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 441 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: FTC Chair Lina Khan falsely claimed Amazon sold below cost
“Basically she claimed Amazon was losing money, which was This wasn't true. Or she claimed Amazon was selling below cost, which wasn't true.”
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…”
Evans: AI Model Inference Alone Generates 40% to 50% Gross Margins
“And meanwhile, we sort of know that you have positive gross margins on inference alone of sort of 40, 50%, but you've got the cost of building the next model, and you don't know where the cost The cost will move, or the cost of the next model will move, and yo…”
Evans: DeepSeek Proves Anyone With Two Billion Can Build Foundation Models
“Like anyone who's got a couple of billion dollars can make a foundation model which is what DeepSeq showed us as well.”
Evans: User data does not currently make AI models better
“At the moment, they don't. At the moment, the companies all say, well, indeed, we don't train, we don't use your data to make the models better, partly because the amount of user data involved isn't enough to make the, relative to the broader scale of the trai…”
Evans: No competing AI app has more than 5% of ChatGPT's usage
“Go look at App Store ranking, or Google Trends, or usage data of any kind that you can get, and you see that basically it's ChatGPT, and then none of the others are more than five percent of that.”
Evans: AI assistant usage remains tiny compared to Google search
“Use of all of these AI assistants is still tiny compared to Google. And there is this sort of bubble talk in the valley that, oh my god, no one uses Google anymore, which is just not true unless you're in the valley.”
Google paid $25 billion last year in device revenue share
“Google is paying a revenue share of 25 to 35% of the revenue they get from each search back to the device, and that was twenty-five billion dollars last year.”
The US court cannot compel Apple to add Safari choice screens
“The court can't make Apple put a choice screen in Safari. Like, Apple isn't in court. Like, they haven't been convicted of anything.”
Evans: High inference costs prevent free 100-million-user consumer AI apps
“Because at the moment you can't make a consumer app that's free and have a hundred million users because you can't afford the inference cost.”
Evans: Ad agencies replace 10-person two-week workflows using ChatGPT and Midjourney
“ChatGPT plus mid-journey means two people in a day instead of a team of 10 people in two weeks.”
Evans: Google Gemini generated racially diverse depictions of Nazi stormtroopers
“And so it turned out that if you typed in, give me pictures of Nazi stormtroopers, you got A white person in Nazi uniform, and a black person, and a Chinese person, and an Asian woman, and so on.”
Benedict Evans: Meta has spent up to $20,000 per active Quest user
“Yes, I was doing some back of the envelope math earlier, and like, if Meta, you know, like, depending on quite how much they've spent, quite many active users, Meta would spend somewhere between 10 and 20,000 dollars for each active user that they have on this…”
Evans: Rebuilding ChatGPT from scratch takes 6–12 months and tens of millions
“How long would it take you to make a chat GPT again yourself from zero? And it's like six months to a year and however many tens or hundreds of millions of dollars. So, you know, it's not quite, you know, anyone can do that at home, but it's like, it's also no…”
Evans: Amazon Ads Yield Operating Profit Equal to AWS Without Massive Capex
“So if you apply that to 40, forty billion dollars, you get whatever it is, 20, over twenty billion dollars which is roughly the same as AWS, so roughly equivalent operating profit as AWS, And without AWS's 10 or twenty billion dollars of capex attached to it.”
Evans: Product search moved almost entirely from Google to Amazon
“What's happened in the last decade or so is product search has moved almost entirely from Google to Amazon.”
Goldberg: Cost per transistor is increasing in many cases
“The cost per transistor is actually going up in a lot of cases”
Goldberg: China has failed to copy TSMC by poaching personnel
“And China for years has been trying to poach people out of TSMC to come build their foundries. And it just hasn't worked. Like you, it's something about the whole body of knowledge that's just too, you just can't copy and paste.”
Evans: Most Big Tech sub-threshold acquisitions were under $10M and 10 employees
“And the vast majority of them were less than 10 people, and less than ten million dollars.”
Evans: MrBeast viewing time rivals a top 10 to 15 Netflix show
“Depending on whether you think he gets like one minute Per view, or six or seven minutes per view, it looks like Mr. Beast in total would sort of count as like a top 10 to top 15 Netflix show on a weekly, rolling weekly basis, and sometimes more than that.”
Web3 Does Not Exist and Cannot Support Instagram Today
“And in fact, web three doesn't exist yet. And it would not be possible to build Instagram on a blockchain today.”
