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 302 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: Creators most upset about AI art lack originality
“The really unkind thing one could say is that the people who are most upset about AI art are the people who are making stuff that has no particular authenticity originality. I mean, if you, if you've made, if you wrote 10 vampire romance books last year and yo…”
Evans: The Cambridge Analytica scandal was basically a hoax
“And of course the irony of Cambridge Analytica was it was, in the end, it was basically a hoax. There was nothing there.”
Evans: Sam Altman's Windows and utility analogies for AI are flawed
“Sam Altman talked about windows, which is a really bad analogy because windows had network effects. He also talked about water companies and electricity companies, which are like completely the opposite. They're regulated utilities with crappy margins selling …”
Evans: No AI lab has unique models because everyone builds identical tech
“What's happened so far is that people leapfrog each other every couple of weeks or every month or two, but because everyone is basically building the same stuff nobody has anything unique in the models.”
Evans: Dismissing AI as useless is like calling the internet useless in 1999
“I still see people who say, no, it's just like a stochastic parrot. It doesn't do causation. It doesn't work very well. It's got hallucinations. It's all useless. These people are morons. Like, they are just idiots. But they're idiots in the sense of somebody …”
Evans: Skeptics dismissing AI as useless or like NFTs are ignoring reality
“The real idiots are the people who are just saying, oh, none of this works, and it's all nonsense, and it's just a stochastic parrot, and it's useless, and I don't know what it's for and this is all, like, nonsense, and this is a rerun of NFTs. Because these p…”
The DOJ gerrymandered its market definition in the Apple antitrust lawsuit
“The DOJ is suing Apple for having what the DOJ, claiming the DOJ describes as a monopoly of, quote, performance smartphones, which Apple described as gerrymandering, and I'm kind of inclined to agree”
The Microsoft antitrust case did not create Google or the iPhone
“This is kind of bizarre assertions that somehow the DHA Microsoft case resulted in the rise of Google or resulted in the iPod and the iPhone, which is just ignorant nonsense.”
Evans: Rabbit's 'cack-handed' AI hardware is becoming a 'smoking hole'
“And we saw this kind of completely cack-handed attempt at doing this from Rabbit, which is now well on the way to being a smoking hole in the ground.”
Twitter needed an 80% to 90% staff reduction and cultural reset
“And so it needed, like, a total cultural reset, and you needed to, like, fire 80 or 90% of the people and then hire back. So that instead of having, it had well over 10,000 people plus, plus contractors. And it's gone down to a thousand or something, and maybe…”
Evans: Musk's management of Twitter has been a series of self-inflicted wounds
“But since then, we've just had like one massive self-infected wound after another. Like he doesn't have, he's shot himself in the feed so many times, whether that's banning external links, like banning people, blocking people. And like, yes, the content modera…”
Evans: Twitter is a failure compared to Meta's multi-billion user apps
“It's an amazing success. Like, no, it fucking isn't. It's got two hundred fifty million users. Each has, like, Meta's got three or even four products that have each got three billion users. It's a failure.”
Elon Musk lacks an intuitive understanding of how social networks work
“Like on past form, you know, Elon is just going to keep doing this because he clearly just hasn't, doesn't have any understanding or any kind of intuitive sense of how social networks work. And he doesn't understand that he, every time he does these things, he…”
Musk's controversial tweets destroy half a billion dollars in value each
“When you do that, you just, that, that, that, that tweet cost you half a billion dollars. Every time you do that, that's another half billion dollars gone. Like, why do you do that? It's worse than a crime. It's a mistake.”
Evans: Developers will have little reason to build for Meta Quest
“I feel very sorry for Meta because they spent, you know, however many tens of billions of dollars on their product that, you know, no one's really, only a couple of million people are really using and doesn't have traction. And after this, why on earth would y…”
Evans: DOJ e-books lawsuit effectively protected Amazon's monopoly
“The DOJ basically goes to court in order to protect the position of a monopolist. Now that was actually what happened. What they said they were, or thought they were doing, was protecting low consumer prices, which was also what was happening. But the low cons…”
Evans: Netflix is a TV company, while YouTube actually disrupts television
“Netflix is a TV company, not a tech company, because all the questions that it poses, the TV industry questions, and it hasn't actually changed what a TV show is. It's just bought more of them and made more of them. Mr. Beast clearly is not a TV show. It's som…”
Sequoia Was an Unsophisticated Investor Duped by FTX
“FTX was selling Wall Street to non-Wall Street people. In this case, it's an, it's a funny, you could almost say it's an increase at Sequoia with the unsophisticated investors who got taken to the cleaners by some clown from hedge fund land.”
Bitcoin and Ethereum Currently Lack Real Utility
“At the moment we don't really have utility for them other than people building stuff that we hope we'll be able to do stuff with at some point in the future.”
Evans: Netflix using algorithms to commission shows is "all bullshit"
“So all this stuff I read about how Netflix is using algorithms and software and artificial intelligence to work out what shows to commission, it's all bullshit. You're not paying somebody twenty million dollars a year if you've got a machine that tells you wha…”
Evans: Requiring Google and Meta to pay news publishers for links is ludicrous
“Completely ludicrous idea that Google and Facebook should somehow pay newspaper companies to link to that.”
Evans: The idea that Big Tech buys up all startups is nonsense
“And they're actually a very small percentage of all the acquisition, all the startups in the field, or indeed all of the exits, because, you know, I think it was something like 60 or 70 of those 400 were more than fifty million dollars, which is the point that…”
Evans: Open source and Linux failed completely as consumer products
“So Linux failed completely. As a consumer product, open source failed completely at creating consumer products.”
