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 6,239 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
Reyes: Major AI model providers explicitly plan to compete with customers
“At least, you know, two of the largest companies that provide models today have explicitly said, we are going to go after every single one of these industries and businesses that we provide like intelligence for.”
Reyes: Chinese AI models show no unique security backdoors versus US models
“For me, the Chinese models specifically have demonstrated no examples where they have some sort of security risk or backdoor compared to American models.”
Stebbings: Mercor Crosses $2B ARR and Raises at $20B Valuation
“I'm an investor in McCaw. I never thought this would be as big as it has got as quickly as hit, as it has done. It's crossing out two, two and a half billion ARR. They're doing a new round led by General Catalyst at twenty billion.”
Stebbings: Surge AI at $3.5B ARR, Mercor $2.5B, Handshake $1B, Micro1 $500M
“Surge are doing three, three and a half. McCaw are doing two and a half. Handshaker doing one. Micro One are doing half.”
O'Driscoll: OpenAI is lobbying in Washington for AI regulation alongside Anthropic
“They're signing this publicly while at the same time lobbying in Washington right alongside Anthropic for a regulatory process.”
O'Driscoll: AI infrastructure spend hits $900B while AI apps struggle past $50B
“Zooming out a million miles, you know, my mental model is, I divide the AI world up into three buckets. It's the making AI, the infrastructure layer, right? And you're right, the spend there is eight, nine hundred billion dollars a year. Then there's the two f…”
O'Driscoll: Meta and SpaceX rented compute after failing to build AI assets
“Two companies Have done the same thing, which is buy a load of compute to build proprietary assets, fail to build those assets, and then bring that, and then decide instead to sell that compute to others, and both of them have had a very positive market recept…”
Lemkin: OpenAI and Anthropic Lied About Books and YouTube Training Data
“Open AI, an anthropic, Kind of lied about the books, and they definitely lied about training on YouTube”
Stebbings: VC firms need a $400M fund to lead Series A today
“You can't do Series A unless you have a four hundred million dollar fund today. Absolutely no chance.”
O'Driscoll: The AI industry generates $100B revenue while spending $700B on CapEx
“So AI as a whole is getting a hundred billion in revenue and spending seven hundred billion a year. That's not a great business.”
Lemkin: Prompt engineering skills that once paid $150,000 are now worthless
“When we started this show, you need to be a fucking prompt it. They would joke this was the highest paying job out of college was prompt engineers were making a 150,000 dollars out of college because they knew how to write a prompt. That skill's worthless toda…”
Lemkin: OpenAI and Anthropic yield 40-70% gross margins on enterprise inference
“They have an enterprise base, which is, it has, you know, between 40 and 70% in, you know, gross margin just on inference.”
Randle: Frontier AI models can now autonomously execute cyber attacks
“Zooming out, I think the most important thing in all this Is that we step back from Anthropic and realize that the models are to place now, whether they're from Anthropic or elsewhere, where they can autonomously find and chain multiple vulnerabilities togethe…”
US government owns 10% of Intel, Nvidia and SoftBank 5% each
“American government owns 10% of Intel. Nvidia and SoftBank own five percent each.”
Anthropic lobbied heavily for US AI export controls
“And definitely like companies like Anthropic lobbied very hard for it.”
O'Driscoll: Musk earns $2B monthly selling compute to Anthropic and Google
“He found two of his biggest competitors who want to buy from him. You know, he's getting two billion a month, 1.25 from an topic and nine 50 from, no, the other way around, nine 50 from a topic, 1.25 from Google, the other way around, two billion a month. Two …”
Foody: Investor Spread False Rumors of China Accessing Mercor Data
“Think of one person that's very prominent who's invested in multiple competitors and just, like, made this tweet about how all of our data was getting accessed by China when it was totally untrue.”
O'Driscoll: xAI Rented Colossus Cluster to Anthropic for $1.25B Monthly
“They've rented that to Entropic for 1.25 billion a month, right, with a, I think, a ninety-day cancellation clause on either side.”
Peets: Anthropic offered sales reps $1.2M compensation packages
“Like if Anthropic, for example, when they were at their three 80 valuation, they were offering reps, call it a 1,000,002.”
O'Driscoll: Anthropic Management Stating November Target for IPO
“They're saying they're going public in November”
Stebbings: Altman Offered $2M in OpenAI Tokens to Every YC Startup
“Sam Altman just offered two million dollars In open AI tokens to every YC startup in the current batch in exchange for equity.”
O'Driscoll: Software valuations will never reach 20x revenue multiples again
“Give me 30% growth, give me profits, give me a story that's got some future in it, and I'll get you back to five times. I'll never give you 20 times again. I won't fall for that one this time.”
Tobi Lütke: Over 60% of Canadians view US as top national risk
“60% of people, more than 60, I think the numbers have gone up since, and people think that the United States is the largest risk to Canada, like, much larger than, like, Russia or China would be.”
