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 23 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
Feldman claims NeoClouds face massive cost disadvantages buying Nvidia hardware
“When Google or when Cerebris puts our equipment in our own data center, right, we have a significant advantage Over a NeoCloud, because NeoClouds are buying hardware with gross margins of 70, 80% for NVIDIA.”
Feldman: Quantization from 8-bit to 4-bit won't solve AI scaling
“I think incremental improvements make believe gains achieved by dropping from, you know, eight bit to four bit. Those aren't gonna get us to the promised land in AI.”
Multi-Billion-Dollar AI Deal Announcements Are Just Options on Future Compute
“I think you should think about sort of these announcements as sort of options on the future. Right. That's really the way to think about it is in an unknown environment, how can I take an option on the future? I don't know if I'll use it all, but I'll pay some…”
Feldman: Memory bandwidth, not compute speed, limits GPU AI inference
“And that includes memory, which has, for inference, is the fundamental limiter for the GPU architecture. And so it doesn't matter how much faster the chip goes. It matters how much faster the memory bandwidth is.”
Fast-Moving Software Development Culture Fails in Chip Manufacturing
“Modern software does not fit well In a chip making framework. I mean, weekly sprints don't work well on two year long projects. You know, move fast, break things often is not the way you think in the chip world. The way you think in the chip world is measure t…”
Feldman: Building something great requires every waking minute, not a 40-hour week
“This notion that, that somehow you can achieve greatness. You can build something extraordinary by working 38 hours a week and having work-life balance. That, that is mind-boggling to me. It's not true in any part of life. And your willingness to jump in and s…”
Feldman: Hardware startups require experience, unlike consumer tech
“It hasn't historically rewarded. 19 and 20 year olds. Where, where, where the market has rewarded extreme inexperience is where they look like the customer, right?”
Feldman: DeepSeek proved AI frontier models don't need thousands of employees
“And what DeepSeek showed us is you don't need 5000 people and, you know, billions of dollars of gear. You can do it with 200 smart people.”
Feldman: Nvidia customer delivery delays create major opening for competitors
“And so I think there is a real opportunity in the potential for NVIDIA Customer Unhappiness, for sure. For those of us who are competing with them. I mean, if you can't get your gear, you may as well test somebody else's. And that, that's a huge opening.”
Feldman: Investors generate no alpha by betting on dominant incumbents
“Truth is most things don't work, and most of the time Goliath wins. Right? But there's no alpha in that. There's no money made for you or me betting on the biggest of the big dogs to continue not to lose.”
Feldman: S&P 500 Investors Face Heavy Tech Concentration Risk, Not True Diversification
“If people continue to think the S&P is sort of an index of the global economy or, and it's not, It's 30% or 50%, seven companies. Then they're exposed to sector risk that they weren't signing up for. They thought they were diversified. And in fact, they're hea…”
Feldman calls semiconductor fabs the modern pyramids of human manufacturing achievement
“Fabs are modern pyramids, Harry. I mean, they are the greatest things humans make in manufacturing, in the manufacturing world, by far.”
Feldman: Chip depreciation is driven by generational performance jumps, not calendar time
“The question of depreciation is how much faster are future generations than the current generation? That's the actual question on depreciation. Because what you're, with depreciation, you're saying, at some point, it's no longer worth using a part that's fully…”
Feldman: Chip FLOP increases are wasted without proportional memory bandwidth
“If you make one part fast and the other part, you don't move, doesn't move as far forward. It becomes the new bottleneck. And your, it doesn't matter how, how many flops your chip has. If you can't get data onto and off of the chip, Those are wasted.”
Feldman: AI inference growth compounds across users, frequency, and compute per query
“The greater growth of inference is the number of people who use it, Times the frequency of use. Times the amount of compute needed per use. Right? It is three different variables multiplied by each other. The problem is they're all growing fast.”
Feldman: Defense startups require leaders with deep existing domain experience
“It's not an accident that the people who've had success have done it before. And you don't have to be the founder who's done it before, but your co-founder could, or your head of sales needs to, or your COO needs to, you need to find people who have built a ca…”
Feldman: AI's core matrix math calculations are trivial to design
“First, the underlying calculation is trivial. It's a matrix multiplication, and an FMAC can be developed by any second year electrical engineering student.”
Feldman: Data movement, not computation, is the core bottleneck in AI chips
“The hard part with AI work is results and intermediate results have to be moved a lot. And therein is the most complicated part. They have to be moved to memory and from memory. And they have to be broken up and moved among GPUs.”
Feldman: Milliseconds of latency destroy user attention in interactive AI
“What we know is that in interactive mode, milliseconds matter. In interactive mode, what Urs Holtz over at Google years ago showed was that you can destroy your user's attention With milliseconds of delay. So being the fastest matters everything in that domain…”
Feldman: AI inference speed will unlock new industries like broadband did
“If you remember Blockbuster, right. First, I mean, let's look at the history of that. You're exactly right. First, we used to drive to Blockbuster to get a DVD, right, or a video. Then Netflix was mailing them to us, right? And then we got broadband. And there…”
Feldman: Negative gross margins show a tech company sells commodities
“Traditionally, your gross margins were a measure of your technical differentiation, right? And I think if you're running a negative gross margin business, I think you're It speaks for itself. You're selling commodity. You're not, ah, your value creation isn't …”
Feldman: Experience matters far more than naivety in complex hardware startups
“I think if you are in a business in which running a business is a benefit, then experience matters a great deal. I think if you are in a business in which you look like Your customer. There was a reason why social, social networks were started by people right …”
Feldman: Data center financing attracts capital markets by mimicking real estate bonds
“It has a structure that they really understand, right? It looks like a bond to them. It looks like a piece of real estate. You get a tenant. They pay rent every month. You can loan against that. You get an investment grade tenant. That's basically a bond. It h…”