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
Kevins: Startups will unbundle Shopify by simplifying niche vertical workflows
“And then 10 people will do that to Shopify. Like, theoretically, I could sell a subscription newsletter in Shopify, except no, it's a lot easier to do it the way that I, in Substack or Memberful, depending on what you wanted to do. And I'm, there's a lot of pe…”
Evans: Retail gasoline sales will end by 2030
“Step forward, 10 years time, and there won't be any gasoline and a lot, it'll be a lot of delivery, but, you know, for the time being, that's a good number.”
Brown: Brexit Will Cause Tech Hubs to Boom in Berlin and France
“I think you're going to start seeing a boom of the tech hubs in Berlin, in France, even though they're already present, but they're going to become even more so like the hubs of the tech startup world.”
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.”
Brown: Generative AI companies face massive marketing push to gain users
“Which sounds like all of these companies and all of these products are going to have to, we were joking about this, but it is going to be a massive marketing exercise of who's your audience? Who's your end user? How do we put this product in the center of thei…”
Evans: AI will become invisible background infrastructure within five years
“It just, like, it just disappears. You don't think about it anymore. You know, when's the last time you did autocorrect? You know, you don't, you just, it just happens. When's the last time you used the cloud? Like it just happens. And so that's sort of the ba…”
Evans: Tech giants cannot stop open-source AI image generation
“One of them is that the models are open source and the compute will get better and the models will get more efficient. And so if you want to do the scenario or just outlined, it's not like Facebook or Google or Adobe can stop you.”
Evans: Generative AI will force marketing agencies off cost-plus pricing
“We're going to have to shift from a cost plus a percentage basis to something else because our customers are not going to pay us to have a bunch of interns sitting around, juniors sitting around stuff that we could do with ChatGPT. And so if we're going to do,…”
Evans: Google, AWS, and Microsoft Cloud Capex Will Near $100B in 2023
“Google AWS, Microsoft probably spent, will probably spend a hundred billion dollars on cloud capex this year.”
Brody: Winning consumer brands will capture small rooms within big opportunities
“And I think at the end of the day, those will be the brands that win, the ones that can actually capture small rooms in big opportunities and create really, really interesting communities and nexus to the customer and nexus to the Artist to the mission to the …”
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.”
Benedict Evans: Cheaper Apple Vision models will drive volume sales by 2026
“And that will have sort of sales in volume in maybe twenty-twenty-five or twenty-twenty-six, and then there'll be the Vision Vision and the Vision SE and so on, and the price will slowly come down”
Evans: Apple will release a cheaper non-Pro 'Vision' headset
“This is called the Vision Pro, very clear signaling that there's going to be a Vision. So there's going to be cheaper, you know, the price will kind of cascade down.”
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: If Apple launches a $3,000 headset, it will sell negligible volume
“And if it is 3000 dollars, well, they're not going to shift any volume of that this year, so it will remain, like, very early.”
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: Kids' TV voiceovers and animation will be automated by computers
“It's Very easy to look at this and think, okay, all those voiceovers are going to be done by computer next. And then all the animation is going to be done by computer as well.”
Goldberg: True vehicle autonomy requires $1,000 to $2,000 leading-edge chip systems
“All of that has to shrink down. And the only way to sort of be able to deliver true autonomy is sort of a 1002 thousand dollar system, which is almost certainly going to have to have advanced edge, advanced process chips in them.”
Evans: Generative AI will drive practical creation and workflow automation
“And now suddenly this isn't just writing funny bits of text. This is making, or this is automation of the creation of something. And I think that that we're going to see a lot of this sort of stuff.”
Evans: VR hardware will unquestionably reach lightweight ski-goggle form factor
“And so you can look at VR and AR and say, like, unquestionably, these things will get way better. The displays will get better. They will get much lighter. We know that for VR. For AR, it's a little bit more open whether the optics will really get us to someth…”
Evans: Generative AI will automate a large portion of commercial creative work
“And so, yes, you will, you would expect to see kind of a great chunk of this stuff getting automated in some way.”
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…”
Evans: A wave of non-software company creation is coming across retail
“Like, there is clearly going to be a wave of new company creation, right? Outside of software. So whether that's apparel, or retailing, or restaurants, all sorts of things, like the whole basis of how you buy stuff online changes.”
