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 197 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 15 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
Ross: Nvidia will be worth $10 trillion in five years
“I personally would be surprised if in five years NVIDIA wasn't worth 10 trillion, but I can't predict the outcome.”
Ross: Total AI ROI will exceed capital invested despite individual failures
“Right now, people are making more money than they're spending. It's just very lumpy. As an aggregate. Plenty of people are gonna lose their shirts, but overall, less money is gonna go in than is gonna come out.”
Ross: NVIDIA will produce ~5.5M GPUs this year despite 50M die capacity
“If Nvidia wanted to, they could build fifty million of those GPU die, Per year. But they're going to build about 5.5 million GPUs this year.”
Ross: Chinese AI models cost 10x more to run than US open-source
“The cost to run the OSS model is about one-tenth that of the Chinese models.”
Ross: Europe will become a tourist economy without rapid AI energy expansion
“Then Europe's economy is going to be a tourist economy. People are going to come here to see the quaint old buildings, and that's going to be it.”
Jonathan Ross: AI will cause massive labor shortages, not mass unemployment
“I believe that AI is going to cause massive labor shortages. Yeah, I don't think we're gonna have enough people to fill all the jobs that are gonna be created.”
Ross: Gemini's integration into Gmail and Google products is practically unusable
“It's like, it's in Gmail, but it's practically unusable. It's in pretty much every product, and it seems thrown in, kind of, like, half thought through”
Ross: NVIDIA's software moat applies to training, not inference
“That NVIDIA's software is a moat. Yeah it's true for training, but it's not true for inference.”
Ross: Groq benefits NVIDIA by capturing lower-margin inference workload
“You can almost say we're one of the best things that's ever happened to NVIDIA because they can make every single GPU that they were going to make, and they can sell it for training, high margin, gets amortized across deployment. You know, we'll take the low m…”
Ross: NVIDIA used misleading benchmark curves to claim 30x GPU speedup
“Like, if you look at the last GTC, there was an announcement that the latest GPUs were 30 x faster than the previous generation. And when you look at how it was done, there was this curve that looked kind of like this, and then it Basically ended here, and the…”
Ross: Groq plans to serve 50% of global AI inference by 2027
“And our goal by the end of 20, 27 is to be providing at least half of the world's AI inference compute.”
Ross: Southeast Asian GPU deployments secretly serve Chinese firms
“One of the concerns right now is about Malaysia or Singapore, that region over there being a place where people are deploying GPUs with the wink, wink, like we're not going to rent it to China, right? But that's a belief that a lot of people are doing that. Ot…”
Ross opposes 'founder mode', advocating delegation over micromanagement
“I'm anti-founder mode. I believe in delegation. I think when you are telling people how to do their job, that is an indication that it's not a, not necessarily a problem with you. It could just be that that person is not right for that job.”
Ross: OpenAI will lose the closed model battle and should open source
“I can't speak for Sam Altman or OpenAI, but if I was in that position, I would be gearing up to open source my models in response. Because it's pretty clear you're gonna lose that, so you might as well try and win all the users and the love from open sourcing.”
Ross: DeepSeek's ultra-low training budget claims are false marketing
“This model was supposedly trained on a smaller number of GPUs and a much, much tighter budget I think the way that it's been put is less than the salary of many of the executives at Meta, and that's not true. It's actually, there's an element of marketing invo…”
Ross: OpenAI accidentally subsidized DeepSeek via unprofitable API tokens
“Open AI Was effectively subsidizing accidentally the training of this model because they were using open AI, right? And, you know, rumors are that open AI may not be completely profitable yet in terms of every token in the API, like on the subscriptions maybe,…”
Ross: CCP will pressure DeepSeek to harvest user data
“The CCP is probably going to be taking the safeties off the weapons. They're going to be like, why are you making this model open source? Please direct your data towards us. Go win a bunch of customers this way, but now we want the data, right? And so they're …”
Ross: DeepSeek R1 proves base AI models are commoditized
“This has just made it absolutely nakedly clear that the models are commoditized, right?”
Ross: $500B AI infrastructure plan is not enough spending
“Actually, I don't think it's enough spending.”
Ross: OpenAI Could Switch Backend to DeepSeek and Retain Users
“Most people think of them synonymously as AI. They could just switch to deep seek and people would still use them. It's brand. It's one of the seven powers.”
Ross: AI Competitors Will Set Aside Morals to Win
“And I think that's going to happen. I think people will like you cannot lose.”
Ross: Chinese tech relies on state-backed IP theft from Western firms
“And then you look at China, China practices R D T research development theft. It's just part of the culture. And it's not just against Western company. It's against each other too. The difference is if you're a Western company, then the government Steals from …”
Ross: Specialized AI inference chip startups benefit NVIDIA's stock
“I don't know that Nvidia will ever see it this way, but I do think that those of us focusing on inference and building stuff specifically for that are probably the best thing that's ever happened for Nvidia stock because we'll take on the low margin, high volu…”
Ross: Countries controlling compute will control AI
“The countries that control compute will control AI, and you cannot have compute without energy.”
