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 27 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 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
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: OpenAI's new ChatGPT work product is a confusing disaster
“I was playing with a new chat GPT work product, which is clearly not that it's a complete disaster. It's chaotic, confusing mess”
Evans: OpenAI and Anthropic lack distribution and cannot out-innovate startup ecosystem
“You don't have the existing feature set that Google and Meta and Microsoft and Apple and Amazon and everybody else have where they can add it and Salesforce and, you know, Workday and, you know, Figma and everyone else, some of them, some of which will survive…”
Evans: OpenAI lacks a technology lead, lock-in, or network effects
“If you're open AI, you've got, don't fundamentally have a technology lead. You're first among sequels at best. You've got this giant user base. That's not, that has very shallow usage and engagement. And it isn't really locked. It isn't locked in. It doesn't h…”
Evans: AI product heads cannot set roadmaps because research breakthroughs dictate capabilities
“What that's saying is the head of product isn't setting the product strategy and has no idea what the product is going to be in a month's time. Because there's going to be stuff coming out of the research lab that they don't know about, that the research lab d…”
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 …”
Evans: OpenAI will struggle to make data centers better than rivals
“In the end, A, it's going to be very hard for particularly OpenAI to, for their data center to be better than everybody else's or cheaper or more efficient than anybody else's.”
Evans: Sora, AI app platforms, and AI browsers will likely fail
“The Sora, the app platform, the browser, it's quite more than likely that none of those will work.”
Evans: AI models are commodities outside specialist use cases
“It's been very clear for like the last year that these models are commodities outside of specialist use cases and outside of very, people who are very, very deeply into using them all the time every day. Unless you're doing image, for image generation or codin…”
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: 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…”
Evans: AI image generation requires human curation akin to photography
“It's like, you know, if I take a photograph, is the camera now the artist and not me? Well, no, it's me that decided what the picture was, and where to point it, and how to take it, and which of the 2000 pictures you took is, is the one. And, you know, I was t…”
Evans: Anthropic Leads AI Frontier, OpenAI and Gemini Trail by 5%
“Because right now we've got, you know, Anthropics ahead at the moment. We have OpenAI and Gemini five percent behind, like not far behind. Grok just, SpaceX Grok Nazi model just came out with like a model that's in like the top At the top of some of the benchm…”
Evans: Anthropic and OpenAI job exposure scores are self-deception
“Because Anthropic does this thing, and OpenAI have done these things based on sort of US census data where they try and put like a numeric score job by job of exposure to AI. Which seems to me just absolutely ludicrous as an exercise in sort of self-deception …”
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…”
Evans: AI cascading model pickers represent a product design failure
“All that you have is you have these ridiculous model pickers, which we have to make sure we mention, like the model picker that cascades out. Should I use GPT? Should I, yeah, should I use O-three or three- Well, how the fuck? What the hell kind of a question …”
Evans: Perplexity does nothing OpenAI cannot do, winning solely on UX
“Theoretically perplexity isn't doing anything that you couldn't do with OpenAI, but it said, let's narrow it and make it more specific and build product around that and make a UX around that and communicate to the users, this is what it's for, not those other …”
Evans: A novel search interface could seize market share from incumbents
“Simply doing a new search engine with a completely new user interface could be an opportunity to take share, even if it's actually just a Up front and onto the same thing you had before.”
Evans: Building first-party AI apps means competing with all of Silicon Valley
“So if you're going to make your own experiences, then you are competing with the whole of Silicon Valley and the entire tech industry in trying to invent new experiences on this technology.”
Evans: Sora usage dropped off the charts as the novelty faded
“Of course, it might also be Sora which is obviously an open AI attempt to solve this, or now Sora has now dropped off the charts as the novelty wore off.”
Evans: Big companies run 10 to 20 AI pilots without systemic clarity
“Every big company now has had, like, 10 AI presentations. They've had one from Microsoft and Google, they've had the one from their ad agency, they've had the one from Bain or BCG or McKinsey, they maybe had one from OpenAI, they've had stuff from Accenture, a…”
Evans: Big Tech funds AI capex out of cash flow, unlike OpenAI
“Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Meta are funding it out of cash flow, Meta less so than the others, whereas OpenAI has to do these innovative funding structures because it has no cash flow, and Oracle is basically going to borrow a hundred percent of revenue to…”
Evans: OpenAI built a reasoning engine, not a specialized tool
“What I tried to do is build something, build what you could say is like a reasoning engine based on having an enormous amount of material that's the output of human intelligence.”
Evans: Open-ended AI models create a paradox between capability and discoverability
“Paradox is theoretically it can do anything, but you don't know what you can do. So you want a list. Theoretically you can ask it for whatever you want, but actually there's the five things that you found that work for you.”
Benedict Evans: Users will consistently bypass probabilistic LLM safety filters
“You can try and stop it, but people will find ways of getting around it because it's not just doing a binary database lookup. So you might have a keyword filter on Napalm and people will come up with a way of describing Napalm without using the word Napalm.”
Evans: ChatGPT succeeded due to open access and content moderation
“The difference is ChatGPT, I think there's two specific things about ChatGPT. One of them is that they just made it open and anyone can plug stuff in. And the other, I think is that they put a lot of effort into content moderation. Like there's like a building…”
Evans: Amazon Is Flooded With Spam Products Named After OpenAI Error Messages
“Amazon is overrun. You know, if you saw this link, if you search, search Amazon for I'm sorry, that would break open AI terms of service. And you just got huge numbers of marketplace products where literally the name of the product is, I'm sorry, I can't name …”