Benedict Evans: Meta's massive VR spend builds nonexistent hardware supply chains
“It's like, that's kind of why they're spending all this money, because they realize now actually there isn't all the stuff you need to get VR working actually isn't sort of already there waiting to be plugged together the way smartphones kind of work.
and s…”
Evans: Australian court ruled Google is not a publisher in defamation suit
“There was a fascinating court case a couple of weeks ago in which some, someone, a newspaper would describe somebody as a gangster, and the newspaper story is in Google, and the person accused of being a gangster sued Google for defamation, and the court said,…”
Evans: WeWork failed to disclose core operational numbers in its IPO prospectus
“Which is, of course, what happened when we went out and IPO'd, and the real estate investors asked what the numbers were, and they didn't know what the numbers were. They weren't in the IPO perspectives because they just said it's a movement.”
Evans: Machine learning cannot reliably scan messages for grooming
“Problem two is that's not a simple database look at. That's a quite challenging machine learning problem, and it's not going to work very reliably. Like, it might work 60, 70% of the time, maybe. Massive false positive problem. Actually, we don't really have t…”
Russia cannot manufacture new tanks due to foreign semiconductor shortages
“So the Russians are fucked, because they can't even make new tanks, because they can't get the components.”
Evans: Musk has zero experience in consumer software or social networks
“Whether, you know, Elon with zero experience of building consumer software, or, and zero experience of a social network is the right person to do that is a slightly different question.”
Evans: Laws of physics prevent mesh networks from replacing cellular
“You can't replace, laws of physics prevent mesh networks from replacing cellular.”
Evans: Cookie Deprecation Only Truly Impacts One-Third of Digital Advertising
“The whole cookie apocalypse thing and the privacy thing and all of this stuff is actually only about sort of a quarter to a third of online advertising because there's YouTube. Which is where video advertising is, there's, well, let me put it another way, ther…”
Evans: Apple's SKAdNetwork limits conversion attribution data compared to IDFA
“They're going to turn it off and replace it with something called SK Ad Network, which will really just tell you there was an install, but not tell you what or how much it resulted in, which is like massively less useful.”
Brown: Uber expanded abroad by ignoring local regulations, causing severe backlash
“And it was just so interesting to see the complete lack of understanding of the policies and the regulations, whether it was in Europe, Saudi Arabia, you name it. And they were just like, we're just going to do it the American way and it will stick. And you're…”
Evans: Facebook's targeted advertising does not sell user data to advertisers
“Facebook sells your data. Okay, what does Facebook do? You're an advertiser, you go on Facebook, you say, I want to show an ad for a playgroup to mothers in Cardiff, and I've got 500 pounds to spend. Okay, we'll show that ad to 500 people that we, to a thousan…”
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,…”
Evans: Facebook generates trivial revenue from news content
“All my friends at Facebook would basically say, we wish we didn't have news at all. We don't make any money from it. We actually don't make any money from news, although the amount of money is trivial. It's a huge amount of pain and aggravation”
Evans: Every platform allowing file sharing hosts child sexual abuse material
“Any internet platform that allows people to share files of any kind has a child porn problem. Every single one.”
Facebook cleared out Oculus founders for wanting to build gaming consoles
“This is why they cleared out all the team, because they bought a company staffed by people who wanted to make a games, a high-end games console, and they know they don't want that.”
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: AI infrastructure is built behind demand, unlike dot-com fiber
“The narrow problem with that, of course, is that that was built out ahead of demand, whereas this is being built out behind demand.”
Evans: Telco stocks were flat for 20 years while apps captured value
“Giant industry, trillion dollars of revenue, two hundred billion dollars a year of CapEx stocks have gone nowhere in 20 years, and all the value is built by other people.”
Evans: AI code generation found PMF, driving 10x compute surge
“Writing software with AI really in the last six months has suddenly found product market fit. And suddenly everyone is You know, using 10 times more capacity, more compute than they thought they were going to use at the beginning of the year. And the tech indu…”
Evans: Survey data shows Claude holds between 0% and 1% consumer usage
“If you look at the, you know, survey data on usage, it's,
It's ChatGPT, and then it's sort of two-thirds of that to a half of that is Gemini and Meta AI.
Even though Meta AI is a fiasco, Llama IV was a fiasco, the new models haven't launched yet, but consume…”
Evans: Oracle raised $50 billion in bonds this year for cloud
“Borrowed a lot, an enormous amount of money, fifty billion dollars of bonds this year to capital raising this year.”
Evans: Meta AI consumer usage rivals Gemini; Claude has zero adoption
“For consumers, Meta AI has got not actually very dissimilar usage to Gemini, and Claude is nowhere.”
Evans: Waymo is delivering close to 1 million rides per day
“Waymo is doing close to a million rides a day”
Evans: Apple marketed Apple Intelligence heavily but missed launching key feature
“Apple has obviously put Apple intelligence on billboards everywhere, and had this coherent set of individual specific features, and then, of course, failed to launch the most important one.”
Evans: Top four cloud platforms will spend over $200B on data centers this year
“And we will build the five, four platform companies, four big cloud companies will spend something over two hundred billion dollars this year, which is up 80 or ninety billion dollars from last year on building data center.”