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 53 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 2 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
Shulman: Using copyrighted works in AI training data is industry standard
“Yeah, we know that there are some copyrighted works in our training data. That's not illegal. It's stock standard for the industry. It's what every AI company does.”
Shulman: Empty text box UI is wrong for most AI products
“They did every AI company a huge disservice because everybody thinks that just like empty text box is now the right interface, and it is for ChatGPT, and it is incorrect for basically everything else.”
Shulman: Scaling laws will not solve AI music generation
“For music, It's very different from text, and I think people will very sloppily look at the world of OpenAI and Anthropic and the hyperscalers and say audio is just a couple years behind, which it is, but that scale is gonna solve all these things. But unlike …”
Shulman: Quantum computing startups face fundamental physics challenges, not engineering ones
“The challenges are not they're still physics challenges. They're still like basic research challenges that have to happen here, and so it's not something where you can kind of just turn the crank and make companies out of it, and to my knowledge, all of the co…”
Shulman: Music incumbents suing AI startups before negotiating is inefficient
“On paper, I would say it just seems silly to throw a bunch of venture dollars at lawyers instead of sitting down and talking about how you could Work together. You know, like, deciding to sue first and then ask questions later seems to me to be inefficient, bu…”
Shulman: Suno will survive even if it loses copyright lawsuit
“If this lawsuit goes to trial and we lose, it's obviously not good for us. The company, the company's not dead, but it's obviously not good for us. I don't think that's likely.”
Shulman: Most artists privately admit to using and loving Suno
“The vast, vast majority of artists that I speak to Behind closed doors admit that they use and love Suno.”
Mikey Shulman: Human taste will outweigh technical skill in future art
“It's increasingly taste is the only thing that matters in, in, in art, and skill is going to matter a lot less because you're going to be able to make a lot of stuff And the people who are going to be recognized are people who are able to pick from the vast qu…”
Shulman: AI companies will soon stop releasing standalone raw models
“At some point, I don't know if it's version four or version five, there will be a last model release that is released as a model, and everything else is just product releases.”
Shulman: VCs will not get timely returns on quantum computing investments
“I don't think you're gonna get your money back in a reasonable time.”
Shulman: Users Choose Suno for Product Quality, Not Model Size
“At the end of the day people will use Suno because it's a better product, not because there's a bigger, better, bigger model under the hood.”
Shulman: Scaling AI research headcount yields sublinear returns
“The machine learning team at Suno will almost certainly not scale as quickly as the software team, or said differently, I think research is not something that you can solve with scale. You can just throw more bodies and you'll get, you know, comparatively more…”
Shulman: Suno actively works with plenty of music industry incumbents
“And by the way, there are plenty of incumbents in the industry who do work with us.”
Shulman: Most people do not enjoy the time spent making music
“It's not really enjoyable to make music now. It takes a lot of time. It takes a lot of practice. You need to get really good at an instrument or really good at a piece of production software. I think the majority of people don't enjoy the majority of the time …”
Shulman: Hit songs succeed via algorithms and promotion, not quality alone
“I think that they probably reverse the causality. Things break on TikTok, and then they become famous on Spotify, but that is a function of both algorithms and people pushing music, and not necessarily only a function of the quality of the music.”
Shulman: Suno refuses API requests from generative AI video companies
“The vast majority of Gen AI video companies have asked us for an API so that they can have, you know, Suno music behind their AI videos, and the answer's always no.”
Shulman: The term 'prompt' will disappear within six to twelve months
“I hope that, you know, in, in six months from now, or 12 months from now, we're not using the word prompt. There are just far more intuitive ways to interact with the music, and we shouldn't be guiding you we should be listening to you if that makes sense.”
Shulman: Requiring complex prompts is an AI product failure, not user failure
“Well, if it took a really complicated prompt and 1600 iterations, that's a failure of my product, not a failure of the candidate.”
Shulman: VC promises of reserve capital are actually not founder-friendly
“So that's, you know, that, that's billed as very founder friendly and it's actually the opposite.”
Shulman: Interactive music will drive consumer spending like video games
“I think if you accomplish all those things and if you make music interactive and you make music engaging people will pay for it like they pay for video games.”
Shulman: Suno's edge is audio representation, not model architecture
“Our competitive edge here has not been to innovate on the architecture, and has been to innovate on the, Audio representation.”
Shulman: Infinite AI supply lowers individual track value but increases music's overall worth
“I think it reduces the average value of any given piece of content, but I think it greatly increases the value of music to society or to any given person.”
Shulman: Suno Is the Only Place Aligning AI to Human Taste
“If you are interested in a different AI problem, in the problem of how do I align Models, not to objective truth, but to human taste. I think there's nowhere else to do it.”
Shulman: Suno's GPU compute spend is several times its entire payroll
“It's the biggest thing by far. Yeah. It's a few times payroll.”
