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 73 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 6 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
Bitcoin Runs on Greed While Solana and Ethereum Show Long-Term Potential
“And that greed element of blockchain, which is exactly what the Bitcoin thing is all about, in my opinion, is about greed, bringing down the, in the whole blockchain thing. While Solana and Ethereum, they're looking like they have a long-term potential.”
Murdock: Fireworks Is 10x Better Business Than Baseten Due to Capital Efficiency
“I bet on fireworks over base 10, 10 times better business, in my opinion, because they're more capital efficient.”
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.”
Jerry Murdock: OpenRouter's 5% markup is unsustainable and will not last
“My opinion is open router has massive amounts of transactions because people are basically lazy, right? It was easy. Okay. I need to connect to this model. I'm just going to use open router and open router charges five percent on top of that, which is a crazy …”
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…”
Jerry Murdock: Most companies view AI coding assistant Cursor as obsolete
“Most of the companies, their view, as they've told me, is cursor is obsolete.”
Jerry Murdock: Autonomous agents will drive shift from Nvidia GPUs to ASICs
“And my guess is this will lead to the rise of open source models more, more proficiently. And that it's going to lead to the rise of ASICS chips, because what's going to happen with ASICS is you're going to put the model on the chip. You know, ASICS is going t…”
Jerry Murdock: Legacy SaaS vendors face severe disruption within 18 months
“But if you're not making your software for autonomous agents today, you're going to be challenged in the future. Maybe it's six months, maybe a year, maybe 18 months, but you're going to be severely challenged if you still think human beings are going to buy y…”
Jerry Murdock: AI job displacement could decide the next US presidential election
“I'm here to say that that is going to be a major issue On the next presidential election, it could decide the election. It'll be one of the most important things because there's no easy answer.”
Jerry Murdock: UBI will become a ballot question within two years
“When this happens, we're going to see dramatic change, and I think politically, the minimal viable income may become a reality or at least a ballot question in two and a half years.”
Jerry Murdock: AI disruption will cause tech private equity firms to fail
“And so they'll be stories like that. I don't know about Bravo or anybody else, but they'll definitely be PE firms that end up like Forsman Little.”
Jerry Murdock: Twitter would have been far better without VC politics
“Twitter could have been infinitely a more interesting company, but VCs got involved and created politics, and they fired Jack Dorsey early, and I don't know if that was right or wrong, but they created issues, and the company was pretty messed up.”
Murdock: Hyperscalers Will Benefit from Market Dislocation by Buying Cheaper Assets
“If there is a dislocation, no one is better prepared to survive it than hyperscalers. I mean, all the hyperscalers have enough ongoing business and they've been very consistent. That's why they're worth what they're worth. The magnificent seven is there becaus…”
Murdock: At Least Half of Neoclouds Will Fail Within 36 Months
“I think at least half of them go away within 36 months without, and if there's an economic disruption, a lot of them go away right away.”
Murdock: Token Cost Disparity Will Drive Massive Open-Source Model Adoption
“And if you're looking at a Frontier model with double dollar digit cost per token, and you're looking at an open source model that's 10, 11 cents per token, while all tokens aren't created equal, it's still enough of a difference that there's going to be a mas…”
Murdock: AI tokens are not commodities because model customization changes their value
“I disagree with a token as a token. That may be true at the moment with pretty much frontier models, but I disagree with it because companies like fireworks and others are helping companies to customize. The more you customize the model, the more the token cha…”
Murdock: Frontier models will not be cannibalized in the short term
“We're going to absolutely see this thing that, you know, Prohibits the cannibalization of frontier models, at least in the short term.”
Murdock: Enterprise firewall data security needs will drive open-source AI adoption
“And I think in part, this is what's going to drive the open source opportunity is that, yeah, you know what? We don't want that stuff. Uploaded into the cloud. We want it, you know, behind the firewall.”
Murdock: Containers are not safe for AI tools and require sandboxes
“Containers aren't safe. You need sandboxes. This is why. The big container company, Docker said, Hey, themselves said containers aren't safe. You better put in a sandbox.”
Murdock: E2B and Docker lead in understanding AI sandbox infrastructure
“And if you look at E to B and you look at Docker, they're probably the two best at understanding all that stuff. So you start there because if you don't get the sandbox right, forget everything else.”
Murdock: ASIC Chips Are Ideal for Customization While GPUs Are Too Expensive
“I, look, Asics chips are really ideal if you're thinking about model customization. If you're saying, look, we're at a new phase in, in, in this AI build out, or what we really want to do is, is, is do a lot of model specialization. You don't need a GPU for th…”
Murdock: Building Custom Chips Is the Wrong Long-Term Path for AI Companies
“Look, actually owning the chip is going the wrong way long term. Short term, it makes sense for larger companies, because they want to optimize chipsets for models.”
Murdock: Mega rounds for Anthropic and OpenAI might actually have been cheap
“And I would argue that it looks like anthropic and open AI, those crazy mega rounds, you know, at a hundred billion, a hundred and fifty billion might actually have been cheap.”
