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 5,249 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
Nvidia Conceals Massive Chip Field Failure Rates to Keep Customers Waiting
“You don't talk about the field failure rate of your products, which are massive. Rather you sort of keep talking about the future in an effort to convince people to wait, to make a good decision rather than go with technology that's, that that's better and pre…”
Elon Musk and Tesla Failed at Building Wafer-Scale Chips for Dojo
“And after we did it Elon tried Dojo and they failed.”
Feldman: Nvidia Has Zero CUDA Software Lock-In for AI Inference
“In inference, it's not real at all. There's no CUDA lock-in in inference. None. Well, you can move from OpenAI on an NVIDIA GPU to Cerebrus to Fireworks Service on something else to Together to perplexity with 10 keystrokes. I mean, anybody who actually uses A…”
Pishevar: Bill Gurley hired PIs and met weekly to oust Travis Kalanick
“We found out in our investigation that he hired Some private investigators had weekly meetings about how do we get rid of Travis.”
Pishevar: Benchmark Hired Private Investigators Against Naval Ravikant
“There's a history of VCs who have done this type of thing and in Benchmark's case, they did it against Naval. They hired private investigators and Naval Ravikant. He had a company called eGroups, and he got thrown out of it.”
McCabe: COVID mRNA vaccines were harmful while traditional treatments worked
“During COVID, it turned out that these gene therapies were really bad for you, and that these traditional treatments were really, really helpful. Don't slap your face like I shouldn't have said that, because it's fucking true.”
Shaun Maguire claims Iran has recently obtained nuclear weapons
“Allegedly they have just recently obtained nuclear weapons.”
Asparouhov: Benchmark cornered Travis Kalanick in a hotel room after mother's death
“Travis committed no crime and they, you know, sort of ousted him despite the fact that, you know, they actually didn't necessarily, you know, have the legal control to do so. They just cornered him in a hotel room, you know, two days after his mother had passe…”
Tenev denies Robinhood colluded with hedge funds to restrict meme stock trading
“The idea that somehow the most wrong thing was this allegation of collusion that we're somehow colluding with hedge funds that we have no business relationship with to somehow restrict buying of these stocks. Yeah, I think that was just wrong.”
Hassabis: Google and DeepMind developed 90% of modern AI breakthroughs
“I would say about 90% of the breakthroughs that underpin the modern AI industry were done either by Google Brain or Google Research or DeepMind, so one of our groups.”
Andreessen: Companies falsely blame AI for corporate layoffs
“And now they all have the silver bullet excuse, right? Ah, it's AI. Right, and I know this for a fact, because number one, I talk to them, but number two, I know this for a fact, because AI until, like, literally until, like, December, right, was not actually …”
Siemiatkowski: Klarna cut headcount by 50% to under 3,000 employees
“We've gone from 7000 people. We're now below 3000. We've shrank 50%.”
Cahn: Chip makers finance AI buildouts to book revenue circularly
“The chip companies are now stepping up and saying, okay, we'll absorb some of the risk. We'll put in the capital to finance this build out where the demand on the other side is not so clear because of course the chip companies also get to book this as revenue.”
Benioff: Salesforce cut support headcount from 9,000 to 5,000 via AI agents
“And to that point, I've been able to reduce the number of human agents I have in support From about 9000 to about 5000.”
Tenev: Robinhood enabled private stock tokenization without target company opt-in
“And so I think it's important for the tokenization mechanism to work. Without the opt-in of the companies that, that are being tokenized. And I think that's actually the innovation that we've been able to drive. Like we can, we figured out how to make this wor…”
Scott: Frontier AI models diagnose health issues better than average GPs
“It is already the case that I think the frontier models are probably better like health diagnosticians than Your average GP is”
Hoggett: Most UK companies listing in the US perform poorly or delist
“In the last 10 years, only 20 UK companies have listed in the US that have raised over a hundred million. Of those, nine have already delisted, only four are trading up and the rest are trading down by over 80%.”
Oscar Pierre Faces a Potential Six-Year Prison Sentence Over Glovo's Labor Model
“And unfortunately, the, yeah, the country where we suffer from regulation the most is Spain. I'm not going to go into the details, but it's so extreme that I'm now in a criminal process for so the, yeah, the prosecutor, the general attorney accused me with six…”
Hommels: US fighter jets require real-time remote US clearance to start
“Even if you buy US fighter jets, Yeah. So the way how it works is you are the owner. It stands somewhere in the hangar, and you want to, you know, start flying. You have to put it in the way where, where you want to fly, and then this data is sent to the US, a…”
Hommels: Europe cannot independently launch satellites after Ariane sold capacity
“Yeah, currently we either we get a slot in a SpaceX, yeah, with all the with all the restrictions that there are, or we have Ariane, but Ariane base lastly sold a hundred percent of the defense transport capacity to Amazon. So basically, as Europeans, we are, …”
Hommels: Germany and UK have only four days of ammunition left
“The ammunition is, is a cruel one, yeah. So, so the numbers I have from the military is like four days in Germany and UK and five in France, which is 25% more, but it doesn't make a difference.”
Maguire: Colombian and Venezuelan drug cartels report directly to Iran
“Like the cartels in Colombia and Venezuela basically report into Iran. Iran handles most of the money laundering for them and coordination processing of a lot of like the precursor chemicals, stuff like that.”
San Diego Persian Jewish dentist was killed without media coverage
“A Persian Jewish dentist who my family knows in San Diego was literally stabbed to death by a former patient named Mohammed, like just randomly, like it was not reported and it was not reported as a hate crime, et cetera.”
