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 42 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: 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: 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: 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: 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: NVIDIA effectively holds a monopsony on High Bandwidth Memory
“The thing is, Nvidia effectively has a monopsony on HBM.”
Ross: NVIDIA will keep selling chips despite AI labs building custom silicon
“NVIDIA still keeps selling chips.”
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: NVIDIA Will Sell Every Single GPU It Builds
“NVIDIA's gonna sell every single GPU that they build.”
Ross: DeepSeek's breakthrough was an algorithmic gain in data generation
“There was an algorithmic improvement on that. And the algorithmic improvement, as I explained, you know, is this seemingly silly thing where they just wrote the answer in a box and then they knew what to look for rather than having to have a human being check …”
Ross: NVIDIA holds a cornered resource as HBM monopsony buyer
“You don't normally think of tech companies as having a cornered resource, but Nvidia has a cornered resource. They're a monopsony, the opposite of a monopoly, a single buyer for HBM, and the Interposer, the COOS.”
Ross: Industrial generators currently face a 90-month lead time
“There's a 90 month lead time on generators right now”
Ross: Groq will not train proprietary AI models to avoid competing with clients
“We have decided that we're not going to train our own models. We'll do a little fine tuning for specific cases or whatnot, but we don't want to compete.”
Ross: DeepSeek scraped OpenAI data while developing unique RL techniques
“And all of that said, they did a lot of really innovative things. So that's what makes it so complicated because on the one hand, they kind of just scraped the OpenAI model. On the other hand, they came up with some unique reinforcement learning techniques,”
Ross: OpenAI does not need to distill DeepSeek because OpenAI remains superior
“They don't need to because they're actually better still. They're a little bit better. So they could, but why would they?”
Ross: Chinese laws force companies to hand over data and censor content
“But at the same time, they also require that you hand over all data. And not only that, they also require that certain answers be in a form that they find acceptable.”
Ross: DeepSeek was created by a hedge fund, not the state directly
“Remember deep seek is a real, I mean, it's a hedge fund. They're doing this themselves and they're just influenced by the CCP”
Ross: DeepSeek restricted signups due to a shortage of inference compute
“So, they ran out of compute, and this is why, this is the other reason why chip startups are gonna do just fine, because they ran out of inference compute.”
Ross: Groq Will Never Create Its Own AI Models
“In our case we found an area where we will not compete with our customers, which is we will not create our own models. So we just won't do it.”
Groq deploys 600 to 3,000 chips per AI model instead of eight
“So rather than using eight chips, we'll use 600 or 3000 for a model.”
Ross: Edge computing is less energy efficient than data center compute
“They think that edge computing is lower energy. Actually, edge computing is less energy efficient than computing in the data center.”
Ross: Inference Accounts For Roughly 40% Of Nvidia's Market
“Right now, about 40% of their, you know, market is inference.”
Ross: Worldwide data center capacity is currently 15 gigawatts
“I am aware of about 20 gigawatts of power that people want to make available for data centers now. Right now there's about 15 gigawatts of data centers worldwide, so more than double the current capacity.”
Ross: Groq built its entire hardware and cloud stack with 300 people
“We have 300 people. We built our own chip. We built our own networking hardware and software. We built our own runtime. We built our own orchestration layer. We built our own compiler. We built our own cloud. We built all this with 300 people.”
Ross: AI token cost drops consistently spark significant demand growth
“And so what's happened is every time we've seen the cost of tokens for a particular level of quality of models come down, we've actually seen the demand grow significantly.”
Ross: The entire AI industry will shift to Mixture of Experts architecture
“What you're going to see is everyone else starting to use this MOE approach.”
Ross: AI companies will use massive GPU clusters to generate synthetic data
“What you're going to see now is now that everyone has seen this deep seek architecture, they're going to go great. I have hundreds of thousands of GPUs. I'm now going to use a lot of them to create a lot of synthetic data. And then I'm going to train the bejes…”
Ross: Every 100ms speed improvement increases conversion by roughly 8%
“Every 100 milliseconds of speed up results in about an eight percent conversion rate.”
Ross: Groq plans to upgrade its AI chips annually
“We're looking at upgrading chips about once a year.”
Ross: NVIDIA H100 GPUs remain highly profitable to operate despite age
“They're getting close to five years old. And they're still operating well, they're still earning more than their operating costs by quite a bit. You would never deploy an H 100 today, but they're still profitable to run, right?”
Ross: Data center demand has exceeded projections for ten consecutive years
“For the last 10 years, infrastructure for data centers, you're planning that out two, three, four, five years in advance, right? And what happens is everyone, everyone's predictions are wrong. They end up building too little. This has just been what, what's ha…”
Ross: Japan built a two-nanometer fab and is producing wafers
“Japan decided to build a two nanometer fab. When I was there last, they were showing off these two nanometer wafers that they produced. Now, the yield's not where it needs to be. This is not production grade, but they built a two nanometer fab, and they are pr…”
Ross: Japan allocated $65 billion toward AI initiatives
“They've allocated sixty five billion dollars for AI.”
Jonathan Ross: Groq scaled from 640 to over 40,000 chips in 2024
“We started 2024 with about 640 chips in production. We ended with over 40,000.”
AI performance scaled at 4x every 18-24 months via chip accumulation
“Turns out, the number of chips was also doubling every 18 to 24 months. So rather than two X, it was four X.”
Ross: Groq's chip architecture improves energy efficiency 3x per token
“It improves at about three X, and the reason is...”
Groq Completed Saudi AI Deployment in 51 Days
“Ah, the recent deployment we did in, in Saudi Arabia 51 days from contract to the first tokens being served in production in country.”
Groq Chips Function as Switches Without External Hardware
“We actually don't use switches to communicate between our chips. We just plug our chips into our chips. Our chips are the switch.”
Ross: Compute costs dropped 1,000x per decade while spending rose 100x
“So for the last five to six decades, like clockwork, once a decade, the cost of compute has gone down a thousand X. People buy 100,000 X as much compute spending a hundred times as much. So every decade they spend a hundred times as much. So you make it cheape…”