Murdock predicts disruption of model routing fee markups within 3–5 months
“And so I think that you're gonna see a big disruption in that model in the next three, four, five months. Actually, not just Akinaki, but Venice, Venice IO is doing that. And there's two or three other guys that are now in the process of building exchanges tha…”
Murdock: Flipboard Turned Down ~$1B Acquisition Bids From Twitter and ByteDance
“They had two bidders going for them at the time. And that was very, very interested in them at around, I'll say within 20% of that number, and, ah, one of them was Twitter, and the other one was TikTok, the founder of ByteDance, and founder just, you know, he …”
Murdock: Autonomous agent co-work is starting to threaten legacy SaaS companies
“And as co-work becomes, you know, more successful and more stable and more broadly used, I would be really concerned about SaaS companies that don't have some kind of system of record or some kind of AI strategy in place to succeed. Because the co-work era, it…”
Continuous Learning Models Will Obsolete Current AI Models Within Ten Years
“First of all, within 10 years, I believe we, and I think some people are thinking two or three years, continuous learning models will come into existence. That means that every generation of every model we have today Dies, goes away.”
Murdock: Failing Sample Efficiency and Continuous Learning Risks AI Disillusionment
“What could send us into the valley of disillusionment is a combination of a global financial event and a failure for the models to continue to grow and evolve. And we're going to get to a place that if we don't solve SAPL efficient models and we don't solve co…”
Blockchain for AI Agent Payments Will Become Obvious Within Five Years
“Blockchain for agent payments. Blockchain is, is in the valley of disillusion right now. It's like, it's really in a bad spot.”
Jerry Murdock: Open-source communities will drive the biggest impact in AI
“And those open source communities that are popping up in massive amounts, they're the ones that are going to have the big impact.”
Jerry Murdock: Meta rejected Nvidia GPUs to bet on custom ASIC chips
“I mean, look, you know, a lot of people like to criticize meta here and there about being behind the game, but they had the balls to say no to Jensen. Sorry, Jensen. We don't need you. So why did he do that? Because he's betting on a six chips. No question abo…”
Jerry Murdock: AI agents will replace humans as primary software buyers
“Software is going to be purchased or used by agents. And what's going to happen is an agent, an autonomous agent becomes an employee. You give it credentials, you give it identity, and then it's up to the agent to make the decision. You will review them like a…”
Jerry Murdock: AI agents will write software faster and cheaper than humans
“Autonomous agents, and it may take a year or longer for most enterprises to actually enable and get committed to autonomous agents, but they're going to write software faster, cheaper than any human being on the planet.”
Jerry Murdock: AI displacement begins with hiring freezes for junior white-collar roles
“First of all, not to the people with the job. First of all, to the next person in line, the next junior developer you want to hire, the next executive assistant, the next marketing person. So the first thing you see is people stopping or slowing down Hiring of…”
Jerry Murdock: Single-person billion-dollar companies are realistic due to AI agents
“Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's all about How smart is your agent? How, how, how smart are you to deploy the agents and how well are you willing to listen?”
Jerry Murdock: Autonomous AI agents require visual recognition to understand reality
“Language is, is a very subpar Descriptor of the world. It's just limited. So for autonomous agents, we need a new system where we can visually recognize the world to be able to have an objective view of reality for the autonomous agent.”
Jerry Murdock: Now is the best time to launch a venture fund
“Absolutely. Absolutely. The best time because you're in a sea change. Humans are no longer going to be the decision makers. About software, it's going to be autonomous agents.”
Jerry Murdock: Google and Gemini are better long-term assets than OpenAI
“They can, and they are long-term better assets. They've got, if I have an autonomous agent business and I've got Gmail, you're going to have a phenomenal asset that open AI doesn't have.”
Murdock: Hyperscalers Have Taken on Record Debt Levels
“All the hyperscalers have taken on much more debt than they ever have before”
Murdock: OpenAI and Anthropic Do Not Permit Frontier Model Customization
“What's happening is, is that you can't customize anthropic models or open AI models right now. Not the big frontier models. You're not allowed to do that.”
Murdock: Open-source models have never beaten frontier models on innovation
“There's never been a time yet where the open source model has trumped a frontier model on innovation yet. They might be better at specialization, but they certainly don't compete yet in sort of Complex and being able to do complex tasks.”
Murdock: There will be thousands of specialized forms of sandboxes for AI
“The truth is, there's gonna be thousands of different forms of sandboxes, and you're gonna need a company that understands how models look at tools, and what that behavior is, and be able to take that behavior and optimize for it.”
A Security Breach Will Wreck the First Vulnerable Legal AI Startup
“And the first one of those guys that, that has a security leak and security problem, and it will happen, Is going to wreck their market opportunity.”
Murdock: Giving US Government Frontier AI Stakes Is Purely Political
“I mean, it makes sense if like a Manhattan style project, if we did that for AI 10 years ago, well, fine, you know, do it because it's strategically important to the country. But today, given the size of them, I think the only reason you do it is For political…”