Mollick: OpenAI's $3B revenue run rate is largely an accident
“I mean, they're incidentally making three billion dollar run rate this year, I think by like just accident, but there isn't like a, there isn't really a product there right now.”
Hulme: Microsoft acquired Inflection primarily for its 12,000 H100 GPU cluster
“I do not believe that Microsoft were buying the Pi model. I think Microsoft are GPU constrained, and we're buying a cluster of 12,000 H-one hundreds.”
Rabois: No $100 billion European tech company has been created since 1990
“There hasn't been a hundred billion dollar European company created since 1990.”
Proposed EU AI Regulation Would Make All Existing LLMs Illegal
“One of the percent of the LMs that were trained these last three years would be illegal in Europe.”
Didi and the Chinese Government Had Full Access to Uber's Data
“It became very clear that everyone had all our data. Didi knew everything we were doing whereas, like, Lyft and Uber always knew what each other were doing, because we were watching each other, we're friends, things like that, but, like, we never had each othe…”
Holland: Excessive burn rate killed Fast, not investor Stripe
“Having Stripe as an investor isn't what killed our company. Having too high a burn is what killed our company. There's just no other way to put it.”
Ed Baker: Uber secretly ran India test against CEO orders, doubling conversion
“We decided to run a test In Hyderabad, India, where we said, let's let riders request their first ride without putting a credit card number in. In fact, we were told by our CEO not to run that test because he felt so strongly against it, but we had so much con…”
Cyan Banister: San Francisco DA Chesa Boudin refuses to prosecute crimes
“We have a DA, Chesta, who will not prosecute crimes. I just found out yesterday a friend of mine whose house was burglarized. The perpetrators were let out of San Quentin for COVID. They robbed his house, almost kicked in the door of his neighbor who had a chi…”
Peter Thiel Called Tesla a Bankrupt Idea Before Model S Shipped
“So like Tesla, I remember famously Peter Thiel's are saying it's a bankrupt idea. The battery technology will never scale. Batteries will never improve. UVs will never work. And I was like, wow, that was just before the Model S. I mean, literally a week before…”
Reyes: Major AI model providers explicitly plan to compete with customers
“At least, you know, two of the largest companies that provide models today have explicitly said, we are going to go after every single one of these industries and businesses that we provide like intelligence for.”
Reyes: Chinese AI models show no unique security backdoors versus US models
“For me, the Chinese models specifically have demonstrated no examples where they have some sort of security risk or backdoor compared to American models.”
Stebbings: Mercor Crosses $2B ARR and Raises at $20B Valuation
“I'm an investor in McCaw. I never thought this would be as big as it has got as quickly as hit, as it has done. It's crossing out two, two and a half billion ARR. They're doing a new round led by General Catalyst at twenty billion.”
Stebbings: Surge AI at $3.5B ARR, Mercor $2.5B, Handshake $1B, Micro1 $500M
“Surge are doing three, three and a half. McCaw are doing two and a half. Handshaker doing one. Micro One are doing half.”
O'Driscoll: OpenAI is lobbying in Washington for AI regulation alongside Anthropic
“They're signing this publicly while at the same time lobbying in Washington right alongside Anthropic for a regulatory process.”
O'Driscoll: AI infrastructure spend hits $900B while AI apps struggle past $50B
“Zooming out a million miles, you know, my mental model is, I divide the AI world up into three buckets. It's the making AI, the infrastructure layer, right? And you're right, the spend there is eight, nine hundred billion dollars a year. Then there's the two f…”
O'Driscoll: Meta and SpaceX rented compute after failing to build AI assets
“Two companies Have done the same thing, which is buy a load of compute to build proprietary assets, fail to build those assets, and then bring that, and then decide instead to sell that compute to others, and both of them have had a very positive market recept…”
Lemkin: OpenAI and Anthropic Lied About Books and YouTube Training Data
“Open AI, an anthropic, Kind of lied about the books, and they definitely lied about training on YouTube”
Stebbings: VC firms need a $400M fund to lead Series A today
“You can't do Series A unless you have a four hundred million dollar fund today. Absolutely no chance.”
O'Driscoll: The AI industry generates $100B revenue while spending $700B on CapEx
“So AI as a whole is getting a hundred billion in revenue and spending seven hundred billion a year. That's not a great business.”
Lemkin: Prompt engineering skills that once paid $150,000 are now worthless
“When we started this show, you need to be a fucking prompt it. They would joke this was the highest paying job out of college was prompt engineers were making a 150,000 dollars out of college because they knew how to write a prompt. That skill's worthless toda…”
Lemkin: OpenAI and Anthropic yield 40-70% gross margins on enterprise inference
“They have an enterprise base, which is, it has, you know, between 40 and 70% in, you know, gross margin just on inference.”
Randle: Frontier AI models can now autonomously execute cyber attacks
“Zooming out, I think the most important thing in all this Is that we step back from Anthropic and realize that the models are to place now, whether they're from Anthropic or elsewhere, where they can autonomously find and chain multiple vulnerabilities togethe…”
US government owns 10% of Intel, Nvidia and SoftBank 5% each
“American government owns 10% of Intel. Nvidia and SoftBank own five percent each.”
Anthropic lobbied heavily for US AI export controls
“And definitely like companies like Anthropic lobbied very hard for it.”
O'Driscoll: Musk earns $2B monthly selling compute to Anthropic and Google
“He found two of his biggest competitors who want to buy from him. You know, he's getting two billion a month, 1.25 from an topic and nine 50 from, no, the other way around, nine 50 from a topic, 1.25 from Google, the other way around, two billion a month. Two …”