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 14,040 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 974 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 will IPO later and lower than Anthropic
“The rank, the most, the big picture fact is the ranking has changed, and you're now number two. So you will go out later then and a lower price than the other guys, unless you change the trajectory massively.”
Lemkin: Workers Will Threaten to Quit Without Continuous AI Agents
“Next year, there's going to be backlash. I can see it in my best portfolio companies where we can't go back anymore. We can't live. We can't go back in time. And I need my 10 sub agents running 24 hours a day to do my job or I quit.”
Lemkin: Databricks and OpenAI IPOs will be nail in coffin for SaaS
“I think it will be the nail in the coffin for almost every public software company. And what I mean is when Stripe and data, like, okay, there's OpenAI, there's Anthropic, we can put them in a different category, right? They clearly are on many levels. When Op…”
O'Driscoll: Defense tech venture returns will suffer from market consolidation
“I think an area where, despite it being amazing for America and important for the world, I think the venture returns of the March might be tough will be defense, not because we don't need all these products, but because I think there's an element of that busin…”
Lemkin: Classic CS and CX software won't exist in 24 months
“Classic CS and CX won't even exist in 24 months. There's really no, there'll be commodity cheap products But we won't even need it. It's already dying and merging into marketing, sales, every, everything's becoming one agent.”
Murdock: Baseten's Deal With Cursor Yielded Scale but Little Profit
“I think cursor was pretty smart in the base 10 contracts from last year with cursor. I don't think there was much profit in it for a base 10. They just got revenue and they got scale from it, but they didn't get a lot of earnings.”
Murdock: Continuous learning will replace frontier models rather than bolting onto them
“They're going to replace frontier models. I don't think you can bolt on continuous learning into an existing frontier model. I think they're going to try and the early stages will look like that. But I think ultimately it'll call for a new form of architecture…”
Macdonald: In 15-20 Years, Nobody Will Own a Car or License
“Which is why I do think in some future world, maybe not five years, but 15 or 20 years, Everyone's going to be like Harry. Nobody's going to own a car. Nobody's going to have their driver's license because you'll be able to get around. And I think bikes and sc…”
Waymo and Tesla Will Eventually Have to Partner With Uber
“I think ultimately it's in both of their interests to put their vehicles on our network, even if they have their own robo taxi apps or their own one P apps, even if they work with our competitors on the rideshare side or on the delivery side. I think everyone …”
The era of no-code software is slowly ending due to AI
“The era of no code, of things that we can, humans can do without engineering resources, it's slowly winding down. And if it's in chat, GBT, man, I'm just worried.”
Anthropic will IPO soon after pulling ahead of OpenAI's ChatGPT
“They will go public because this is peak brass ring moment, and you know, you could argue the trends in 27 are tougher. You've pulled ahead of ChatGPT, so just put a nail in the entropic pit, right? You've pulled ahead of ChatGPT comfortably, OpenAI, to a poin…”
Any startup investment not run by a founder will be a zero
“Any investment I've made that is not run by a founder is a zero. It's going to be a zero in this age. It's going to be a zero. I look across, now you, we have different portfolios, but the ones I have that are not run by founders, whether they're at twenty mil…”
Stebbings: Sam Altman and Dario Amodei will successfully lobby for AI restrictions
“I just think Sam Altman is someone who I would never, ever bet against, and I think he's the best politician in the world, and I think when he says something, he says it with intent, and when he says we should give five percent away to the administration, he's…”
Angelopoulos: Fake AI applicants passed Arena's live technical engineering interviews
“They come in, they're like, hey, I want to be an infrastructure engineer at Arena, which is a great job that we're hiring for you. But then the other side of it is some guy that looks perfectly normal. They're getting, you know, they're passing all of our tech…”
Angelopoulos: Open-source AI pressure could cause insolvency for leading frontier labs
“And I think that the reason to be worried is because if the open source ecosystem somehow makes the cost saving opportunity for businesses much more salient and therefore decreases the revenue of companies like OpenAI and Anthropic within the enterprise, that …”
Lemkin: Open-source AI models will bypass Nvidia's CUDA platform
“He's got to go frontier and open and open is dangerous. Open doesn't need CUDA. Open is cheaper and it's lower margins. Open will bypass him, but he's got it.”
