Benedict Evans
Independent Technology Analyst · 99 appearances on the record.
computed by AI from the episodes · how this works → · full disclaimer →
analystauthorinvestorhost@benedictevans ↗LinkedIn ↗ben-evans.com ↗
Benedict Evans is an independent analyst known for his annual macro presentations and tech industry newsletter. He previously served as a partner at Andreessen Horowitz and co-hosts Another Podcast.
1261statements → 493claims → 341claims resolved → 75%fully supported → 3.82/5average certainty → 2.35/5average debate potential →
255 supported 56 partly supported 30 contradicted 13 not yet assessed 139 not checkable as stated how the 493 claims stand · each chip opens the sources
121 predictions · 372 assertions · 263 opinions · 487 insights · 9 disclosures · 9 what ifs · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 493 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 341 are resolved, 13 are not yet assessed, and 139 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.
The record, in short
What the tape says about how Benedict argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.
Their most notable supported claim
Evans: Vast majority of platform moderation decisions are universally agreed upon
“The vast majority of the decisions are not the lab leak theory from China or Hunter Biden's laptop. They're not things where people disagree. They are, you know, things where literally everybody who thinks content moderation is bad would look at that and go, o…”
Expressed certainty vs assessment result
weighted support: a fully supported claim counts one, a partly supported claim counts half. Each filled bar is clickable and opens exactly those claims; "none yet" means nothing said at that certainty level has resolved yet
How they sound: not measured why? →
We measure speaking style by listening to the audio itself, and a fair number needs at least 2,000 words from one person on tape we have measured. There is too little of Benedict Evans on measured tape to publish a rate. This says nothing about how they speak.
Everything Benedict Evans said on Another Podcast that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →
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…”
Evans: The Cambridge Analytica scandal was basically a hoax
“And of course the irony of Cambridge Analytica was it was, in the end, it was basically a hoax. There was nothing there.”
Evans: Sam Altman's Windows and utility analogies for AI are flawed
“Sam Altman talked about windows, which is a really bad analogy because windows had network effects. He also talked about water companies and electricity companies, which are like completely the opposite. They're regulated utilities with crappy margins selling …”
Evans: Bottom-up enterprise adoption only ever succeeded for Slack and Notion
“This is like the great fallacy of enterprise software that you can just sell to the users, and it's like it only ever worked for Slack and one other company. Maybe Notion, but even Notion has capped out.”
Evans: No AI lab has unique models because everyone builds identical tech
“What's happened so far is that people leapfrog each other every couple of weeks or every month or two, but because everyone is basically building the same stuff nobody has anything unique in the models.”
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 …”
Evans: Skeptics dismissing AI as useless or like NFTs are ignoring reality
“The real idiots are the people who are just saying, oh, none of this works, and it's all nonsense, and it's just a stochastic parrot, and it's useless, and I don't know what it's for and this is all, like, nonsense, and this is a rerun of NFTs. Because these p…”
The DOJ gerrymandered its market definition in the Apple antitrust lawsuit
“The DOJ is suing Apple for having what the DOJ, claiming the DOJ describes as a monopoly of, quote, performance smartphones, which Apple described as gerrymandering, and I'm kind of inclined to agree”
The Microsoft antitrust case did not create Google or the iPhone
“This is kind of bizarre assertions that somehow the DHA Microsoft case resulted in the rise of Google or resulted in the iPod and the iPhone, which is just ignorant nonsense.”
Evans: Rabbit's 'cack-handed' AI hardware is becoming a 'smoking hole'
“And we saw this kind of completely cack-handed attempt at doing this from Rabbit, which is now well on the way to being a smoking hole in the ground.”
Evans: Open-source clones of commercial products never succeed
“Well, so I was looking at, I looked at Metaverse, sorry, at Fediverse, and saw, this looks like an open source claim of Twitter, and open source claims of commercial products never work. It's the only people who use them are people who care that it's open sour…”
Twitter needed an 80% to 90% staff reduction and cultural reset
“And so it needed, like, a total cultural reset, and you needed to, like, fire 80 or 90% of the people and then hire back. So that instead of having, it had well over 10,000 people plus, plus contractors. And it's gone down to a thousand or something, and maybe…”
Evans: Musk's management of Twitter has been a series of self-inflicted wounds
“But since then, we've just had like one massive self-infected wound after another. Like he doesn't have, he's shot himself in the feed so many times, whether that's banning external links, like banning people, blocking people. And like, yes, the content modera…”
Evans: Twitter is a failure compared to Meta's multi-billion user apps
“It's an amazing success. Like, no, it fucking isn't. It's got two hundred fifty million users. Each has, like, Meta's got three or even four products that have each got three billion users. It's a failure.”
Elon Musk lacks an intuitive understanding of how social networks work
“Like on past form, you know, Elon is just going to keep doing this because he clearly just hasn't, doesn't have any understanding or any kind of intuitive sense of how social networks work. And he doesn't understand that he, every time he does these things, he…”
Musk's controversial tweets destroy half a billion dollars in value each
“When you do that, you just, that, that, that, that tweet cost you half a billion dollars. Every time you do that, that's another half billion dollars gone. Like, why do you do that? It's worse than a crime. It's a mistake.”
Evans: Developers will have little reason to build for Meta Quest
“I feel very sorry for Meta because they spent, you know, however many tens of billions of dollars on their product that, you know, no one's really, only a couple of million people are really using and doesn't have traction. And after this, why on earth would y…”
Evans: Generative AI is going to demolish the porn industry
“It's also going to happen to porn. It's just going to demolish the porn industry. Because again, there's vast amounts of training data.”
Evans: Near-zero AI error rates render semantic understanding questions practically irrelevant
“And as the error rate goes down, you get this philosophical conversation, which is what gets you to AI risk, where people are saying, look, you throw another hundred X more compute and 200 X more data at it, and the error rate goes to 90 X percent, 99.98%.
At…”
Evans: DOJ e-books lawsuit effectively protected Amazon's monopoly
“The DOJ basically goes to court in order to protect the position of a monopolist. Now that was actually what happened. What they said they were, or thought they were doing, was protecting low consumer prices, which was also what was happening. But the low cons…”
Evans: Netflix is a TV company, while YouTube actually disrupts television
“Netflix is a TV company, not a tech company, because all the questions that it poses, the TV industry questions, and it hasn't actually changed what a TV show is. It's just bought more of them and made more of them. Mr. Beast clearly is not a TV show. It's som…”
Sequoia Was an Unsophisticated Investor Duped by FTX
“FTX was selling Wall Street to non-Wall Street people. In this case, it's an, it's a funny, you could almost say it's an increase at Sequoia with the unsophisticated investors who got taken to the cleaners by some clown from hedge fund land.”
Bitcoin and Ethereum Currently Lack Real Utility
“At the moment we don't really have utility for them other than people building stuff that we hope we'll be able to do stuff with at some point in the future.”
Evans: Policy papers cannot control AI because models are open source
“And indeed the whole problem I had with the whole concept of AI safety and AI ethics was like, this stuff is all fundamentally open source. So aren't five companies that can do this. Anybody will be able to do this. So you're not going to be able to sit and wr…”