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
O'Driscoll: AlphaFold won a Nobel Prize without producing a commercial drug
“The protein folding advance has collected its Nobel Prize and as yet has not had meaningful commercial success or a drug in production yet.”
O'Driscoll: Most competitive open-source AI foundation models are Chinese-based
“All the competitive models to the foundation models, all the open source models, bar not quite all, but most of are Chinese-based.”
O'Driscoll: Anthropic delayed shipping its latest model due to US government concerns
“We're seeing Anthropic unable to ship the most recent model until they satisfy the concerns of the US government.”
O'Driscoll: 90% of Kalshi's prediction market activity is actually sports betting
“90% of what they do is sports betting.”
Arora: Compute costs have increased 2x to 4x over two years
“If I abstract, if I step back today there's not enough compute for what the world is demanding. Unequivocally not enough compute, right? You can't buy compute. Compute is costing two to three X or four X more than it used to cost two years ago. There's not eno…”
Petersen: Almost all logistics competitors have suffered major cyberattacks
“Almost all of our competitors have had major hacks in logistics. Like, it's been a major target area for cyber, and there's been a lot of, like, ransoms.”
Randle: US regulating Anthropic's Fable on capabilities is a Rubicon moment
“At the face of it, this is a Rubicon moment in the history of the AI industry. It's the first time that the US has ostensibly regulated an AI model based on capabilities.”
Perplexity differentiates by orchestrating across competing AI models
“And the way we differentiate ourselves at perplexity Is we don't just orchestrate across tools and files and connectors. We also orchestrate across models. That is the differentiation that Anthropic and OpenAI cannot claim”
Lemkin: SpaceX IPO will be a dud and will not trade up
“I think the IPO nominally will be a dud. I don't think it will trade up dramatically.”
O'Driscoll: Databricks fetches a higher private multiple than public Snowflake
“Databricks can get capital at a higher revenue multiple because they're higher growth rate than Snowflake can and on hassle-free terms.”
Foody: Mercor did not lose OpenAI as a customer after hack
“False. Our relationship with OpenAI is stronger than ever.”
Felicis Offered Mercor $10B Valuation at $400M ARR
“By September of 20, 25 or say October, we were at called four hundred million in revenue run rate. And then Felisa's was like, we want to invest more. And so they gave us a term sheet at a ten billion dollar valuation.”
O'Driscoll: Nvidia's $50B Quarterly Profit Makes It World's Most Profitable
“It's the 50 something billion in profits, which makes it the most profitable company on the planet, because typically Google clocks in around a hundred to a hundred and twenty billion now a year. Right? These guys, in a quarter, made fifty billion plus, fifty-…”
O'Driscoll: Anthropic GAAP Revenue Doubled From $5B to $10B
“The proof that the sluice gates are open is you just look at Entropic going from five billion in gap revenue to ten billion in gap revenue.”
Lemkin: Anthropic Doubled Enterprise Pricing and Costs Twice as Much as OpenAI
“It has become a premium product since the end of last year. It is twice the cost of its competitor, right? Especially at the, after four, six, it started to charge enterprises clearly per token per use case. They charge them directly. Prices doubled. It is a p…”
Stebbings: Anthropic Gross Margins Reached 70% With $559M Projected Q2 Profit
“Gross margin, gross margins expanded from 38% to 70%, and they're going to have a five hundred and fifty nine million operating profit in QT, QT projected.”
Lemkin: X Revenue Has Shrunk 50% Since Musk's Acquisition
“Twitter's, Twitter's just, growth has fallen off, it's shrunk 50% since he bought it.”
Feldman claims Cerebras is the only pure-play AI public company
“But what we did know was that we had a chance to be the first and only AI peer play in the entire market. There's only one, and that's us.”
Feldman claims Cerebras chips are 15 times faster than competing GPUs
“Now, we are 15 x faster because of architectural reasons.”
Feldman claims Micron achieves software-like 80% to 85% margins on memory
“Micron is producing numbers where they have 80, 85% gross margins. I mean, they're getting software gross margins on making memory.”
Feldman says top Chinese open-source AI models lag closed-source models slightly
“This is made doubly worse by some of the best open source models were made by Chinese companies. And they are exceptionally good models. Kimi Ketu, Deep Seek. When the GLM, these are extraordinarily good models. They're not quite as good as the closed source m…”
Peets: Anthropic sales organization operates on group quotas rather than individual metrics
“They have a group quota.”
Lemkin: Anthropic has secured more compute capacity than OpenAI
“And now Anthropik, I hate the five D eight D chess metaphor, but now it's gonna, it's figured out a way to have more capacity than open AI.”
Lemkin: Anthropic publicly warned Menlo Ventures against SPVs last year
“Anthropic last year warned Menlo, one of its best investors and others, enough with the SPVs, they said publicly, enough with the damn SPVs.”
Lemkin: ZoomInfo's market growth was stolen by Clay and competing tools
“Zoom Info's growth was stolen from it from Clay and friends, and it's a brutal case study.”
