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 173 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
Brody: Blockchain will eventually let sports fans vote on transfer decisions
“I think there will come a day where fans will be heavily engaged. In what goes on on the field. Like, and whatever that looks like, whether it's they're making game day decisions, or whether they're making transfer market decisions, or they're voting on those …”
Evans: Generative AI is going to demolish the porn industry
“It's also going to happen to porn. It's just going to demolish the porn industry. Because again, there's vast amounts of training data.”
Evans: Policy papers cannot control AI because models are open source
“And indeed the whole problem I had with the whole concept of AI safety and AI ethics was like, this stuff is all fundamentally open source. So aren't five companies that can do this. Anybody will be able to do this. So you're not going to be able to sit and wr…”
Evans: VR will only succeed as a niche gaming subset
“I'm afraid I am now deeply on the sort of, okay, I don't think VR is going to work except as, I mean, the school of thought that says I don't think VR is working except as a subset of games. Now clearly there's a bunch of people who think that's just because t…”
Evans: AI will not fundamentally alter enterprise software adoption dynamics
“This will be more software, and people will use this to make tools the way they did with no code, and the way they did with Excel, and the way they did with all those previous things, but it doesn't actually fundamentally change the dynamic. It just shifts tho…”
Evans: AI foundation models become commodities if frontier progress slows
“If the frontier slows down, then this stuff is definitely a commodity.”
Evans: Model makers will lose pricing power within five years
“And the paradox is like right now they can name their price, but that isn't where we're going to be in five years. You can argue about how quickly the infrastructure gets built out and how fast the GPUs arrive, blah, blah, blah, blah. Fine. But that's a supply…”
Evans: AI foundation models will likely become commodity infrastructure
“Are the model companies going to have come some kind of, you know, oligopolistic power over the tech industry, or is this going to be commodity infrastructure with,
The value being somewhere else to which I think the answer is it's commodity infrastructure, bu…”
Evans: Only idiots believe people will use vibe coding to rebuild Stripe
“Like, no, people are not going to vibe code to their own stripe, but that's kind of a straw man. Like it's, I'd say it's a straw man, except there are people who say this, but only idiots.”
Evans: AI model infrastructure likely settles into 3 to 6 company oligopoly
“So it seems quite likely that all of that will settle out at some point with some kind of oligopoly, where like the laws of gravity and the laws of financial gravity kick in, and while this is the amount of money that the revenue that you can get, and this is …”
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: 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: Tech companies will spend over $400B on AI infrastructure
“These companies will collectively spend something over four hundred billion dollars building infrastructure.”
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 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.”
Apple is more likely to replace ChatGPT than build a search engine
“It's much more likely, I think, that Apple will shift questions from ChatGPT to its own foundation model than it would shift questions from Google to its own general search engine, I think.”
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: Breaking up Google Display will not return ad spend to newspapers
“If you made Google display a separate business, all the people buying ads on Google display are not going to shift Those adds to newspapers, and that's not going to become like a bigger business.”
Devins: The future of computing is not bigger or more screens
“I don't think the future of computing is having five screens. And the reason that most people don't have five screens isn't because they're expensive and they don't have room. I don't want to work on a spreadsheet that has and see 200 rows and columns at once.…”
Devins: Bull case for Apple Vision headsets is 200 million users
“The thesis I'm groping towards is this is something that a couple of hundred, the bull case is a couple of hundred million people will have one of these eventually.”
Devins: Spatial computing headsets will reach mass market in five years
“You're seeing something that if this happens, this is something that will be mass market in some form in five years.”
Evans: AI wrappers will evolve into specialized vertical software
“What will happen over time is that this will, that those will become part of much richer, much more vertical, much more specialized pieces of software.”
Evans: AI startup value will accrue in the intermediate application layer
“And the company creation is going to be in the middle, which is how do you create actual like tools with lots of stuff on top of this?”
Evans: Twitter's erratic changes are Threads' biggest long-term growth driver
“Like the general point here is you cannot build a business there because you can't trust that they won't do something stupid or shut it down tomorrow. And that's probably the biggest long-term positive for threats. Is Elon is going to keep doing this. He's goi…”
Benedict Evans: VR cannot become general computing without text-capable high-resolution screens
“You need the screen that Apple has shipped to do text at all. And you have, and you could propose that you can't do anything other than games, maybe fitness, maybe VR, maybe, maybe, maybe TV, maybe a couple of other niche things. Without text. And so VR is not…”
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: Radically new AI UX will reset default consumer search habits
“Presume that the chat GPT will be 10% worse than Google. I mean, maybe not, maybe it'll be 10% better, but the point is consumers will not care anymore. They will, the experience will be so different that you'll kind of reset people's presumptions and people's…”
Goldberg: TSMC's Arizona fab will remain dependent on Taiwan's expertise
“It doesn't mean the U.S. Actually can do advanced chips because that plant is going to be entirely dependent on expertise and knowledge base from the mothership in Taiwan.”
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.”
Goldberg: RISC-V will probably capture automotive and IoT instead of mobile
“And I think that's going to have important implications, probably not for mobile or compute, But for all the other things that are getting chips built into them, cars, especially cars, home devices, internet of things, all of that is probably going to end up i…”
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: Figma will grow to replace all of Photoshop and Illustrator
“This is clearly an existential question because this thing is going to grow. You know, it is going to grow, expand and take over all of Photoshop and all of Illustrator. It's going to be the better way of doing that in a way that Google docs never really did f…”
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: Mozilla would go out of business without Google search payments
“And the second problem is, of course, that almost all of Mozilla's revenue comes from this. And so if Google stops doing this, Mozilla goes out of business by default, and there's no competitive web browser, or the main competitive web browser, the main compet…”
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…”
Evans: There will probably be a US political panic over Shein
“There hasn't been a Xi in panic yet, actually, even though it's another Chinese thing that every American teenager is using. But there probably will be. I don't know what form that will take.”
Google's next decade is moving all television advertising onto the internet
“The next 10 years of Google is turning everything, all TV advertising, into the internet. So they've taken everything else, but, you know, TV is a bit that hasn't really moved yet.”
Evans: Bloomberg will never be disrupted because tech engineers cannot access it
“Well, the thing that occurred to me sometimes is that, you know, Bloomberg, for example, will never be disrupted because the only people who could disrupt it can't see it because it's 24,000 dollars a year. So nobody who knows what it is or really understands …”
Evans: Banning profile-based ads benefits Google and could bankrupt The Guardian
“You want to ban advertising based on the user profile rather than on the context. Okay, well, that's probably good for Google and terrible for the New York Times, and the Guardian might go out of business.”
Evans: In 10 years, the metaverse will run on Web3 infrastructure
“Go forward 10 years and the two of them sort of merge. In that, you know, if everyone is doing, if they could both work, and everything that you do in the metaverse will be web three, will be running on web three.”
Evans: Boring enterprise SaaS will out-mint Web3 billion-dollar companies
“While tech is obsessed with Web three and metaverse, There's going to be an awful lot of billion dollar companies that do something that sounds really boring until you describe what it is and you think, oh yeah, I can see how that would be useful.”
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…”
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: 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…”