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 82 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 1 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: AI foundation models lack winner-takes-all network effects
“And the problem is that as far as we can see, there is no winner takes all effect or network effect in a foundation model.”
Evans: OpenAI has commodity tech and no differentiation but massive mindshare
“If you're Sam Altman, you've got a commodity technology. You've got, you're competing with people who have giant legacy cash flows. You don't have your own infrastructure. Don't really have any differentiation, but you've got massive mindshare.”
Evans: OpenAI Product Chief Kevin Weil is building a thin GPT wrapper
“Kevin Wheel is building a thin GPT wrapper. I mean, I love Kevin, but like, that's his job, is to build a thin GPG wrapper.”
Evans: AI scientists possess no special expertise on global geopolitical threats
“One of the sort of fallacies here is a sort of an appeal to authority, which is, you know, well, that person is an AI scientist, so they must know if this is a threat to world peace. No, they don't. They're an AI scientist. They don't know anything more about,…”
Evans: Elon Musk's autonomy and humanoid demos are fake
“It's bullshit. Yeah, but it's not a real demo. It's not working.”
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 …”
Evans: Meta and Google do not need standalone LLM monetization
“Because if you are Meta or Google, You've got this whole other highly profitable business, which now needs to have LLMs inside it, powering all sorts of capabilities and features, and you probably want them to be your LLMs rather than somebody else's. But you …”
Evans: OpenAI has 900M weekly active users, but only 5% pay
“You've got nine hundred million weekly active users, but most of them are not using it every day and can't think of anything to do with it. And only five percent of them are paying for it.”
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…”
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.”
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…”
Evans: Anthropic momentum is fleeting as AI model leadership shifts weekly
“Not really. I mean, this week they've got all the fire, they've got all the juice, whatever the word is. I don't know. This week, next week, it'll be something else.”
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.”
Evans: AI frontier models are commodities spread across half a dozen organizations
“The thing that's become very clear, if it wasn't clear a year ago, is that the models themselves are sort of commodities in that, you know, there's half a dozen people who have a state-of-the-art model.”
Evans: OpenAI's Deep Research inverted numbers in its own marketing example
“Then the interns typed the number in wrong. Like, it was literally the wrong percentage. It was like, 65, 35, instead of 35, 65.”
Evans: AI is not currently on a path to 100% factual accuracy
“Are you telling me this is going up to the point that I'm going to be able to use deep research and the numbers will all be right, and I'll know that they're all right? Because I don't think we're on a path to that. Or at least I don't think we know that we're…”
Evans: Consumer chat interfaces are thin wrappers, not vertical SaaS
“The only thin, thin GPT wrappers are what you get when you go to chatgpt.com and claude.com and grok and all these others. That's a thin wrapper on a model. Whereas you know, name your vertical enterprise SaaS company. That's not a thin wrapper.”
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…”
Evans: Meta and AWS both benefit from AI becoming cheap commodity infrastructure
“In a sense, like, AWS and Meta are on the same page, and then Meta wants this to be cheap, generic commodity infrastructure that's sold at marginal cost, and they will differentiate on cool Facebooky stuff on top. Amazon want this to be cheap, generic commodit…”
Evans: Consumer AI apps currently lack viral loops and network effects
“There's no viral loop. There's no network effect. There's no reason why you should use the one your friends use. There's no reason this one gets better because everyone else uses it, at least not yet.”
Evans: No standalone breakout consumer apps exist wrapping ChatGPT API
“We don't have a breakout, there's no standalone breakout consumer app. There's no one, there's no, there's all these, there's, there are all these enterprise SaaS stuff. There is not really a consumer equivalent. There aren't hundreds of consumer apps using th…”
Evans: Public discourse around AI doomerism has effectively vanished
“Yes, all of the dumerism's gone away.”
Evans: Every enterprise software company is unbundling Oracle, Gmail, or Excel
“Basically every enterprise software company for the sake of argument is unbundling Oracle, Gmail, or Excel.”
