Benedict Evans

Manually driven cars kill 30,000 people a year in America.
Not figuratively - 30,000 actual people actually killed every year.
Tell your social media intern to work on their rhetoric

I said the exact opposite

The study says that a third of people who actively use AI use AI for search.
This is circular.

Project Genie: Experimenting with infinite, interactive worlds Google AI Ultra subscribers in the U.S. can now try out Project Genie.

Yes, I still see this attitude sometimes. It's an astonishing lack of curiosity. This whole field is full of of questions, but if someone watches this and doesn't think something important has happened, they are only fooling themselves. blog.google/innovation-a...

Project Genie: Experimenting with infinite, interactive worlds Google AI Ultra subscribers in the U.S. can now try out Project Genie.

At this stage, people who still claim that generative AI doesn't work and is all bullshit are showing an amazing level of wilful self-deception. blog.google/innovation-a...

Also unaffected: Santa Claus, tooth fairy.

I hate AI because it makes confident assertions it hasn’t checked and also I saw a headline that says a study I haven’t read claims only 5% of AI pilots work

The way that ‘MIT study’ that supposedly claimed ‘95% of AI pilots fail’ (none of which was really supported by the analysis or methodology) still gets cited everywhere ironically tells us quite a lot about the error rate in human reasoning

It's kind of amusing that he starts by saying that people accused him of not understanding crypto, and then proceeds to demonstrate that he doesn't understand *anything* - but is quite sure that anyone with a different opinion to him is a bad person.

The interesting thing about OpenAI’s ‘code red’ is that it involves pausing product and doubling down on models, and not the reverse. OpenAI’s core strategic problem is that it has no unique product and no distribution.

There are 17 pages on resources and roughly two thirds of the entire presentation is about broader social and economic consequences. There is even a slide that literally charts the effect on jobs of automation
There is also a page on how people often say silly things about changes like this.

Keynes said “when the facts change I change my opinions“, but some people start with opinions and then choose their facts.

I am not entirely surprised that someone who rage-quit Google after publishing a paper based on made-up energy consumption data would support a book based on water consumption data that turns out to be wildly wrong.

This McKinsey chart does a pretty good job of capturing the problem in asking people or corporations "Do you use AI?" without defining 'use' or 'AI'. The US government does a survey like this. It is meaningless.
www.mckinsey.com/capabilities...

You cannot understand fragments of sentences without reading the rest of them.

I’ve never said that and I don’t think that.
I don’t understand why people invent quotes. Try engaging with what people actually say?

One effect of the splintering of Twitter is that the people building AI are mostly still there, but most of the people who think that AI is evil and stupid left to go to places like mastodon or Bluesky, where now they just talk to each other in decreasing circles of irrelevance

Presentations — Benedict Evans Every year, I produce a big presentation exploring macro and strategic trends in the tech industry. New in May 2025, ‘AI eats the world’.

Twice a year, I produce a big presentation exploring macro and strategic trends in the tech industry. New in November 2025, ‘AI eats the world’.
www.ben-evans.com/presentations

It shouldn’t be a surprise that that turned into cases that didn’t get through the courts. It turned into government lawyers making fools of themselves claiming that Instagram didn’t compete with TikTok and WhatsApp didn’t compete with iMessage.

I have a lot of sympathy for the idea US competition law is too narrowly focused on low prices, and some for arguments for more competition in tech. But a lot of of this agenda was based on poor analysis & poor understanding. Remember that House anti-trust report full of basic factual mistakes?

Judge agrees it was really dumb for the FCC to claim Meta doesn’t compete with TikTok.
This case was originally thrown out because the FCC just… forgot to say what it meant when it claimed Meta was a monopoly. Market definition is the first step in a competition case and they just didn’t bother.

Who says Europe has no hyper-growth companies?

Almost done

But as Jonathan Swift tells us, you can’t reason someone out of an idea that they weren’t reasoned into. The people who would need to read the book aren’t willing to learn.

Idea: a book where each chapter explains why something lots of people believe without question is wrong.
Facebook sells your data, buybacks are bad, rent control is good, $100 Nikes cost $1 to make, foreigners pay our tariffs, you can fix deficits by cutting waste/taxing billionaires…

The funny thing about this thread is all the people who are very toxic, very sure they're right, and say things that ten seconds in Google would have shown them aren't true. There are still people who believe in Cambridge Analytica!

You should read that link. For the first time. Then you would know that Cambridge Analytica didn't buy data from Facebook.

Yes, she's the only person who still believes Cambridge Analytica was a thing, bless her.

Yes, 'sells data' and doesn't sell data' are the same thing and you have to be pedantic to suggest that's kind of a convoluted piece of logic

Cambridge Analytics did not buy data from Facebook, didn't actually do anything, and is best thought of as a hoax.

Ten seconds in Google would have told you this. You're so sure, and so wrong, and never even once bothered to look. Do you still think MMR causes autism, too?