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
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: China will match US per capita GDP within decades
“China is going to have the same GDP per capita as America, more or less, at some point in the next couple of decades.”
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: External customers will spend $100B–$150B on AI coding this year
“This year, people outside of those labs will spend, clearly will spend something in the order of hundred, hundred and fifty billion dollars to use AI coding. Just to use AI coding. And that's not AI people spending money from NVIDIA. That's real money. And tha…”
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: 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.”
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.”
Apple will maintain Google defaults while routing specialized queries to AI
“Apple will carry on treating Google as the default general search engine. They'll just peel more stuff out into their own foundation model or into chat TPT or into booking.com.”
Evans: OpenAI will face half a dozen competitors
“I'm not sure, you know, there would be a big debate about whether OpenAI is worth anything right now, or what it's worth based on the fact that there's clearly going to be half a dozen competitors to it.”
Benedict Evans: US consumers will likely never return to $150/month TV spend
“It seems very unlikely that you're going to get everybody in America to go back to paying 150 dollars a month for television.”
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: Apple will sell 200,000 Vision Pro units in 2024
“I'm not the right analyst to ask, but you know, they're not going to sell fifty million of them next year. They might, you know, they might sell a couple, they're going to sell a couple of 100,000.”
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…”
Evans: Custom video effects and actor swaps will run on iPhone apps
“Now, what, now, I, well, what is the point in which I say, okay, I would actually like to see that, but I would like to see Don Rickles instead of Go Forever. That, that is not 20 people in a production studio and a whole pile of SFX. That is going to be an iP…”
Goldberg: TSMC's Arizona fab will lag leading-edge chips by half a generation
“And now I think that's actually gonna be a real plant in Arizona. And I think it's gonna have decent capacity enough to sort of satisfy the U.S. Military's needs and Apple's needs. And it will be, I don't think it'll be even a generation behind. I think it'll …”
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: 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…”
Evans: Zoom is a feature, not a $200B enterprise platform
“It's just a feature. It's not an enterprise software platform. It's not going to be like the next, you know, a hundred billion dollar, two hundred billion dollar company.”
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: 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: The US will not pass an equivalent to the DMA
“The US isn't going to get an equivalent of the DMA.”
Evans: EU will force Apple to open NFC to third-party payment apps
“Certainly they will have to open up NFC, they will have to open up Apple Pay, so you'll have to be able to basically substitute Apple Pay with Stripe Pay or Square Pay. The EU, that's very clear in the DMA that's just kind of, that's going through its final pr…”
Evans: Text-to-video AI generating specific human actions is roughly five years away
“Well, today, certainly make me a picture that says people doing this, and certainly, and then it will be make me a video that says, that shows people doing this, and that's, You know, that's sort of five years away or something.”
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: Linear TV ad slots will disappear within 10 years
“Half of the ad, global ad industry is still on TV. And that's not going to be there in 10 years' time, or it won't be quote unquote TV. I mean, this is this whole, what is TV? You know, is Disney, you know, if you watch it on your smartphone, if you watch YouT…”
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: The 30% App Store commission rule is toast
“Look, the 30% rule is toast, but we don't really know quite how and what and where”
Evans: Fully autonomous, driverless cars will not arrive by 2022
“Full, full, full autonomy as in a car with no steering wheel that can drive from San Francisco to San Diego while you sleep in the back and there's no seats, there's just a sofa and no windows, you know, like that kind of autonomy is five, 10, 15, 20, I don't …”