right now, or what it's worth based on the fact that there's clearly going to be half a dozen competitors to it.”
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…”
Catton-Brown: New US F1 rights deal will likely close at $100M–$110M
“So more likely that if this deal closes, it's going to close closer to a hundred, a 110 Million. I think my gut feeling is that A, it's probably going to close.”
Evans: External customers will spend $100B–$150B on AI coding this year
“This year, people outside of those labs will spend, clearly will spend something in the order of hundred, hundred and fifty billion dollars to use AI coding. Just to use AI coding. And that's not AI people spending money from NVIDIA. That's real money. And tha…”
Evans: EU antitrust regulators will target Apple's APIs and App Store control
“This EU are going to come back and they're not going to start with payment. They're going to start with the store and the APIs and everything else.”
Evans: China will target predatory mobile game monetization mechanics
“China is already having a crackdown on games addiction. You know, it has to be only a matter of time before China comes for this stuff as well and says, hang on, why are these people, you know, purely on sort of social harm and populism, whatever, but like Chi…”
Evans: The 30% App Store commission rule is toast
“Look, the 30% rule is toast, but we don't really know quite how and what and where”
Catton-Brown: Formula One will not secure its initial asking price for rights
“F-One is definitely not going to get the initial price set that they want. ESPN is definitely not, sounds like they're not going to fight for it.”
Evans: Dating apps will integrate LLMs for flirty message generation
“The next thing will be dating apps, like why all the dating apps don't have an LLM for like, write me something quirky and slightly flirtatious based on this profile. Go. Clearly that's like the next use case.”
Evans: Running image generation models locally on phones is months or years away
“You know, we're going, quickly going to go to a model in which you can run stable diffusion on the journey yourself on your computer or on your phone. That's like months or years away. It's not decades away. That's close.”
Evans predicts antitrust concerns will force Apple to open iOS NFC access
“Well, I think it's pretty likely that Apple will have to open up NFC access, for example. Because that's a payment monopoly thing.”
Evans: AI search answers will drain web traffic from lifestyle publishers
“But if I'm going to say, you know, write me an itinerary for hotels, restaurants, and architecture in Barcelona, I'm going to get, that's going to produce less click-through, and so that's going to be less traffic for Condé Nast Traveler, it's going to be less…”
Goldberg: TSMC's Arizona fab will lag leading-edge chips by half a generation
“And now I think that's actually gonna be a real plant in Arizona. And I think it's gonna have decent capacity enough to sort of satisfy the U.S. Military's needs and Apple's needs. And it will be, I don't think it'll be even a generation behind. I think it'll …”
Evans: 10% of Google's workforce will work in compliance by late 2025
“I think the only certainty is that when we come back in five years' time, 10% of people who work at Google will work in compliance.”
Evans: EU will force Apple to open NFC to third-party payment apps
“Certainly they will have to open up NFC, they will have to open up Apple Pay, so you'll have to be able to basically substitute Apple Pay with Stripe Pay or Square Pay. The EU, that's very clear in the DMA that's just kind of, that's going through its final pr…”
Benedict Evans: Screen shortages will cap 2024 Vision Pro sales
“And so Apple will sell, pick a number, tens to low hundreds of thousands of them next year, but picking a number wildly out of thin air, apparently people in supply chain say they'll be very supply constrained on the screen.”