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 37,600 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
Lemkin: Autonomous AI agents could reduce Salesforce and HubSpot to dumb databases
“If the agent can run 24 seven autonomously, take all your data and build all the analytics, build all the dashboards, run autonomously out of it then your data can flow between apps and you won't even care where it lives and all the fears about headless become…”
Shridhar: Government Equity Stakes in AI Companies Stifle Startup Competition
“The only thing regulation can do, in my opinion, is stop that innovative culture. So if the government took Major equity shares in a company, and because of that provided unfair access for those companies to its products and its people. By definition, they're …”
Benchmark Lacks the Platform Resources of Multistage Funds
“I think Benchmark doesn't really have as many resources. Like these multistage funds have so many resources for founders.”
Lemkin: Modern open-source AI is fake because China subsidizes training costs
“Open source is a bit of a fake because China's paying for all the trading, okay? It's not open source like a generation ago.”
O'Driscoll: OpenAI and Anthropic rely on $300B spent by other companies
“The whole reason the OpenAI and Entropic models work is because other idiots have spent the three hundred billion dollars on their behalf.”
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…”
Lemkin: LLM-driven migration tools are destroying traditional B2B software moats
“It's a moat destroyer when LLMs will lift you from one vendor to the other, and I, you know, I don't even, like, I literally was doing a pitch this week, and the founder was going on and on about their moats, and I immediately didn't want to invest. Like, I ju…”
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…”
Arora: Early enterprise AI startups need forward-deployed engineers to sell incomplete products
“So I think FTEs are needed for the short term because remember, all the enterprise AI startups are hungry for revenue.”
Petersen: Anthropic is a better investment than OpenAI at equal valuation
“I think I'm going Anthropic. No offense, because Sam's a friend of mine, but. Yeah, the enterprise business seems great. And the team, I think there's a lot of value of like this cohesive team that's been together forever, and OpenAI's had ups and downs, and p…”
Petersen: Work-from-home ultimately benefits employers through global labor arbitrage
“The idea that work from home is going to benefit highly paid employees is sort of a total fantasy. Like, work from home done correctly, you should be hiring the world's greatest geniuses. There should be a labor arbitrage here, where you're finding really, rea…”
Petersen: A passive board is preferable to an active, 'helpful' board
“I don't really want a more active board. They're not super active in the business. They're not like telling us what to do. They don't help that much, but they don't ever hurt. And like, I would much rather have that than like a really helpful board. I don't th…”
Randle: Outside of China, there are basically no good open-source AI models
“Outside of China, there are basically no good open source models.”
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…”
Randle: Mistral AI has fallen very far behind on model development
“Like Mr. All itself has fallen very far behind on, on the actual model side, and they've done a very good job becoming this inference platform and the FDE model and all these things, but they're outside of China.”
Randle: Benchmark missing early AI model providers was a complete failure
“No, it fucking sucks. It's terrible. It's a complete and utter failure on, on our part. And I think we, we'd all say that.”
O'Driscoll: Adobe operates like a PE firm milking its users
“My vent on that company is they have milked their users for so long that it just feels a piece of financial engineering interacting with the product. It's always the login are crap. I don't even understand the licensing model. I don't even know what I can use …”
Google's AI search mode copies Perplexity but remains inferior
“The whole experience is literally looking like perplexity, except it's still not as good.”
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.”
Micron might surpass Meta in valuation within 12 months
“It might not be inconceivable that Micron, the supplier of HPMs, might be more valuable than Meta in the next six to 12 months.”
Anthropic lobbied heavily for US AI export controls
“And definitely like companies like Anthropic lobbied very hard for it.”
US government owns 10% of Intel, Nvidia and SoftBank 5% each
“American government owns 10% of Intel. Nvidia and SoftBank own five percent each.”
Dario Amodei's doom messaging on AI job loss does a disservice
“Yeah. I think so. I mean, I think, you know, they have contradictory messages in their own, like different social engagements so far, where the most reason when I heard was there is no evidence that AI is taking over jobs.”
Google underestimated coding models and lags behind the AI frontier
“They have advantages, all, all advantages one needs to have to be that, but they underestimated the importance of coding models. And so they're far behind the frontier right now. So again, they could catch up totally capable, totally competent team, but today …”
Grinberg: Lacking frontier open-source AI models in the US is embarrassing
“I think it's pretty embarrassing that we don't have frontier open models in the United States.”