Ross: OpenAI and Anthropic revenues would double with double compute
“If OpenAI were given twice the inference compute that they have today. If Anthropic was given twice the inference compute that they have today, within one month from now, their revenue would almost double.”
Ross: Microsoft withheld Azure GPUs because internal usage made more money
“Microsoft in one quarter deployed a bunch of GPUs, and then announced that they weren't going to make them available in Azure because they made more money using them themselves than renting them out.”
Ross: Hyperscaler AI spending is driven by existential survival, not ROI
“That's how the hyperscalers feel. So of course they're going to be spending like drunken sailors because the alternative is that they're completely locked out of their business. So it's not a purely economical framework that they're using. It's a, do we get to…”
Groq deployed a customer feature in four hours with zero human code
“Four hours later, it was in production. Not a single line of code was written by a human being. There was no debugging done by a human being. It was all prompting.”
Ross: Tesla's Dojo custom AI chip project was recently canceled
“And when you look around the industry, you've got a bunch of people building chips, some of them are getting canceled, like Dojo recently got canceled.”
Ross: Building custom AI chips to rival NVIDIA is like replicating Google
“Going off and saying, I'm gonna build my own AI chip to compete with NVIDIA, It's a little bit like saying, you know, that Google search is pretty nice. Let's go replicate it. It's insane. Like the level of optimization, the level of design and engineering tha…”
Ross: OpenAI, Anthropic, and all hyperscalers will build custom chips
“I have no doubt that OpenAI will be able to build its own chips. I have no doubt that eventually, Anthropic will be building their own chips, that every hyperscaler will build their own chip.”
Ross: NVIDIA effectively holds a monopsony on High Bandwidth Memory
“The thing is, Nvidia effectively has a monopsony on HBM.”
Ross: Memory Suppliers Restrict HBM Supply to Protect High Profit Margins
“There's also this situation where the margin on HBM is so high, That no one wants to actually increase the supply, because then the margin goes down.”
Ross: Hyperscaler AI CapEx of $100B Annually Is Not Overspending
“So when you hear the hyperscalers talking about that, you know, seventy five billion to a hundred billion dollar a year investment, because they're building out the capacity for data centers, they're putting a lot of money up for returns that they're expecting…”
Ross: Groq LPUs Ship in 6 Months Versus 2 Years for GPUs
“You have to write a check two years in advance to get GPUs. For us, you write us a check for a million LPUs, and the first of those LPUs starts showing up six months later.”
Ross: Hardware incumbents win because AI models are optimized for existing GPUs
“So if you are the incumbent, you have an advantage because people are designing their models for your hardware. It doesn't even matter if there's a better architecture out there. It's not going to run well, so it's not a better architecture.”
Ross: NVIDIA will keep selling chips despite AI labs building custom silicon
“NVIDIA still keeps selling chips.”
Ross: AI product quality scales directly with compute spent per query
“AI doesn't work the way SAS does. In SAS, you have a bunch of engineers who go out and build a product, and the quality of that product is determined based on what those engineers did. That's not the case in AI. In AI, I can improve the quality of my product b…”
Ross: China will build 150 nuclear reactors to power domestic AI compute
“They're going to build a 150 nuclear reactors. So they're going to have enough energy, even though their chips aren't as energy efficient.”
Ross: US will maintain AI hardware advantage over China for 2-3 years
“So my expectation is that right now for the next two to three years, the United States has a clear advantage in that away game over China.”
Ross: Anthropic should open-source older models to counter Chinese AI adoption
“I think that Anthropic should be open sourcing their previous generation in order to get people using them instead of the Chinese models.”
Ross: Missing out costs more than fumbling in growth economies
“There's two kinds of risk. There's mistakes of commission, where you do something that's a mistake, and then there's mistakes of omission, where you don't do something and it's a mistake. And the United States is terrified of making mistakes of omission. When …”
Ross: Norway could match total US energy output via wind and hydro
“Norway has about an 80% utilization rate of wind. So, like, 80% of the time you can be generating energy. They have enough hydro that if you deployed an five x the wind power of the hydro, Norway itself could provide as much energy as the United States and cou…”
Ross: US nuclear power permitting costs triple actual construction costs
“He said they spend three times as much on the permitting in the United States than on the nuclear power plant.”
Ross: 10x compute scale will outperform a 10x smarter AI model
“You could have a model that is 10 times smarter than OpenAI's model. And if you have 10 times the compute, OpenAI's model's gonna be better.”