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.”
Lemkin: AI agent unpredictability will strengthen US bans on foreign open weights
“I think these models are very risky. I use them every day. I love it. And I think it's an argument to keep the open weight out of the US. It's gonna favor the ban because we can't, we have no idea what these models are gonna do.”
Lemkin: Every company will suffer an LLM agent breach within 24 months
“I believe that every company in the next 24 months will have a security breach due to an LLM agent. Every single company.”
Open-source models will not displace top foundation models like Anthropic
“I think the foundation models, let's say specifically Anthropic, have such special models. This can be hard for somebody to just kind of say, I've used open source with my data. It's going to be functional and positive for some amount of what you're doing, but…”
Sub-$100M boutique seed funds will be the worst-performing VC category
“I think one of the worst performing groups in terms of venture in this vintage will actually be the small boutique seed funds, which is what every single LP that you speak to today, Matt, wants. Every LP. This is the funniest thing. Every LP wants San Francisc…”
Nitski: Forward-deployed AI services are only a short-term enterprise trend
“I think it's the future for the short term as the knowledge of how to use AI gets disseminated throughout industry. We have basically a concentration of a bunch of people in San Francisco who really know how to deploy agents, eval agents, Be AI first in engine…”
Nitski: Mercor adds millions of dollars in cash to bank weekly
“It doesn't annoy me, no, because the, you know, we end every week with millions more in the bank, right? So it's funny how you can have, I've been at other Companies where I've seen, you know, interesting financial engineering and accounting, and people can ha…”
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…”
Lin Qiao: AI future will feature millions of specialized models, not AGI
“I really believe the future will not be a few small number of AGI models dominating the world. I really believe the future will be, it may be scary, but I think that's true, it will be millions of specialized models, one per application, per use case.”
Curative Headcount Will Shrink In Short Term Due To AI
“We're about 650 people now. In five years we'll probably be bigger. In the short term I think we're going to be quite a bit smaller.”
Lemkin: Almost every AI go-to-market startup buys illegitimate data sources
“Almost every GT AI agent GTM provider is buying data sources that they probably shouldn't be buying. Almost every startup that is doing GTM, they are buying, whether it's a cleanse Chinese data center, they are taking your, like, you can't be that good with da…”
Lemkin: Legacy pre-AI SaaS companies will die when their contracts renew
“I think when the renewals come, they all just die like Marketo. They're just all gonna die.”
Lemkin: Adobe's Marketo is in terminal decay and heading to zero revenue
“It is going to zero. It is, but it is one of the slowest decays you can get, right? Because moving off a marketing automation system in the enterprise is very slow, but it is without question going to zero. There are no net new logos and everyone hates it.”
Abrahami: LLMs will not replace white-collar jobs because they lack reasoning
“I would not be That concern with LLM is replacing every kind of a white color jobs. That's not going to happen. It's not that smart. You keep making silly mistakes. It's not very good. Actually, it's not very good at reasoning. It's very good at collecting dat…”
Jain: The world's greatest companies will not operate with only 100 employees
“And the, I don't think the world's greatest companies are going to be companies with a hundred people”
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”
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: Microsoft's enterprise AI deployment strategy will fail
“I think this is going to fail because I don't think there is enough talent To do what we want to do in the enterprise. The idea makes sense to on a spreadsheet. It makes sense. Sad is smarter than me, but I, my today, my experience is it's going to fail with a…”
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: 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.”
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…”
Arora: Companies will cut G&A headcount by half within three years
“My rule of thumb is that in the next three years, we'll probably have half the people in GNA type activities in companies. Things like marketing, things like finance, things like HR, because there's a lot of process management there, and a lot of process manag…”
Arora: AI will increase enterprise demand for technical and sales resources
“People believe we're going to have less people working because AI is going to take over our jobs. I don't believe that. I think what's going to happen is you can'forward imagine the number of people on my team who want more technical resources, more AI savvy r…”
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…”
Standalone AI model builders and token resellers have no viable business
“The output tokens, if you're literally just a reseller of model tokens, you have no business. Because the model will get commoditized. So even if you're a model builder, you don't have a business.”