Grinberg: Believing a good product sells itself is delusional
“There's a very common Silicon Valley fallacy, which is there's like research is like the pinnacle. And then there's engineers who implement the research, you know, they're not quite there, but you know, they're still great. And then there's sales and marketing…”
Grinberg: Coding speed and syntax memorization no longer matter for engineers
“And the parts of engineering that become less important are funny enough, the things that the Silicon Valley has really bragged about a lot, which is like, Competition winning or like Olympiad type. Are you like as fast as possible at coding? Are you, do you m…”
Grinberg: Institutional Math Olympiad track records can be an anti-signal in hiring
“Especially there's some high schools that, like, really focus on, like, you must do the math olympic, like, you must do this, the Amy, to then go to the IMO, and, like, this is the path to success, where actually that's kind of anti-signal, because there it's,…”
Grinberg: Advocating to slow down AI development is harmful and selfish
“And by saying you want to slow down AI, that's saying like, These people who have relationships with loved ones who have dementia, you're like, no, no, no, sorry, you guys, you gotta maintain that relationship for a little bit longer. We're scared. We don't kn…”
Grinberg: Ivanka Trump provides better hands-on help than traditional VCs
“She is genuinely so kind, so intelligent, and like, people just in, throughout tech, throughout the world, really love her, and for good reason, and she has an incredible network. She's so generous with her time. Like, there is, like, kind of dirty work invest…”
Grinberg: Software requiring forward-deployed engineers to close deals is a bad product
“If we need FDEs to make the product work, we have a shit product. Like, the point of FDEs should be accelerate and get them consuming faster. If you're putting in FDEs, because that's the only way you'll get a deal done, I'm sorry, my friend, you have a shit p…”
Grinberg: AI labor displacement warnings are disingenuous hype designed for mega-fundraising
“I think that has been not only like disingenuine and wrong, but it's like really hurt the psychology of a lot of people, developers, like just people in the world. Does AI a disservice? Does the world a disservice? Because this is again, talking about the use …”
O'Driscoll: Revolut's valuation stems from fat, inefficient European banks
“Because the European banks, unlike the American banks in general, are so crappy. There's a reason that Revolut's worth a hundred and fifteen billion, because the incumbent European banks were fat, dumb, and happy, and making margin off their customers.”
Lemkin: Uber Leaders Are Justified in Hating Benchmark Capital
“I think the folks that hate benchmark from Uber, I think they deserve to hate benchmark.”
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 …”
Lauritzen: Legora is avoiding hiring remote engineers to prioritize in-person collaboration
“Well, we're very opinionated about who we are and who we aren't. We, if you're a great engineer and you want to be remote, then you probably also want to work on very isolated problems, and that's, that can be fine. We'll, we'll, we probably have those, and we…”
Calacanis: Companies will choose spending on AI tokens over humans by year-end
“I really do think by the end of the year, we're going to choose tokens over humans.”
Calacanis: Software QA departments will be destroyed by 2027 due to AI
“I think what will happen going into 2027 is an engineering QA departments will get destroyed because you'll be like, I got six QA engineers.”
Calacanis: AI Startups Will Eventually Re-Bloat to Historic Headcounts
“And so even, and so our startups that we're excited about, I think ultimately they will achieve the same historic level of bloat, maybe half the size, but they will get as bloated as they can because they will have much larger, broader product lines.”
Rory O'Driscoll: AI Will Not Boost GDP Productivity Growth Above 2%
“Or where I stand, the statistic, the average over the last 200 years has been two percent. It'll stay at two percent.”
Stebbings: Menlo to make $10B carry on Anthropic, Founders Fund more on SpaceX
“Menlo will make ten billion dollars in carry Spot will too, plus Founders Fund will make more than that from SpaceX.”
Rory O'Driscoll: AI will not cause mass white-collar unemployment in 3 years
“And we've grown to accept that, that, you know, we're all here in the Valley with a plan. To automate white collar work such that there's going to be mass unemployment, according to these folks who are totally wrong, in my opinion, in three years, and all the …”
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.”
Application Layer AI Startups Will Struggle to Build Defensible Moats
“And so I feel like building defensibility in the software layer On top of the models is going to be incredibly difficult. Whereas on the other side of things and the infrastructure side, it feels like there are meaningful moats that are getting built.”