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 143 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 13 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: All of Apple's App Store rules will be overturned within 18 months
“Now none of this will stand because all of Apple's rules are going to get overturned in the next 18 months”
Evans: Legacy carmakers will be able to buy autonomy from Google
“It's much easier to say that the screen on a Tesla is an enormous challenge, or even that the autonomy is an enormous challenge, but then they'll be able to buy the autonomy from Google.”
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: Newsletter platforms will inevitably need algorithmic feeds as they scale
“What is it going to look like when you've got 10,000 people on your platform, and everybody's got signed up to 200 newsletters, You're going to have an algorithm. You are. Or you're going to be MailChimp, and you're going to say, that's not my problem, in whic…”
Google and Facebook Will Face Regulation Like Banks and Telcos
“You are going to get regulated like a telco or a bank. You know, if you work at Google or you work at Facebook, you are going to have the same kind of scrutiny that a telco or a bank have. And it doesn't really matter if you think you shouldn't. That's just wh…”
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: Apple Silicon will blow through Intel on performance
“And now they are on a curve to just blow through Intel and deliver dramatically better performance which is kind of, again, classic disruption theory.”
Evans: Future primary computers will run sandboxed OSs without raw filesystem access
“Well, your main computer is going to be running a sandboxed operating system without Live file system access, probably without running very much native code, and it will be running Chrome, or it will be running iOS, or it will be running something similar, and…”
Evans: Splitting YouTube from Google would not spark video competition
“Today, if you split YouTube into a separate company, that wouldn't result in 10 new social media video sharing sites exploding.”
Evans: A DOJ antitrust win against Google Search will have little effect
“And I think this is the problem with the DOJ's case on search distribution, which is even if they win, it's not really going to have much effect.
Because it's, A, it's not actually getting at the levers of power.
It's quite a long way away from the actual sear…”
Evans: Most people cannot articulate tasks for AI agents to execute
“Yeah, because people won't see the thing that they want the agent to do, and then they won't be able to work out how they want the agent to do it. They won't be able to articulate that. Most people can't.”
Evans: AI infrastructure may become a high-cost oligopoly without network effects
“So you've got kind of a down the stack question, which might end up looking like semiconductors or aircraft or something where it's just, there's no network effects, it's just really expensive. And maybe, you know, there's only two people who make aircraft. Th…”
Evans: Chatbots are not the final AI product form
“The chatbot isn't the right product is what's going to happen is these are going to spiral off in different places where they actually do have different product strategies.”
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: AI models will not become commoditized in 2024
“Clearly that's not gonna happen next year, because you had these models have, like, much more data, much more capital requirements in order to get them to work.”
Brody: Blockchain will modernize co-ops and fan engagement once wallet friction resolves
“Once that and the wallet environment stuff is fixed, you've got this incredibly powerful piece of technology that will allow you to develop fan engagement at massive scale, I think. And it will, and it won't bring new ideas. It won't bring new ideas, but what …”
Brody: Consumers will earn brand revenue share and dividends via blockchain
“I think you will see consumption move in that direction, and you'll have a couple brands that you are super passionate about that are smaller, challenger-like brands, and you will be part of their revenue ecosystem, and you'll be able to deliver that through b…”
Evans: Prompt interfaces will be abstracted away inside software tooling
“It seems to me incredibly obvious that what's going to happen is that this stuff will get abstracted inside and away. And then the actual technology of it may be running a prompt that gets inserted into an LLM, but the user will probably very often won't see t…”
Caron-Brown: Visual AI will evolve faster than text AI
“We're probably going to see way more and faster evolution with the visual stuff than we are with the written.”
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.”
Evans: The iPhone 15 will feature a 3D video camera
“I think it's now blinding the obvious that the iPhone 15 will have a three D video camera so that you can create content that will flow into this.”
Evans: If VR succeeds, LLMs will power all VR applications within five years
“You know, I mean, if VR works, then in five years' time, everything you do on VR will be built using large language models.”
Evans: Apple appears set to launch pass-through VR, not AR glasses
“It doesn't sound like it. It sounds like they're planning to do that with a VR headset.”
