Benedict Evans
26 statements across 3 episodes · 1 bullish · 9 bearish · 1 people on the record · first statement Apr 10, 2024 by Benedict Evans · said 1 times in 1 episodes since 2025 · across every show →
On the record as a speaker too: Benedict Evans's record, appearances and statements → this page counts the times other people say the name.
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brought up most by Sridhar Ramaswamy (1)
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2025 1 mention in 1 episode
Everything said about Benedict Evans, oldest first
Apr 10, 2024 negative
Apr 10, 2024 neutral
Apr 10, 2024 bearish
Evans: VR headsets will not replace smartphones as primary computing platforms
“You're not going to wear a headset, no matter how light and cheap it is, all day outdoors. I would not have worn it walking here, even if it weighed a hundred grams and had completely perfect pass-through. Therefore, it can't replace your phone. Therefore, we …”
Apr 10, 2024 neutral
Evans: Predictions that only tech giants had enough AI data were wrong
“And this is clearly what happened with the last wave of machine learning. There was a brief moment where people said it needs all this data. Only Google's got all the data. There's going to be, like, three people who've got enough data to do AI, and that turne…”
Apr 10, 2024 negative
Evans: Fully autonomous end-to-end AI workflows require AGI
“But you kind of know at the same time that in practice, what I've just described would kind of require AGI. In practice, there's like 10 ways that that's going to break And never mind the hallucination problem, which is a whole separate conversation. There's j…”
Apr 10, 2024 neutral
Apr 10, 2024 negative
Evans: Major software failures stem from institutional rot, not missing regulation
“You don't look at this and say, well obviously the solution is that we needed to have a database regulator that makes sure that databases don't have bugs. Rather you look at it and say, well, this is an institutional failure. A in Fujitsu in the post office an…”
Apr 10, 2024 negative
May 22, 2025 neutral
May 22, 2025 negative
May 22, 2025 negative
Evans: You cannot trust AI research reports on unfamiliar topics
“But if you go to it and say, give me a 40 page report on something I don't know much about, you can't trust any line of that report, because most of it will be right, probably, or it will be roughly right, but if there's anything, but you won't be able to depe…”
May 22, 2025 bullish
Evans: GPTs could lower software creation costs by an order of magnitude
“The analogy that's been floating around, I think, is, is to compare this with AWS, in the sense that AWS was a sort of an order of magnitude change in how easy you could get a startup out of the door. You didn't need to write all this stuff yourself and buy in…”
May 22, 2025
May 22, 2025
May 22, 2025 neutral
Mar 19, 2026
Evans: The hardest part of building software isn't writing the code
“The hard part of writing software is not writing code. It's all the other stuff around, like, what should the code be doing? And how would we tell people that they should be using it? And what should we charge? And how do we go to market? And which bit of the …”
Mar 19, 2026 neutral
Mar 19, 2026 negative
Evans: Incremental AI accuracy improvements don't reduce necessary human review
“But if you've got a bunch of use cases where you need the right answer, as opposed to sort of the right answer, then saying that the model is better doesn't mean anything. I mean, literally, it is literally meaningless. What you're telling me is, I asked the m…”
Mar 19, 2026
Mar 19, 2026
Evans: Most SaaS companies are fundamentally just database wrappers
“Most SaaS companies are database wrappers, where somebody realized that here is this problem, and here is the people who have it, and here is a way of turning it 90 degrees, and this is your insertion point, this is how you build it and take it to market.”
Mar 19, 2026 neutral
Mar 19, 2026
Mar 19, 2026 negative
Mar 19, 2026 neutral
Evans: AI product teams are strategy takers, not strategy setters
“You start from the technology. You don't control the product strategy, which is of course how science works, but you don't know what's going to happen. You don't know what's going to get built. You know, obviously you've got like Sam and Dario and so on are li…”
Mar 19, 2026 neutral
Evans: Differentiating a chatbot is like differentiating a web browser
“The chatbot itself is kind of like trying to differentiate a web browser in that you've got an input box and an output box, and how can you make them different if the whole point is that you can type in anything and get anything out.”