Suno CEO argues the music industry suffers from a fixed-pie mindset
“An embedded fixed pie mentality. There's a fixed pie of money out there and we are all just, you know, trying to divide it unfairly for ourselves. And if we were focused on growing that pie, I think like just everything gets easier.”
Shulman: Founders who claim getting sued is a good thing are lying
“Those people, I think, are lying if they tell you, like this is a good thing. You know, it's like, maybe it's a sign of a good thing, but it itself is not a good thing. If nothing else, it's gonna cost money and time.”
Shulman: AI music fan fiction is more engaging than artist AMAs
“What I can only describe as the equivalent of fan fiction, if she wants that, and that would be an immensely engaging activity, in my mind, way more valuable and way more engaging than like having an AMA with her, if you're a huge fan.”
Shulman: Suno users pay to create music, not to listen to it
“The thing that people don't realize is that right now we've made something where people enjoy making music so much they are paying to create the music. This has nothing to do with listening.”
Mikey Shulman: Modern pop is shorter and more homogenous due to TikTok
“I think songs have gotten Shorter, yes, but also much more homogenous in melodies, harmonies song structures, and they, and music innovates very much sonically. Like, they're really interesting sounds, and they all fit into the same song structure, and this is…”
Shulman: Foreign actors will build worse AI music if US fails to lead
“We can actively build a bigger, better future of music with AI, or we can just wait, and someone else in another country, not bound by US laws, not with the same intentions will build a worse future of music with AI.”
Shulman: ChatGPT acts as a median-competent tutor for every student
“The first order effect here is that GPT means that every person in the world has, like, a median competent tutor or sidekick. This is obviously amazing for education, and if you can't recognize that fact, I'm not sure you have such good judgment.”
Mikey Shulman: Suno aims to make musicians, not just music
“You know, I like to think we're not making music, we're making musicians.”
Shulman: Audio AI technology lags significantly behind text AI
“Audio is really far behind the world of text.”
Mikey Shulman: Suno pays employees less than OpenAI does
“Let's be honest, I will pay you less than OpenAI will pay you, and I need to find a reason to convince you to come join us.”
Mikey Shulman: The team that runs high-quality AI experiments fastest will win
“Experimental physicists just get good at running high-quality experiments really quickly, and AI is an empirical discipline, and so whoever can run more high-quality experiments quickly will win.”
Shulman: Suno Will Not Reach Sub-Second Generation Speed Anytime Soon
“And so I don't see us getting to one second anytime soon, but I think the crossover that you're talking about, we're still kind of far away from.”
Shulman: Suno's primary user success metric is hitting the day-one paywall
“The most salient one is actually just like, did you hit the paywall your first day? Because even if you didn't go through it for whatever reason, if you hit the paywall, you just enjoyed the last 10 or 12 minutes of your life, and I know I did something good t…”
Shulman: Suno chose to charge users from day one rather than stay free
“We made a decision to start charging from day one, which is like a little bit against the traditional wisdom of Silicon Valley of just like give the product away for free, scale, scale, scale.”
Shulman: Suno's subscription revenues offset a lot of GPU burn
“Even, even without the revenues, which are fantastic to have, and they offset, you know, they offset a lot of GPU burn knowing what gets people to subscribe is such valuable data that I don't know, like, how we would do this without it.”
Mikey Shulman: Major AI companies are hitting data walls
“I think the bigger players Are hitting data walls and are more actively working on it, and like everything else, it's really nice to have the big players solve a lot of the really thorny problems for you, and you can kind of focus on your competitive advantage…”
Shulman: Integrating AI Music Creation with Streaming Creates a Larger Market
“That just shows you that there is a lot of friction, and if there were two worlds of music, I think that would A, be friction for the average consumer, but I actually hope it's much more than just consumption. I hope that, like, there shouldn't be, like, a set…”
Shulman: Suno blocks users from generating music with real artist names
“You've noticed in our product, you can't make Ariana Grande songs. If you put her name in, we're going to wave our finger at you, and you're going to say, like, that's not what the future of music is. That's not original music. Suno is for original music. It's…”
Suno does not pay Timbaland in cash for partnership
“No, we don't pay him in cash. He's, yeah, he's an advisor to the company.”
Shulman: YouTube is More Engaging Than Spotify Based on Ad ARPU
“Like YouTube is more engaging than Spotify as measured by the amount of, you know, the ARPU for ads, for example, right?”
Shulman: 90% of Suno traffic migrated from Discord to web in five days
“And so we released this app, we released this web app, which is not even the full functionality of the Discord bot in November, and it takes five days for 90% of the traffic to move over to the web. Five days.”
Mikey Shulman: Great AI software UI must enable novel workflows
“The UI should just in no way resemble what it does today. But I think good UI is just like, what did you enable that is like completely not doable in the old pattern?”