Weitzman: Speechify holds 94% of the B2C voice agent market
“We have 94% of the B to C voice agents market.”
Weitzman: AirPods made more revenue than Spotify and audio competitors combined
“And by the way, AirPods made more money Then Spotify and almost every other audio company put together every single year for the last seven years.”
Speechify is among 200 companies testing ads on OpenAI
“We're one of the 200 companies that's provisioned to test ads on OpenAI.”
Weitzman: Speechify's early hires from Apple and Snapchat failed within three months
“We had two people that we hired from Apple and Snapchat, like very legit people. And they messed up the culture of the company. They would leave at 5:30 p.m. They like didn't live and breathe the company. And in the end, both of them quit after three months.”
Weitzman: Speechify engineers must respond to messages within 60 seconds
“And we have a principle even inside of engineering, which is you've got to respond to messages within 60 seconds because you want to unblock people.”
Weitzman: ElevenLabs inference costs range from $30 to $100 per million characters
“For the like standard model is anywhere from 70 to a hundred bucks. And for the V three fast model, it's like 30 bucks.”
O'Driscoll: Microsoft's revenue growth is flat without its AI initiatives
“Without the AI initiative, Microsoft is flat revenue.”
Tobi Lütke: Shopify's internal AI 'River' performs a ludicrous amount of engineering
“If you're building a large scale AI system like we have one, which they think what river, which lives in Slack and does some Ludicrous amount of Shopify's engineering now.”
O'Driscoll: Zero chance VCs return capital from blocked Manus deal
“The investors who've gotten their capital out, the chances of them having to or being willing to return that capital are zero.”
O'Driscoll: Private equity will no longer provide 3x revenue fallback exits
“You can't build a company big enough to go public. Strategics don't care. So you can sell this thing for three X revenues to fill in the PE from. That's not going to be true going forward.”
AppLovin Cut Departmental Staff 40-50% in 2024 Despite Fast Growth
“Mostly in 24, we had a year where we probably grew near double digits. Sorry, near triple digits. But we ended up cutting the team's staff by 40, 50% in most departments.”
Adam Foroughi: AppLovin Operates Without a Dedicated Product Management Team
“We don't have a product organization. Our engineers are meant to be product managers.”
AppLovin Core Ad Business Generates Over $10M EBITDA Per Employee
“So if I just went to the core business, Our core advertising products are about 400 people. So call it some very, very high percentage of all the companies EBITDA comes from the core business. So if you then calculate the EBITDA per employee over 400, it's a r…”
AppLovin Operates Without a COO, CMO, CRO, or Chief People Officer
“If you look at our exec team, we have CEO, CTO, CFO, and general counsel. We don't have a CRO. We don't have a COO. Go down the list of other C levels that people might have. We don't have a CMO. We don't have a chief people officer. We don't have any of these…”
AppLovin Restricts Equity Grants to Only the Top 10-15% of Employees
“And we used to believe that every single person should have equity granted by the company. Instead, we went to a place where we said the top 10 to 15% of the company will get equity, and the rest won't.”
Masad: Replit has been stuck in Apple App Store review for months
“Replit has been on the App Store since twenty-twenty-two doing exactly the same thing, allowing people to generate or write code. And running it in a browser window. Suddenly they're saying that we are you know, we're not complying with their guidelines. And w…”
Stebbings: Anthropic SPVs are charging up to 8% in upfront fees
“Some of the package pricing on these SPVs for Anthropic has just been the most egregious face ripping I've ever seen. I mean it's like, it's just, oh, I mean like eight percent up front.”
Levie: Enterprises cannot shift AI liability to providers like Anthropic
“I promise you, you're not going to be able to blame Anthropic when something goes wrong. And so if you can't blame Anthropic when something goes wrong, then at some point it doesn't really work to tell the company, like to tell your customer, well, That, that …”
O'Driscoll: Cursor loses money despite generating $4M per employee
“Cursor does four million per employee. Salesforce does 700 per 700,000 per employee. Oh, Cursor must be more efficient. Well, it turns out Salesforce has 30% operating margins and Cursor's losing a lot of money. Why? Because they spend a whole ton on tokens, r…”
O'Driscoll: Meta lost $70B on VR after making $100B+ on Instagram
“Yeah, I mean, if you look at the, if you look at the big play scoreboard for that, it's like, bet a billion on Instagram, win a hundred billion plus, maybe four hundred billion. Bet seventy billion on Meta and VRAR, lose it all.”
Lemkin: Google Search, Facebook, and Instagram are stronger than ever
“Fast forward today. These are record growth businesses now, right? Google search. We started the show talking about AI overviews and other things. Google search is a better business than it has ever been as is Facebook and Instagram.”
O'Driscoll: AI labs will throttle subscriptions and hike prices for compute
“You're going to see some compute rationally, people are going to start allocating tokens to the highest, effectively the highest bidder. You're going to see a lot of throttling, like, you're going to see these plans, like, that's why they shot Sora. You're goi…”