Evans: Tesla's energy business is worthless in software vs. cars debate
“The pair of that, of course, is Tesla, where, you know, half the questions are car industry questions, and half of them are software questions, and indeed, you know, the argument about Tesla is The Tesla stock is the bulls think it's a software company and the…”
Evans: Tesla is dangerous because it claims it drives itself when it cannot
“That intermediate, weird intermediate thing is the reason a lot of people think Tesla is dangerous, because Tesla tells you it can drive itself and it can't.”
Evans: Tesla Risks Becoming a Subscale Legacy Automaker Like Saab
“You know, there is basically the bull argument on Tesla is it's a software company and the bear argument on, on Tesla is it's a car company. If it's a car company. Then it's basically a subscale car company and it's going to end up like sub. Great cars, but su…”
Evans: Silicon Valley's anti-advertising sentiment is 'really fucking childish'
“There's a kind of person in Silicon Valley that thinks that advertising is evil, and advertisers shouldn't want to know anything about us, and I never bought anything from advertising either, and I think this is really fucking childish.”
Evans: Reliance Digital will not become a global internet superpower
“There's this whole story about how Reliance Digital is going to be like the next global internet superpower, and I read this and think it's all horseshit, and this is, telcoes always say this, every five years there's another telco that says, we're going to be…”
Benedict Evans: Search and social networks are natural monopolies like water utilities
“There are clearly structural reasons why it's very hard to create a new search engine or to create a new social network. There are very strong network effects, which I, the last, one of the last pieces I wrote, I described as basically a natural monopoly. And …”
Evans: 1990s antitrust intervention against Microsoft had no effect
“And actually none of the antitrust intervention had any effect, but that's again a separate conversation”
Evans: Giving enterprise employees Copilot or ChatGPT has not worked well
“Step one was give everybody co-pilot, and that didn't work too well, because it's kind of, or Claude or ChatGPT, because it's kind of like being in 1997 and giving everybody a web browser. Okay, this is the future, but it's not, that's not, what was the produc…”
Evans: Microsoft Copilot is an umbrella brand of disconnected features like IBM Watson
“Copilot is rather like Watson. It's a brand name that represents an, that represents every single PM at Microsoft had to add an AI feature as part of their quarterly goals. And so every, every third button at Microsoft And every Microsoft product is purple and…”
Evans: The idea that AI ends management consulting is unintentionally hilarious
“It's unintentionally hilarious that people think this is the end of consultants. It's kind of a point I've come back to several times. You know, nobody is going to work this out by themselves, and most people are going to pay somebody to do it for them.”
Evans: AI Model Makers Lack Value Capture Due to Identical Technologies
“Because right now there isn't a path to value capture because right now you've got a lot of people doing basically the same thing with basically the same technology and the same data and the same chips.”
Evans: OpenAI's new ChatGPT work product is a confusing disaster
“I was playing with a new chat GPT work product, which is clearly not that it's a complete disaster. It's chaotic, confusing mess”
Evans: LLMs lack broad product-market fit beyond software developers
“The LLM itself Is not a great product for most people. Usage is a mile wide and an inch deep, and you have this kind of polarization between people where this really, really works, and they really, really have product market fit, which is basically software de…”
Evans: Chatbots are a terrible user interface for AI
“I feel like chatbots are terrible interface and users need product and interface and tooling and company and go to market around that.
And so that we all have thousands of companies that go out and build that.”
Evans: OpenAI and Anthropic lack distribution and cannot out-innovate startup ecosystem
“You don't have the existing feature set that Google and Meta and Microsoft and Apple and Amazon and everybody else have where they can add it and Salesforce and, you know, Workday and, you know, Figma and everyone else, some of them, some of which will survive…”
Evans: OpenAI lacks a technology lead, lock-in, or network effects
“If you're open AI, you've got, don't fundamentally have a technology lead. You're first among sequels at best. You've got this giant user base. That's not, that has very shallow usage and engagement. And it isn't really locked. It isn't locked in. It doesn't h…”
Brown: Silicon Valley is building incredible AI capabilities that nobody needs
“And maybe this is the first time that the disconnect is just so obvious that we have this insane capability of building these things that are incredible and yet no one actually needs it right now.”
Evans: AI models are commodities outside specialist use cases
“It's been very clear for like the last year that these models are commodities outside of specialist use cases and outside of very, people who are very, very deeply into using them all the time every day. Unless you're doing image, for image generation or codin…”
Evans: ChatGPT and Claude are thin wrappers over models
“The only actual real thin GPT wrappers are the apps from these companies like chat GPT is a thin GPT wrapper. Claude is a thin GPT wrapper. Like Claude, the website, Claude, the app, is a thin GPT wrapper. It's an input box and an output box, and a little spri…”
Evans: Mainstream users have never heard of Claude despite Silicon Valley hype
“This disconnect between how everyone in the Valley is obsessed with like Claude is three percent better than ChatGPT this week and next week Gemini is overtaking Claude. But then you look at the user numbers. I know users have never heard of Gemini or Claude. …”
Evans: Apple Acts as 'Dumb Money' in TV Streaming Strategy
“It's like all they're doing is being what in the value we used to call dumb money. You know, they go to LA with a big checkbook, and they write checks to people in LA, and people in LA give them a TV show. And they go, and Apple goes and runs it on their infra…”
Evans: AI foundation models are undifferentiated except by icon color
“What you have as the model is completely undifferentiated, except at the level, as I said, of what color is the icon.”
Google pays Apple $20 billion annually to prevent vertical query routing
“And Apple is being paid twenty billion dollars a year not to do anything else here. So they're being paid twenty billion dollars a year not to say this is a hotel's query, maybe we'll send you straight to booking.com. They're being paid twenty billion dollars …”