Evans: E-commerce product imagery will almost certainly become entirely artificial
“I mean, a subsidiary point, of course, is how are you doing the product shops, and the answer almost certainly is that the product shops will all be artificial.”
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…”
China will intensify semiconductor sovereignty efforts after observing Russian shortages
“And, of course, the Chinese will be looking at all of this and thinking, right, so this semiconductor sovereignty thing we're going to do a try even harder on that.”
Caron-Brown: TikTok's 10-Minute Format Will Spawn New Video Editing Tools
“And you can almost guarantee that with the 10 minute format that you can now do, there's going to be a bunch of editing tools.”
Evans: YouTube will soon be blocked in Russia
“I think YouTube is blocked, or if it isn't, it will be soon.”
Evans: US e-commerce penetration will probably stay flat for one to two years
“Now it's probably going to be flat for a year or two, and then it will kind of carry on back up on the same curve as it was before.”
Evans: Most DTC Brands Will Fail Independently and Face Acquisition
“Clearly a whole bunch of these aren't going to work. A whole bunch of these are going to get aggregated up into Amazons and so on. A whole bunch of them will reach a point scaling point where they need to get bought by Sephora or Procter & Gamble or whoever it…”
Evans: Metaverse and Web3 will compete as parallel visions for 10-20 years
“And they're both kind of competing and in some ways parallel visions for the future of large parts of the tech industry in the next 1015, 20 years.”
Evans: An Apple AR headset will take years to reach scale
“If Apple launches an AR headset at WWDC next summer, like that will not have hundreds of millions of users next year, the year after. Like it did take, it does take three to five years to go from the first thing.”
Evans: Apple will pitch AR glasses for immediate use, not 10-year concepts
“And you just know if, and when they launch AR glasses,
There will not be a concept video of what it might be in 10 years.
There will be some really, really clearly defined reasons why you should buy it now.”
Evans: Full cultural impact of smartphones won't be known for 20 years
“All the things in culture that change when everyone has a car or access to a car, we don't have any, we haven't finished That with smartphones. Yeah, and we won't know what that will be for another 20 years.”
Evans: Tech will become a regulated industry like finance or autos
“The technology very generally will become a regulated industry in the same way that money is a regulated industry or media or indeed cars are a regulated industry.”
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: Ad money probably will not return to Condé Nast
“Does the money all go back to Condé Nast? Probably not.”
Cowan-Brown: Apple privacy changes will disrupt political campaign email operations
“That's where my head always goes when I talk about newsletters and emails, and it's just when politics, you know, what is it going to look like when politicians, when I used to work at Nationworld, that was the big thing of, we need to know how many a percent …”
Evans: By 2022 COVID fears will fade, but 2019 normalcy won't return
“This time next year, it now feels pretty likely, like unless there's another, like, asteroid hits the Earth, that we'll be sorted back. We won't be worrying about getting COVID, put it like that. We will not be back to normal in the sense that we will, you kno…”
Evans: 'Who's in the office?' is the defining quote of 2021
“The quote of twenty-twenty was you're on mute, and the quote of twenty-twenty-one is, who's in the office?”
Evans: Clubhouse will suffer waves of unanticipated abuse mechanics
“But yeah, they will have waves of abuse. They will have waves of mechanics that you haven't occurred to you just as Twitter did and never did anything about which is what killed that, that use of Twitter.”
Machine Learning Will Dominate Enterprise Computing for Another Decade
“The big thing now is machine learning, and that will be the thing for another 10 years.”
Evans: Substack will eventually build discovery tools to find newsletters
“But what Substack has done first is make the tool to do the newsletter. What they are clearly will do over time is make the tool for people to find them.”
Brown: Global software development will yield more diverse, opinionated products
“I think we're going to get a more, more opinionated, more diverse software as a result of that, if more people create it.”
Evans: Anker will reach $2B revenue this year, half Logitech's size
“They built, getting on for two billion dollars, will be two billion dollars this year entirely known as a marketplace, which I think is, and that incidentally makes of about half the size of Logitech just as a kind of, as a point of comparison in the accessori…”