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 295 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: Vast majority of platform moderation decisions are universally agreed upon
“The vast majority of the decisions are not the lab leak theory from China or Hunter Biden's laptop. They're not things where people disagree. They are, you know, things where literally everybody who thinks content moderation is bad would look at that and go, o…”
Evans: AI Model Inference Alone Generates 40% to 50% Gross Margins
“And meanwhile, we sort of know that you have positive gross margins on inference alone of sort of 40, 50%, but you've got the cost of building the next model, and you don't know where the cost The cost will move, or the cost of the next model will move, and yo…”
Evans: DeepSeek Proves Anyone With Two Billion Can Build Foundation Models
“Like anyone who's got a couple of billion dollars can make a foundation model which is what DeepSeq showed us as well.”
Google paid $25 billion last year in device revenue share
“Google is paying a revenue share of 25 to 35% of the revenue they get from each search back to the device, and that was twenty-five billion dollars last year.”
The US court cannot compel Apple to add Safari choice screens
“The court can't make Apple put a choice screen in Safari. Like, Apple isn't in court. Like, they haven't been convicted of anything.”
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.”
Evans: Google Gemini generated racially diverse depictions of Nazi stormtroopers
“And so it turned out that if you typed in, give me pictures of Nazi stormtroopers, you got A white person in Nazi uniform, and a black person, and a Chinese person, and an Asian woman, and so on.”
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: 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: Cost per transistor is increasing in many cases
“The cost per transistor is actually going up in a lot of cases”
Evans: MrBeast viewing time rivals a top 10 to 15 Netflix show
“Depending on whether you think he gets like one minute Per view, or six or seven minutes per view, it looks like Mr. Beast in total would sort of count as like a top 10 to top 15 Netflix show on a weekly, rolling weekly basis, and sometimes more than that.”
Evans: Australian court ruled Google is not a publisher in defamation suit
“There was a fascinating court case a couple of weeks ago in which some, someone, a newspaper would describe somebody as a gangster, and the newspaper story is in Google, and the person accused of being a gangster sued Google for defamation, and the court said,…”
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: 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 …”
Evans: Laws of physics prevent mesh networks from replacing cellular
“You can't replace, laws of physics prevent mesh networks from replacing cellular.”
Evans: Apple's SKAdNetwork limits conversion attribution data compared to IDFA
“They're going to turn it off and replace it with something called SK Ad Network, which will really just tell you there was an install, but not tell you what or how much it resulted in, which is like massively less useful.”
Evans predicts antitrust concerns will force Apple to open iOS NFC access
“Well, I think it's pretty likely that Apple will have to open up NFC access, for example. Because that's a payment monopoly thing.”
Evans: Facebook's targeted advertising does not sell user data to advertisers
“Facebook sells your data. Okay, what does Facebook do? You're an advertiser, you go on Facebook, you say, I want to show an ad for a playgroup to mothers in Cardiff, and I've got 500 pounds to spend. Okay, we'll show that ad to 500 people that we, to a thousan…”
Evans: EU communication privacy law inadvertently banned child abuse scanning
“So late, late in December, the EU had passed a law on privacy of communications platforms, which basically said you're not allowed to look at what people are saying to each other. And suddenly realized, just as this was about to go into effect in mid-December,…”
Evans: Facebook generates trivial revenue from news content
“All my friends at Facebook would basically say, we wish we didn't have news at all. We don't make any money from it. We actually don't make any money from news, although the amount of money is trivial. It's a huge amount of pain and aggravation”
Evans: Telco stocks were flat for 20 years while apps captured value
“Giant industry, trillion dollars of revenue, two hundred billion dollars a year of CapEx stocks have gone nowhere in 20 years, and all the value is built by other people.”
Evans: Meta AI consumer usage rivals Gemini; Claude has zero adoption
“For consumers, Meta AI has got not actually very dissimilar usage to Gemini, and Claude is nowhere.”
Catton-Brown: Formula One will not secure its initial asking price for rights
“F-One is definitely not going to get the initial price set that they want. ESPN is definitely not, sounds like they're not going to fight for it.”
Evans: Top four cloud platforms will spend over $200B on data centers this year
“And we will build the five, four platform companies, four big cloud companies will spend something over two hundred billion dollars this year, which is up 80 or ninety billion dollars from last year on building data center.”
Microsoft invested $100 billion in Bing over 20 years for 5-10% share
“Bing has invested about a hundred billion dollars over the last 20 years, and they've got 10%, five to 10% share of US search.”
