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 43 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
Ross: Countries controlling compute will control AI
“The countries that control compute will control AI, and you cannot have compute without energy.”
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…”
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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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.”
Ross: AI compute expands labor supply, an unprecedented economic shift
“The most valuable thing in the economy is labor. And now we're going to be able to add more labor to the economy by producing more compute and better AI. That has never happened in the history of the economy before.”
Ross: Easy funding prevents AI startups from building critical talent mass
“Right now the biggest problem I see in AI is if you see a good engineer, one that you would have hired before, they can go out and they can raise 10, twenty, hundred million, a billion dollars, and then rather than contributing to one of the other AI startups,…”
Ross: Lowering AI chip prices 50% leads customers to buy double
“If we lower what we charge 50%, people are gonna buy twice as much. They're spending as much as they're making because whatever they spend increases the quality of the output.”
Ross: Relevance and market foothold outweigh profitability during hypergrowth
“And when you are growing faster than exponential, there's no amount of profit that you can make that matters. What matters is getting a toehold in the market and becoming relevant.”
Ross: LLM-generated synthetic data is better for model training
“You could have an LLM generate synthetic data, and when it generates the synthetic data, the data is better. You then train on that synthetic data.”
Jonathan Ross: LLMs cannot multiply large numbers without intermediate reasoning steps
“One of the reasons that these LLMs struggle to multiply large numbers is because multiplying is not linear. These LLMs could do anything linear without, you know, needing to think, but just like on a piece of paper how you need to write out all those intermedi…”
Jonathan Ross: Competing directly means a startup failed to find unsolved problems
“If you're competing, it means that you haven't found an unsolved customer problem, because if you're competing, someone else has already solved the problem.”
Ross: Renting cloud GPUs is the biggest loophole in export controls
“Why would they try and smuggle in GPUs when all they'd have to do is log into any cloud provider and rent GPUs? This is like the biggest gaping hole in the whole way that export control is done. You can literally log in. You can swipe credit card, whatever, an…”
Ross: IP blocking fails to enforce AI export restrictions
“It's also a little bit fruitless because, you know, someone could just like rent a server anywhere and then log into us from there. Right? And then there's nothing we can check. So I don't know that IP addresses are really the right way to do it anyway. I thin…”
Ross: Foreign companies in China cannot extract net profits
“And the formula is actually pretty simple. You're not allowed to make net money. You're allowed to spend more money in China. But the moment that you start to become profitable or anywhere near profitable, all of a sudden there's a thumb on the scale.”
Ross: LLMs Have Zero Switching Costs Compared to Linux
“Linux has switching costs, and I think what we've discovered is LLMs have no switching costs whatsoever.”
Ross: Better AI models create a self-reinforcing compute demand loop
“So better models create more demand for inference. Then has people going, I should train a better model, and the cycle continues.”
Ross: Big tech must spend on AI to protect Magnificent Seven valuations
“If you're not a member of the mag seven, You're not going to be able to get anywhere near the valuation. And so what do you do to stay there? You spend. And it's worth it because the stock value stays up because you're in the top seven or 10.”
Ross: CPG profit margins correlate directly with response speed
“What is the number one thing that a high margin correlates to in CPG? It's the speed at which the ingredient acts on you. So that dopamine cycle, how quickly something occurs, determines your brand affinity. And so when something has a very quick response, you…”
Ross: AI Training and Inference Form a Virtuous Hardware Demand Cycle
“The more inference you have, as mentioned before, the more you need to train the model to optimize for the inference. And the more training you have the more inference you want to deploy to optimize for the cost of that training, to amortize the cost of the tr…”
Ross: Compute is the most predictable lever for AI progress
“Compute is the easiest knob because it just keeps getting better and better and better every year. And if I write enough you know, if I write a check for enough money and I'm willing to wait a little while, I'm going to get more compute. It's the most predicta…”
Ross: High margins trade competitive moat for market stability
“The real reason why you need higher margins is volatility, because if you have a razor thin margin and the market moves, you may not be able to raise more money, you may not be able to get a loan, and so what a margin does is it gives you stability and staying…”
Ross: Scaling laws are misunderstood because data quality varies
“They're misunderstood because the assumption is that all of the data is the same quality.”
Ross: Tokens per dollar and per watt are the only AI chip metrics that matter
“Like, just tell me what the tokens per dollar is, and tell me what the tokens per watt is. Nothing else really matters.”
Ross: Accepting B-players as a company grows reflects management laziness
“I think saying that you're gonna hire B players because you've gotten large enough is, is laziness and an excuse. And it, it's a lack of creativity in your business model and how you're going, the algorithm of how you're going to scale.”
Ross: European Notice Periods and Hiring Rules Suppress Employee Wages
“If you are a company right now, it feels like, okay, well, it's harder to poach, but what does that do? It suppresses wages. It's harder to hire someone. They're less likely to move. There's less competition. It suppresses wages.”
Ross: LLM writing is poor because language models are predictable
“The reason that the writing from LLMs is terrible is because it's predictable.”
Ross: High-Quality Data Lets AI Models Beat Traditional Token Scaling Laws
“What most people don't realize is that assumes that the data quality is uniform. If the data quality is better, then you can actually get away with training on fewer tokens.”
Ross proposes automated matching subsidies to deter foreign AI and tech intervention
“There needs to be some sort of Automated response of like, if you do this, we will respond. If you subsidize this industry, we will automatically subsidize the equivalent industry. Just automatic. So don't do it because there's no benefit to you.”
Ross: Generative AI Is Fundamentally Different From the Internet
“Is AI the next internet? And I'm like, absolutely not, because the internet is an information age technology. It's about duplicating data with high fidelity and distributing it. It's what telephone does. It's what internet does. It's what the printing press di…”
Ross: Prompt compatibility functions like software compatibility to create ecosystem moats
“And just like you have software compatibility, you have prompt compatibility.”
Ross: Markets are only overheated if macro factors hinder corporate success
“In terms of whether or not the economy is overheated, I think one of the best predictors of that is, is the economy getting in the way of the success of the companies. If it's not getting in the way, then I don't think it's overheated.”
Enterprise AI adoption is sticky due to long-term software contracts
“Enterprises make these long-term deals, and they stick with whatever their deal they made a year ago.”
Jonathan Ross: LLMs Are the Telescope of the Mind
“I think over time, we're gonna realize that LLMs are the telescope of the mind. That right now, they're making us feel really, really small. But in a hundred years, we're gonna realize that intelligence is more vast than we could have ever imagined, and we're …”
Jonathan Ross: Training AI for intuitive reasoning requires 10x more data
“If your job is to get better at multiplying numbers, and I tell you that I want you to be able to do it with fewer steps, more intuitively, for you to be able to multiply three-digit numbers versus two-digit, you need 10 x the data, and you need 10 x the examp…”
Ross: Compute is a soft AI bottleneck that compensates for weak data
“Compute has been more of a less of a bottleneck and more of a sort of a, you know, soft neck or something, right? Where, when you provide even more compute, you can sort of overpower the lack of data, the lack of improvement in algorithms. So it's not a hard b…”
Ross: Founders live entirely on future happiness prior to product-market fit
“As a founder, the only type of happiness you get is this third type, which is future happiness. The other two, the common ones are the present is happy, right? And the other one is you went through some real crappy stuff, but the memories are, make you happy, …”