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 52 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 5 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
Weitzman: Speechify will soon spend more on AI tokens than salaries
“We're getting to the point where soon we're going to spend more on tokens than we spend on actual salaries.”
Weitzman: AI Token Budgets Will Outpace Engineering Salaries Within Three Years
“We'll get there in three years. Yeah. You just need to be like a really strong early adopter.”
Weitzman says GPU analysis helped identify and solve his father's prostate cancer
“It's already solved my dad's prostate cancer, because I figured out with a bunch of help from other people how to use GPUs to identify where in his body the lesion was.”
Weitzman: Speechify Simba 3.2 ranks number one globally for quality
“The newest Speechify Simba 3.2 model is ranked number one in the world for quality. Above all the frontier labs, 10 x more affordable and stuff like 11 Labs.”
Weitzman: Renting an H100 GPU costs 1.5 times more than buying it
“If I was to buy an H 100 for, let's say, 30,000 dollars, that's how much the, kind of, a single card would cost. If I wanted to rent an H 100 for one hour spot instance from GCP, it could cost me five dollars. If I rented it from, like, You know, Azure or AWS,…”
Weitzman: NVIDIA guarantees 25% GPU buybacks with Wall Street lenders
“So I believe earlier this month, NVIDIA did a huge deal with Blackstone, BlackRock, Apollo, and Goldman Sachs. And they said, listen, we want more people to buy more GPUs. We're going to underwrite for you up to 25% the value of a GPU. That if you lend money t…”
Weitzman: Buying Rubin GPUs yields one year advantage over cloud renters
“If I want a Reuben, which is like these much faster GPUs, I'll get it faster if I buy it than if I wait for Google to buy it, and then there's other people in front of me in line. So I'm gonna skip the queue by like a lot, and then I'm gonna have like a year o…”
Weitzman: Speechify holds 98% of B2C text-to-speech App Store installs
“The first one is if you go to the App Store and you search text-to-speech, Speechify has 98% of the installs in text-to-speech for B to C.”
Weitzman: Sierra relies on third-party models and Bret Taylor's go-to-market
“Sierra doesn't have their own model team. They use other people's models, right? Because the value of Sierra is the go to market. It's Brett Taylor.”
Weitzman predicts voice will overtake screens as primary interface within five years
“Human computer interface is going to become primarily voice, as opposed to a screen.”
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.”
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: OpenAI ads will be massive due to deep user context
“Of course. Yeah, massive. Massive, massive. Because it knows so much about you.”
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 holds 94% of the B2C voice agent market
“We have 94% of the B to C voice agents market.”
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.”
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.”
Weitzman: ElevenLabs builds and operates its own physical GPU clusters
“11 Labs, I think Piotrek at 11 Labs literally bought a bunch of GPUs early, early on and set them up in his house, and then they just kept building bigger and bigger and bigger clusters. They do the same thing that we do.”
Weitzman: Speechify's Simba 3.2 API costs $10 per million characters
“11 charges 10, a hundred dollars per million characters. The OpenAI model on the benchmarks cost a 196 dollars per million characters. So ours, when we sell it to other B to B companies now, we just launched our API, Simba, 3.2, it costs 10 dollars per million…”
Weitzman: Whisperflow degraded product quality by switching to their own cheaper model
“Part of the reason they got worse is they switched their own model because it's a lot more affordable.”
Weitzman predicts he will solve his brother's rare autoimmune disease
“And I am, I know I'm going to solve this disease.”
Speechify currently tests nearly 1,000 data-generated ads daily
“We test almost a thousand data generated ads a day right now.”
Weitzman: All Speechify executives must remain hands-on practitioners who buy ads
“I made sure that everybody in our company, no matter how senior they got, always were still not just a fat general sitting at the back, but a warrior who could take out their sword and actually hands on keyboard by the ads.”
Weitzman: Speechify uploads 1,300 ad creatives daily to testing campaigns
“Every day we upload 1300 to our testing campaigns.”
Weitzman: Speechify will never hire candidates motivated primarily by higher pay
“Terrible answer. Never would hire that person, not in a million years.”
Cliff Weitzman: There are virtually no jobs for current CS graduates
“If you look at this graduating class of computer science students, there's basically no jobs.”
Speechify's engineering interview tests candidates on using LLM agents to fix code
“A prerequisite is we have like this entrance exam. There's this gigantic code repo that you need to read very fast. You can't read it with your eyes. You have to use AI. You have to use LLMs to ship all the features, and then you get a test at the end, which i…”
Weitzman: Speechify reads to users more than any other AI product
“We read more to people than any other AI product in the world.”
Weitzman: Nvidia's 35x multiple is reasonable and stock has more upside
“35 is reasonable given how much they're growing. So yeah, I think they have a lot more juice.”
Weitzman: Hydroelectric capacity is fully maxed out globally
“So all the dams that can be dammed have been dammed. Hydro power is like the most efficient and easiest way to create. We just don't have ability to invest in hydro more.”
Weitzman: Speechify cut voice AI inference costs to single-digit dollars per million characters
“And we got it to the point of single digit dollars for a million characters.”
Weitzman: Speechify has been profitable for a long time due to low inference costs
“And that's why the company has been profitable for so long.”
Weitzman: Apple will launch a Whisperflow competitor rather than acquire it
“Does Apple buy Whisperflow? No. Apple launches a competitor.”
Weitzman: Most data centers lack approved liquid cooling for NVIDIA Rubin chips
“Rubens are liquid cooled. But most of these data centers don't have liquid cooling installations already approved”
Speechify fast-tracks cross-team pull requests to encourage multi-repo learning
“And so we have a rule if you ship a PR, To a repo that your team is not responsible for, it gets fast tracked and that team has to very quickly respond because I want to encourage people to learn how to contribute to other code bases.”
Weitzman: Speechify rap song ad about dyslexia generated $3 million
“The one that I did not expect to work that worked amazing is I wrote a rap song about my experience with dyslexia and ADHD, and that thing made us like three million, also like three million dollars on a rap song.”
Weitzman: 40% of incarcerated people have dyslexia versus 17% of general population
“40% of people who are incarcerated have dyslexia, even though 17% of the population has it.”
Weitzman: Internal AI coaches will become standard corporate roles in five years
“Coach. So, One thing that we do a lot in Speechify is coach people on how to use AI better. Force them to use AI better.”
Speechify received 178,000 applications for engineering positions in one year
“Last year we had a 178,000 people who joined, who applied to work at the open engineering positions at Speechify.”
Weitzman: Speechify Has Only Ever Had One Long-Term Employee Attrition
“We've only had one real case of attrition at Speechify of someone who, like, worked with us for a long time, and that person went to work for Elon Musk directly.”
Weitzman: Speechify enterprise sales team will use forward-deployed engineers
“Now that is exactly what we're doing now, but like front deployed engineers.”
Weitzman: Speechify users do not churn because the tool is essential
“If you need a wheelchair, you're not going to churn from your wheelchair in the same way that people don't churn from Speechify.”
Weitzman: Podcasts and audiobooks have reached 40% penetration in most markets
“Podcasts and audiobooks have 40% penetration in most markets today.”
Weitzman: Sam Altman has raised more money than anyone in Silicon Valley history
“No one has raised as much money as Sam Altman in the history of Silicon Valley like that.”
Weitzman: AI will drive a wave of adults over 40 returning to school
“I think there will come a wave of people going back to school after the age of 40, but school will be different.”