Evans: VR and crypto may need 5 to 20 years to mature
“And this may be where VR is today, and you'll come back in 20 years. Crypto may be the new open source and it's plumbing. It may, you fade away, like, you know, people who thought that open source would destroy Windows and desktop Linux. This is the year of de…”
Evans: Generative AI is at minimum as big as prior ML wave
“It changes an awful lot of how tech works and what tech products you'll use. And there'll be all sorts of stuff that's happening inside stuff you use you don't even know is using this, which is also what happened with machine learning. So at the minimum, it's …”
Evans: Google's AI search will likely be better than Microsoft Bing's
“And one should presume that it's not that Google's version of doing this will be worse than Bing's, in fact it wouldn't surprise me if Google's version of doing this will be better”
Evans: The tech industry will aggressively push AI compute to local devices
“So there will be this massive push to kind of shift as much compute as you can down onto the device.”
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: Chip shrinking remains possible for roughly another 10 years
“There's still, you know, a good, I don't know, 10 years of shrinking possible.”
Goldberg: Most Chinese fabless chip companies will not survive
“It's going to shrink. Most of those companies won't survive, but enough will that there's something interesting going on there.”
Evans: Consumer crypto products will emerge from abstruse infrastructure within years
“There's a whole other set of people and a whole set of energy that's very nerdy in a good way, very mathematician, very people building very, very abstruse engineering infrastructure. Out of which consumer products will pop in a couple of years.”
Evans: Generative AI will disrupt the adult entertainment industry
“This is going to, you know, never, no, not the biggest of issues, but this is going to be, we could be pretty disruptive to the porn industry. Because you will be able to just kind of tie stuff in, you know, for the people who look like this, who doing this, a…”
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: 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…”
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…”
Evans: EU messaging interoperability mandate will be watered down until meaningless
“And what it looks like is going to happen is they're going to water it down so much that in the end it will just be meaningless.”
Evans: Leading-edge chip fab capex will climb from $20B to $40B
“Which is why Intel had this, you know, this capital project to build new chip capability in the US, and it was twenty billion dollars. And that's just this generation. And there's going to be 40, it's going to be forty billion dollars next year. And the number…”
Evans: Regulating foreign platforms like TikTok company-by-company is unworkable
“It's TikTok, it's Chinese, we should ban it, control it, take it over, something, but there's going to be 20 more of those. So you can't one at a time this, you can't do it company by company, you have to have a sort of systemic idea of, ok, we are in this sys…”
Evans: Tech may never achieve full vehicle autonomy, mirroring general AI
“It may be that we never get full autonomy, and full autonomy is a bit like general AI in that, you know, this is a joke in AI that, you know, AI is anything that doesn't work yet, because as soon as it works, people say that's not AI, that's just a database.”
Evans: No large company will build its own data center anymore
“But clearly like no one is building their own data center. No big company is going to say, right, we're going to have our own data center now and Everyone, you know, the next generation is clearly the cloud.”
Evans: Substack will support thousands of writers, not millions like Instagram
“I also feel like how many people can write that much once a week? How big is that going to be? I feel like that's thousands of writers, not millions of writers, whereas Instagram is millions, can be millions of creators.”
White: Regulators will soon scrutinize undisclosed publisher affiliate guides
“And at some point soon I'm pretty sure that the various bodies governing sort of advertising may actually notice as well. It'd be like, hang on a minute, what's going on here? Is this properly labeled? Is this actually paid for or not?”
Cowan-Brown: In-person dealmaking at conferences will decline drastically due to Zoom
“That idea of this is the moment where we can all be in a room and finalize that deal or get that deal done. I think that's going to shift pretty drastically because I think people have realized that they can actually conduct their business as usual on Zoom cal…”
Evans: Users will eventually abandon Shopify for simpler alternatives
“Paradoxically, you know, all services grow, you know, so it's a problem that eventually Shopify, people will look at Shopify and say, that's too hard, I want something simpler, which is exactly why Shopify did. They looked at WordPress and said, that's too har…”
Cowan-Brown: Gaming Will Become Universal, but VR Will Not
“I have a sense that gaming is going to become universal, and I'll chat about that in a second, but I don't see VR becoming a universal thing.”
Evans: Biden will not reset US-China relations or ignore recent tensions
“And so you're not going to see Biden kind of turn around and say, we want to be friends with China and pretend none of this happened.”
Evans: The US company-by-company tech regulation approach will not work
“Whereas the US approach is we'll see Google and then we'll see Facebook and we'll see TikTok and we'll see like one by one which will be like, and that's just not going to work guys.”
Evans: Tech and Data Regulation Will Inevitably Become Mundane
“There's this enormous impulse on the one hand to come up with a sort of a TED talk or a book title that gives you know, the new capitalism, the new industrial revolution, the new market, you know, this, you know, the data is a new oil phrase, and on the other,…”