Lemkin: AI agents render Marketo, Outreach, and Salesloft worthless
“They're not going to recommend Marketo for your agent to do marketing automation, ok? In fact, it mocked Marketo outreach and sales loft as tools useless to agents. Ok, this API grid. They said there is no place in the, an agent will never send an email throug…”
Stebbings: Anthropic secondary market pricing has reached $1 trillion
“Every dollar wants its home in Anthropic right now, and it's caused secondary market prices to surge to a trillion dollars for Anthropic.”
Midha: Anthropic is the fastest-growing business of all time
“Tell them to give me a call when they'd like to be investors in the world's fastest growing business of all time, and then they can lecture me about public benefit governance and market share adoptions.”
Stebbings: Sequoia and top VCs announce misleading blended valuations
“The amount of Sequoia rounds where it's like, oh, you know, X raises money from square five billion. Trust me, Sequoia got in at one, but they just club it together and then announced the sum and then the latest valuation. And it's just very misleading.”
Andreessen: Silicon Valley is more centralized than ever due to AI
“The tech industry is more centralized in Silicon Valley than it has been in its entire existence, and I think it's AI.”
Steckman: Anduril builds cruise missile airframes like bathtubs using contract manufacturers
“The cruise missile we build, the actual airframe is built like you build a bathtub. And so we can take advantage of tons of contract manufacturers in the United States that can actually build a bathtub, right?”
Lemkin: US government will block Anthropic indefinitely regardless of court rulings
“The government's going to say you're either going to agree to this or we're going to freeze you out of the US economy. And it doesn't matter what a court says. Because they'll come up with another justification. There'll be another one. There'll be a different…”
Stebbings: Cursor doubled revenue from $1B to $2B in three months
“Cursor announces their movement from a billion to two billion in revenue in, in three months. Rumors of secondary round being done at fifty billion.”
Monday.com replaced 100-person inbound SDR team with AI agents
“We had a team of about a hundred SDRs and we now doing, doing it with agents. A hundred percent is being done with agents. We move those SDRs to do outbound.”
Swisher: Anthropic reached $9B ARR while growing 800%
“If you look at Anthropic, right, publicly available numbers, nine billion of ARR growing 800%.”
Lemkin: Peak XV almost imploded because the managing partner hoarded economics
“I mean, peak, peak 15 almost imploded, right? Because the managing partner wanted to keep all the economics, right?”
Lemkin: Anthropic revenue surged to 64% of OpenAI's in 14 months
“Anthropic said it's hundred K customers are up seven X in the last year. So there's not enough time to steal deals. Having said that, going from five percent of OpenAI's revenue to 64% in 14 months, that is stealing budget.”
Lemkin: Fortune 500 will actively replace human employees with AI by year-end
“By the end of this year, that, that train is going to be so far out of the station that, that these growth numbers will be jaw dropping because we will decide enterprises will the fortune 500 or global 2000 will decide we are replacing humans with AI.”
Lemkin: The shelf life of a state-of-the-art LLM is under 100 days
“There is a very simple bear case that it goes almost to zero which is that shelf life of an LLM is less than a hundred days.”
Chad Peet: Fired sales reps in France and Germany stay on payroll for a year
“Go to Germany and France, I can't fire people. Like, dude, they're on, I, they'll be on the books for a year after you want to get rid of them.”
Lemkin: 2026 will mark the end of entry-level sales jobs
“There'll be, this is the year where we will see the end of so many entry-level sales jobs. We still need AEs. We still need people knocking on doors. We do not need two-year-old kids sending emails. Those jobs will disappear.”
Chang: Energy companies claiming 100% renewable tariffs are lying
“So any energy company that's claiming their harm sent renewables is a complete lie. Right. They're simply buying renewable certificates, right, to claim the harm sent renewables, and it's completely false.”
O'Driscoll: Enterprise AI revenue is $16B vs $400B in CapEx
“End users in the enterprises are spending about fundamental data 15, sixteen billion dollars on AI. And the people who make AI are spending four hundred billion dollars on quote, making AI, right?”
a16z's larger venture funds consistently outperform its smaller funds
“Our funds consistently beat small, large, Diversified, concentrated venture funds. So our larger funds have outperformed our smaller ones, and our larger ones actually have similar multiples of money to our smaller ones across, across strategies.”
O'Driscoll: US fintechs will use anti-China messaging against foreign rivals
“Competitors are going to be the people who use it first. Because if I was an all-American fintech company, I'd have my all-American flag out there and say, these guys are a bunch of commies. They have commies looking at your data. We're, you know, our stuff is…”
Lemkin: Sam Altman receives zero equity in OpenAI's corporate restructuring
“They're a little interesting, but the craziest thing in this deal, because it's unprecedented, I think in our lifetimes is OpenAI said that Sam Altman will still have no shares in the combined entity.”
O'Driscoll: AI model companies spend $300B to $400B on compute
“Because if you think about it, these model companies have grown faster than any company in human history. They're spending three, four hundred billion dollars on compute. They're probably spending three, four billion dollars on RLHF, and they were spending zer…”