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 396 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: Average corporate audit costs have remained flat since 2003
“What I was wondering is, is there data on what the average company pays for an audit? And it turns out it is, there is, and it hasn't changed since about 2003.”
Evans: Uber's TAM Was Far Bigger Than the Taxi Market
“There was a valuation professor who notoriously did an analysis of Uber kind of 10 years ago, where he said, you know, the valuation of Uber should be based on the fact that its TAM is the size of the taxi market, and this is, I'm going to work out the size of…”
Evans: Half of Grok's founders left within two months
“We saw like half of Grok's founders have just left in the last month or two for a whole bunch of different reasons.”
Evans: Big Four tech capex will jump from $400B to $650B
“The big four companies, platform companies, spent four hundred billion dollars on capex last year. This year, they've said they'll spend 650, more or less. Microsoft hasn't been given full year guidance. But Meta and Google and Amazon have more or less doubled…”
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: Shopify CEO mandated employees report their AI usage
“I remember a while ago, the CEO of Shopify said, you know, it was like an HR requirement that everyone had to report how much AI they were using.”
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: Online dating now accounts for around 60% of new relationships
“And today, dating, online dating is now like, 60% of new relationships.”
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.”
Evans: Streaming Services Cut Content Budgets by 10% to 20% Recently
“What's happened in the last two years is streaming companies having ramped up spending on, on TV by something like 10 or 20 times in the last decade, Have pulled back by kind of something like 20 or so to 10, 20% in the last year or two, as they decided they'd…”
Evans: Perplexity gets buzz but struggles to crack App Store top 100
“Perplexity gets all this buzz and struggles to break into the top hundred on the App Store.”
Evans: 90% of Y Combinator startups build enterprise SaaS AI
“Look at Y Combinator, 90% of the startups are basically doing AI as enterprise SaaS.”
Evans: Cloud computing accounts for only 30% of enterprise workflows
“All these kind of basic procurement, IT procurement questions, which are why IT, why cloud is still only sort of 30% of enterprise workflows.”
Catton-Brown: Formula 1 audience averages age 32 and 41% female
“Most big sports would absolutely love to have everyone's audience right now, which is 41% female, 32 years of age, which I think when you look at the NBA or the NFL, we're talking fifty-year. Years of age on average or 45 years of age on average, and it's a ma…”
Evans: 33% to 50% tried ChatGPT, but daily active users are 1% to 5%
“And the top line is basically that in a bunch of developed world countries, something between a third to a half of people have already tried ChatGPT.
And so that's a very glass half full kind of statement.
On the other hand, the number of people you've turned …”
Evans: Only 2% to 3% of Americans trust ChatGPT output
“So a third of people haven't heard of it and two or three percent would trust what it says.”
Evans: ChatGPT traffic dropped over summer 2023 because students went on break
“This is the reason why ChatGPT traffic fell off last summer, because all the kids went home from school.”
Evans: Spotify is twice as large as Apple Music in the EU
“Spotify, of course, is still twice as big as Apple Music or anything else in the EU, so they've done just fine despite this rule.”
Evans: US TikTok Bill Structures Ban Around Foreign Adversary Powers
“And so this, the kind of the rule, this, you know, the latest piece of proposed legislation is that the, you know, the president would be able to designate specific
Social media apps as national security risks
and require them not to be controlled by a foreign…”
Brown: Biden Administration Enlisted 70 Creators For the State of the Union
“Just ahead of the State of the Union, they went out and found 70 creators, I think about half of them, TikTokers, to sort of spread awareness about the State of the Union and spread the message of Biden”
Evans: TikTok Displayed In-App Prompts Urging Americans to Call Congress
“TikTok put up a banner every time when any American opened the app this week that said call your congressman.”
Brown: TikTok Has Stricter Political Ad Rules Than Meta
“And they also have the strictest policy when it comes to political advertising, much more stricter than Meta”
Brown: Stable Diffusion generated 7% female doctors, compared to 39% in reality
“And with the doctors one, the reality was that 39% of doctors in America are women, but in the stable diffusion results, it was only seven percent.”
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.”
Evans: Most Excel spreadsheets are just tables without formulas
“Old observation that most spreadsheets don't have any formula. Most people use Excel to make tables, not to make, not for financial calculations.”
Brody: US high school senior dating rates fell 50% in 15 years
“In, in some of the math, you know, so the number of high school seniors in the United States who date has decreased by 50% over the last 15 years.”
Evans: Most Excel spreadsheets do not contain formulas
“Actually most Excel spreadsheets don't have formulas. Most Excel spreadsheets are actually tables or they're schedules or they're lists. They're not actually spreadsheets.”
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.”
Evans: Europe punches far below its weight in tech users and revenue
“Europe punches way below its weight in user base and revenue and ad revenue and e-commerce, way below the kind of base, proportionate, and it always, out of the 20 years, it's always been, you know, the same.”
Evans gets more likes on Threads with 12K followers than Twitter
“And, but the point is like, I've got like almost 400,000 followers. And I think I've got like 10 or 12,000 followers on, on threads. I get more likes on threads than I do.”
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: BuzzFeed News never made any money
“BuzzFeed News did a lot of great stuff.
They won Pulitzer Prizes.
People like to sort of sneer at it.
It was a great journalism organization.
it never made any money.”
Evans: News is a low single-digit share of social platform posts
“And for them, news is a very small and peripheral thing.
You know, it's whatever it is.
It's low single digit shares, even all the posts that have links, nevermind all the posts that don't have links.”
Evans: UMG is demanding streaming platforms block AI training on music catalogs
“UMG are saying to streaming music platforms, you can't, you have to stop people straining or training on the library. You can't Let someone train a music generation AI on the Spotify corpus.”
Evans: Google did not invent search advertising
“Search advertising wasn't invented by Google, it was invented by somebody else, and they presented, I think it was at a TED talk, and everyone started booing, and they thought this was evil, like, you're corrupting search results. You're letting pay to people …”
Evans: Gaming consoles capped at around 200 million active devices globally
“There's only, as it might be, two hundred million games consoles on earth, which is not nothing, but it's not smartphones. It never became a universal experience.”
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: No optical AR technology currently achieves workable outdoor depth and occlusion
“No one has actually got to a point where you have a good field of view, it has depth of field, it works in the outdoors, it can occlude bright objects.”
Evans: Stable Diffusion occasionally reproduces Getty Images watermarks
“There was a thing in stable diffusion where every now and then you'd see like something that like a Getty image is watermark appear on the image.”
Cairn-Brown: Works lacking human creative input are not copyrightable
“Without the human creative input, that work isn't entitled to copyright protection.”
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: Apple's iOS sandboxing makes it impossible for TikTok to read emails.
“TikTok can't read your email. Like on iOS, it cannot. It just can't. A third party app cannot see your email. It's sitting in a sandbox.”
Goldberg: 90% of annual chip volume uses trailing-edge 80nm+ processes
“The number of chips produced every year, or the wafers produced every year, 90% of them are what we would call trailing edge processes, you know, 80 nanometer and up.”
Goldberg: China spent $100B to $200B on semiconductor subsidies over ten years
“And they have spent a hundred billion dollars, two hundred billion dollars over the last 10 years subsidizing the growth of their semiconductor industry.”
Goldberg: China has roughly 2,000 fabless chip design companies
“There are probably 2000 legitimate fabless design chip companies in China today.”
Evans: Satya Nadella previously called Xbox non-core and non-strategic
“And there was a moment like five or six years ago when Satya Nadella was saying that Xbox was sort of non-core and non-strategic.”