benedictevans

Who decides whether Linux is doing well enough? Who is responsible for fixing bugs or incorporating new requirements? Who is checking that it follows this month's new regulatory requirements? As the tasks scales to become more important, any organization needs to have systematic answers to those kinds of questions. And yes, you can use software for that (we always did!), but you still need a human somewhere who is exercising judgment.

The entire essay explains why I think this is wrong. At a minimum, it is not 'undeniable' - I just denied it ;). Which part of the chain of reasoning I laid out do you disagree with, and why?

Ah, that’s different. Your question confused me because you said they were duplicate slides and they are not, and your word ‘predication’ looked like a typo by you.

There are no duplicate slides.

You are surprised to discover how an entire industry you know nothing about does things. You conclude that everyone in that industry must be an idiot doing bad work.

This says far more about you than it does about me.

All of these points are simply wrong.

I charted the revenue reported by Anthropic and OpenAI as gross and net because those are the numbers they disclose. Anthropic does not report net revenue nor give us any way to calculate that, and the same in reverse for OpenAI. It would be great if we had GAAP revenue, but we don't. This is what we have, and it still tells an important story. What are we supposed to do - just not show the data?

All of the charts indicate whether they are adjusted for inflation. There is no rigid convention on this, but the general practice is that you don't adjust up to maybe 20 years and generally do convert for more than that, unless inflation itself is under discussion, which it is not here. Meanwhile, the text on each slide explains the purpose of the comparison. None of them are random.

Every chart is correctly sourced exactly as you will see it in any other piece of financial or industry research. It is not industry practice to cite specific documents or provide footnotes.

You've clearly just never seen any industry or financial analysis before, and are unfamiliar with basic and universal conventions that run back decades. That's fine. Being rude about it is not.

No, I've never said that, and never thought that. The actual text in that tweet is: " The blockchain can't lie, but you can lie to the blockchain"

You don't know how to use Search, and this is beyond anything worth engaging with.

I didn’t make any comparison at all with the fibre bubble, for precisely that reason. The comparison is with mobile data, which was and is always behind capacity.

I think one of the things that the usage data shows us is that chatbots absolutely do not have infinite use cases - most users only use them a day or two a week or less.

No, I didn’t. I made my account private and stopped using twitter. And the actual tweet says the opposite - that NFTs would need to develop some kind of cultural grounding for them to become a investment, which they didn’t have at the time and never got, and without that this would just be a speculative bubble, which is exactly what happened.

I made it very clear that I thought NFTs were a speculative bubble. I never suggested anyone should buy any crypto-related instrument. The idea that I was ‘shilling for crypto’ is something you would only say if you’re an idiot, as the OP and a few others on this thread clearly are.

Yes, I wrote about Rock’s Law too, but we don’t know that this is how these models will develop

I've made the semi comparison myself, but the amount of capital required to build a SOTA model today is clearly nowhere near enough to lead to a monopoly.

I'm aware that telecoms networks are standardised (I was once a telecoms analyst), but that isn't a precondition for a commodity.

No, you have a different opinion about terminology, which ironically is one of the things I noted as pointless in the thread I posted.

No, I was using crypto and blockchain as interchangeable terms. I'm aware some people don't, but that's always how any person the space I've spoken to uses them

There’s a bunch of fuzzy metrics here, which is one reason I turned it back into a monthly number. The other issue (as you’ll see on the chart) is that Anthropic and openAI are recognising revenue in completely different ways.

This is hilarious. What am I going to do? Hire a hitman? if you’re going be a dick on the Internet, you should be a dick using your real name. I don’t think that’s a threat.

With each platform shift, some of the old players disappear and some of them become irrelevant - IBM is still with us but no one cares

I had that exact chart in a previous presentation.

Looking at a 80 slide deck and saying that the charts are 'fantasies' is not a germane criticism at all. it's handwaving.

Nope. This is the exact quote.

Crypto today has a lot in common with both the internet in 1993 and the internet in 1999. Huge potential with few of the use cases invented yet, combined with froth, scams and delusion. This makes it easier to dismiss (“useless AND a scam!”).

But dismissing crypto as a useless scam is much like looking at Usenet, Cuecat and Boo .com and dismissing the internet. It mistakes applications for the enabling layer.

Looking at crypto and only seeing the scams is like looking at the internet in 1999 and only seeing the bubble.

Looking at crypto and seeing no use cases is like looking at the internet in 1993, when the web was 3% of traffic

Another parallel: 1993 - people complaining the term should be internets, not internet 2018 - people complaining 'that's not what crypto means'

You could argue I was wrong and blockchain's potential never turned into anything much. It actually has become a huge deal as plumbing in the finance industry, but not much else. But so what? This was an interesting tech that hasn't really worked out. Welcome to the tech industry.

Sure. So which chart does our anonymous coward think is a fantasy, and why?

'these charts are fantasies' is a non-criticism from an anonymous moron. If there is an actual criticism of an actual point, make it.

Back when people were interested in Blockchains, I explained why people in tech were interested. I'm happy to explain that again now, if anyone cared. If someone thinks that's bad, they're a fool.

No, it's a really stupid lie. You can look at all my essays and presentations online.

I've spent some time discussing why people are interested in blockchains as software platforms, and what would be good and bad arguments around that. But I've never suggested anyone buy a token - indeed, I was pretty vocal in pointing to speculative bubbles and silly ideas, like NFTs.

Well, yes. Anyone who tells you they know how this is going to work is an idiot.

Microsoft Google and Meta also had enormous reach, but that didn’t mean that they built everything on the Internet, nor could they.

You’ve missed the point completely - if the important experiences are things built on top of foundation models, where the model itself is just an API call, then you don’t need to have a foundation model for build them and the model is just commodity infra

Interesting, thanks. I think the higher level problem is that 1: I have no way to know this failure mode when using the product and 2: I don't really know if I can rely on Claude to get this right every single time either, or what else it would fail at instead.

Have a look at the previous essay. I couldn't get ChatGPT 4o to give me a number in a PDF correctly even when I gave it the PDF, the page number, and the row and column.

https://www.ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2025/1/the-problem-w...

Deep Research doesn’t give the numbers that are in statcounter and statista. It’s choosing the wrong sources, but it’s also failing to represent them accurately.

1: It's the TITLE of a 100 slide presentation. It's not the only thing it said, and it's a way to think about what was happening.

2: Mobile replaced the PC as the main way people use the internet and do their day-to-day computing. The consumer Internet runs on smartphone apps, not PCs. In 2013 a lot of people didn't understand that that was happening, so it was worth saying.

Thank you - I will add this to my file of people expressing strong opinions of things they haven’t read and know nothing about.