70% of US search happens on Google default placements
“About 70% of search in the US happens on a device where Google's made it the default.”
Evans: Deloitte survey shows one-third believe generative AI is always accurate
“They asked about hallucinations, and they said, do you believe that generative AI always produces accurate answers? And the question is still, like, a third of people say yes, even if they've tried it.”
Evans: Hong Kong security law technically applies to US firms in America
“The Hong Kong national security law, technically applies to American companies in America. So if you work for a company that happens to be covered by that law and you set foot in Hong Kong, then they can arrest you, even if the company isn't in Hong Kong.”
Evans: Temu and Shein Accounted for $4 Billion of Meta's Revenue
“10% of revenue, five percent of revenue growth. And so that's about four billion dollars, and so apparently half of that was Temu, and well, presumably quite a lot of the rest was Shein.”
Evans: US De Minimis Rule Gives Temu a Massive Tax Advantage
“There is a rule in the US that for orders of a value of less than 800 dollars, there's no import taxes or different, much less, or different import taxes. And so if you were running a store in the U.S. And shipping a shipping container full of garments to Amer…”
Evans: Social platforms previously blocked COVID lab leak and mask efficacy posts
“I mean, the kind of the case study here is when social networks decided to block anybody Suggesting that masks weren't very useful during COVID or block anybody suggesting that maybe COVID had leaked from a Chinese biology research lab. And I think now, I don'…”
Evans: Twitter cut 80% of staff and withheld contractual severance
“And meanwhile, Twitter fired 80% of the staff and an awful lot of them have said it's failing to pay them their contractual severance payments.”
Benedict Evans: Meta Quest has only single-digit millions of regular users
“So Meta sold maybe twenty million. That you have survey data that says that maybe 10 or 20% of people are actually using them regularly, which is not a great number. So there's like single digit numbers of millions of people using this thing.”
Benedict Evans: Meta has spent at least $35 billion on Reality Labs
“Meta has spent, I think, at least thirty five billion dollars on this stuff. Because they spent like over thirty billion dollars on operating losses for the Reality Labs group, offset a bit by revenue from selling hardware and games. And they bought Oculus, an…”
Benedict Evans: Apple's laptop-grade silicon gives Vision Pro an architectural advantage
“Apple is using a high-end laptop SAC in this thing because they have their own, which has massively better performance per watt than anything from Intel. Guess what Meta has to use? They have to use a smartphone chip from Volcom.”
Evans: The iPhone 15 will feature a 3D video camera
“I think it's now blinding the obvious that the iPhone 15 will have a three D video camera so that you can create content that will flow into this.”
Evans: Meta spends billions inventing tech, unlike Apple's original off-the-shelf iPhone
“Meta is spending tens of billions of dollars every year on all of that Moore's law, because where Apple could basically sit on top of an awful lot of technology that already existed, like they didn't need to create ARM from scratch. They didn't need to invent …”
Evans: Apple appears set to launch pass-through VR, not AR glasses
“It doesn't sound like it. It sounds like they're planning to do that with a VR headset.”
Evans: Google pays Apple nearly $20B for default iPhone search
“Google pays, Apple pays, Apple probably close to twenty billion dollars to be the default search engine on the iPhone.”
Evans: AI search answers will drain web traffic from lifestyle publishers
“But if I'm going to say, you know, write me an itinerary for hotels, restaurants, and architecture in Barcelona, I'm going to get, that's going to produce less click-through, and so that's going to be less traffic for Condé Nast Traveler, it's going to be less…”
Evans: 30% to 40% of top Amazon sellers are Chinese companies
“Something like 30 or 40% of the top Amazon marketplace sellers are actually Chinese companies.”
Evans: YouTube creator payouts rival major TV studio programming budgets
“And then of course they pay out 45% of the ad revenue to the creators, which makes, puts their budget somewhere sort of Makes them sort of top three, top four. If you count that as programming budget, comparable to the US media companies, that would put them s…”
Evans: Generative AI will create a massive flood of automated search spam
“You're going to have people generating content in response to what they think search traffic is automatically. So you will have automatically generated video with automatically generated voice targeting search queries at massive scale. There will be a new floo…”
Evans: One Medical holds no meaningful market power in US healthcare
“There's no possible basis on which you can say One Medical has any kind of meaningful market power in the US healthcare industry.”
Evans: Shein uses browsing traffic to trigger 200-unit manufacturing batches
“You know, there's all sorts of different narratives about this, but you know, at a very, at a minimum, they're ordering in very short, small numbers. They may not even have actually ordered that product before they list it on the site. They're making 200 of th…”