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…”
Benedict Evans still hasn't found a daily use case for ChatGPT
“In my actual job, I can't work out something that I would actually use ChatGPT for.”
Benedict Evans: Science lacks an underlying theory for how LLMs work
“We don't have any equivalent set of theories for intelligence or artificial intelligence. We have a lot of theories of how some bits of it might work. But we do not have a theory of what we have and what, and in what sense is what we have is different and the …”
Benedict Evans: The tech industry lacks enough human data to 100x LLMs
“And so that means you kind of can't do like a prediction. There's no Moore's law here where you can say, well, it'll get to that power of compute level at this, but at this point set aside the fact that we actually don't have enough data to give it 10 or a hun…”
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…”
Evans: Microsoft Bing will never catch up with Google in search
“Doesn't matter how much money and how hard Microsoft works, Bing will never catch up with Google.”
Evans: AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud are fundamentally different businesses
“The first is if you actually look at the market shares, Google Cloud, Azure, and AWS are actually in quite different businesses. AWS is mostly infrastructure. Microsoft is mostly services. Google is mostly scrambling to catch up in a very distant certain place…”
Evans: Submitting 1,000 prompts placed ChatGPT users in top 20%
“Turns out that if you did a thousand posts, if you did a thousand prompts last year, you're in the top 20%.”
Evans: 'Agent' in AI is as fuzzy a term as 'metaverse'
“It's a very kind of, it's a slightly kind of fuzzy term. It's a little bit like saying metaverse. You know, you don't really know what somebody meant when they might've meant VR or VR is real. They might've meant games. Games are real. But when they said metav…”
Evans: AI app design is currently at the 'PDF catalog' stage
“And we're still at the stage of, you know, taking a PDF of your catalog and putting it in your company website as we try and work out what we should do with AI.”
Evans: AI is a continuation of 50 years of software abstraction
“Tell that next time you hear a software developer saying, like, AI is a completely different thing, and nobody has ever abstracted software like this before, like, yeah, we've been doing this for 30 years, 50 years.”
Evans: AI coding will lead to far more total software volume
“There will be way more software, and that will pick up many more of those use cases, either that weren't automated before, either because they were too small, or because you could actually couldn't automate that thing with software before, and now with AI you …”
Evans: No one will vibe code their own ERP software
“No, no one will vibe code their own ERP or their own frame.io, but they may ask Anthropic or Gemini or ChatGPT, can you do this thing for me?”
Evans: Precise numeric scores for job AI exposure are ludicrous
“You want to take all the numbers off because it could tell yourself that that one is 96.5 and that one is 78. It's just ludicrous.”
Evans: Almost everyone in a tech bubble acts rationally
“Well, you know, everyone in, in, generally in a bubble, everybody's a rational actor. Almost everyone's a rational actor given their situation.”
Evans: Initial enterprise deployments of Microsoft Copilot were largely unsuccessful
“Everyone deployed co-pilot and went, oh, okay, that wasn't very successful.”
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 …”
Evans: Current AI models still cannot replace existing software like Excel
“But it still can't actually replace any of the software you use. It can't replace Excel, it can't.”
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…”
Evans: Generative AI is deployed in thousands of companies, unlike crypto
“There are hundreds and hundreds of companies who've already got this in production, doing stuff that's really useful where it works, where you understand what it is. So this is just objectively wrong to say that it's useless. It's already not, not in the way t…”
Evans: Sam Altman's role is mostly fundraising, politics, and promotion
“Like a lot of Sam Altman's role at the moment, it's like you could split his role into capital raising, politics, like internal tech politics and promotion.”
Evans: Apple's AI writing tools are just better spellcheck
“They have the writing tools, so you can select a bunch of text and hit proofread. And it, it's like spellcheck. Or you can summarize it, or you can select some text and turn it into a table. It's useful. It's a feature. It's just a feature. It's like spellchec…”
Evans: Google and Meta delayed LLMs in 2022 due to high error rates
“This is why Google and Meta didn't launch their own LLMs in twenty-twenty-two when they had them as well, because they looked at them and said, well, they're wrong too much.”