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 105 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
Baker: Google surpassed OpenAI and Anthropic in total AI traffic
“I think they've taken 15 or 20 points of traffic share in the last two or three months, and that does not, that's just traffic to Gemini. It does not include search overviews. I suspect on a actual traffic basis, Google is bigger than OpenAI, Anthropic, anyone…”
Horowitz: Google and Microsoft use safety rhetoric to lobby against open-source AI
“And they do it like the really kind of nasty thing is they claim, oh, it's for safety. You know, we've created an alien that we can't control, but we're not going to stop working on it. We're going to keep building it as fast as we can. And we're going to buy …”
Srinivasan: Google paid over $100 million into Windsurf's account for dividends
“Google put a hundred million plus in the bank account of WindSurf where the intent was to dividend it out.”
Michael: Google transitioned from avoiding defense work to top government partner
“Google didn't want to bid on the contract. Now Google is a great partner, you know, and so I'd hope some of the newer companies would learn from what Google did, which is, you know, they didn't want to serve the government because that employee mob issues, but…”
Evans: Claude has virtually no consumer usage despite top benchmark scores
“It's basically, the only consumer, Claude has basically no consumer usage, even though on the benchmark score it's the same. And then it's ChatGPT, and then halfway down the chart, it's Meta and Google.”
Diane Greene was ousted from Google over an innocent satellite contract
“Diane Greene was ousted from Google for like a very innocent contract who'd look at pictures, I mean, satellites, right?”
Rampell: Bay Area housing prices declined massively when priced in tech stocks
“There's a piece that we wrote a little while ago showing that the price of housing in the Bay Area has declined massively in the past 25 years. If you're like, no, no, it hasn't. It's gone off. If you price it in Apple stock and Google stock, right?”
Patel: Top Google TPU hardware engineers have left to join OpenAI
“The TPU team's next-gen designs are pretty non-aggressive, partially because a lot of the TPU team has left to go to OpenAI, the best people that I knew.”
George: Google's Gemini models are currently state-of-the-art across multiple domains
“They actually have the best models right now. Like, they have the leading, you know, the state-of-the-art models in Gemini across a bunch of different domains.”
Ulevitch: Early American Dynamism startups emerged after Google left Project Maven
“You know, even in some of the origins where some of the AD companies started, it was after Google bailed out of Project Maven, and people in Silicon Valley were really trying to figure out what was important, how do I want to spend my time, and that, that, tho…”
Andreessen: Google shelved 2017 transformer breakthrough until startups forced its hand
“Google invented the transformer in 2017 and then put it on a shelf. And then startups came in and sort of picked up that idea and ran with it, OpenAI and now Anthropic and others and many others now. And then as a consequence, Google has now been forced to rea…”
D'Angelo: Perplexity is taking search market share from Google
“I think with perplexity getting share from Google right now.”
Wilson: Cloud market will split to Amazon 60%, Google 30%, Microsoft 10%
“But I think it could be like Amazon has 60% of the market, Google has 30% of the market, and Microsoft has 10% of the market. I think it's gonna be a three player game in that business, and that's good.”
Wilson: YouTube sold to Google due to copyright fight costs
“Right, but that ultimately caused them to have to sell to Google. Because they concluded that they couldn't continue to play the game that way, which was the right way to play the game. As an independent company. They needed somebody who could fight the conten…”
Rachleff: Apple, Google, and Salesforce failed to succeed on original ideas
“None of their original ideas were the ideas on which they succeeded. So Apple, Google, you name the company, Salesforce, Hewlett Packard, none of them succeeded at their original idea, if you can believe that.”
Evans: Apple and Facebook will build full-stack VR while Google commoditizes hardware
“You'll have Apple and Facebook trying to do the full stack, and you'll have Google saying, well, we're going to provide the hard bit, and everything else will be a commodity around it.”
Evans: Global annual photos taken likely reaches 10 to 100 trillion
“Even if you just add up the numbers from Facebook and Snapchat, Facebook and Instagram and WhatsApp and so on, you get to about eight or nine hundred billion photographs taken last year. And that's just, sorry, shared. So if there were eight or nine hundred bi…”
Evans: Google generates more revenue on iOS than on Android
“You know, Google is making more money on iOS and Android right now.”
Evans: Google contracts block OEMs from selling both Google and forked Android
“Well, the problem for them is that Google's contract says you're not allowed to sell a forked and uncompatible and open version of Android. And, or if you do, you can't sell a single phone that has Google services on it.”
Horowitz: Microsoft beat Google in cloud productivity due to enterprise culture
“Google, like had, they built Google Apps, like what, like five years before Microsoft really got going with Office three 65, and Microsoft ran right by them. Why? Because there was no enterprise culture in Google, none.”
David George: Google's 7-to-8-year-old TPUs maintain 100% utilization
“Seven to eight year old TPUs, Google actually disclosed this, seven to eight year old TPUs actually have 100% utilization.”
George: ChatGPT reached 365 billion searches five times faster than Google
“The time to get to three hundred and sixty five billion searches on chat GPT was two years. The time for Google to get to three hundred and sixty five billion searches was 11 years.”
A Google search penalty once wiped out Thumbtack's web traffic and revenue
“At Thumbtack, there was a moment, you may remember this, a decade ago, where I woke up, and I had a message from someone on our team in the Philippines, and it said, Thumbtack does not exist on the internet. I was like, what? And I went to Google, you type in …”
Vahdat: Gigawatt-scale AI workloads create power fluctuations visible to utilities
“We've written about this power utilities notice when we're doing network communication relative to computation at the scale of 1000 of megawatts. Right, like massive demand for power, stop all of a sudden and do some network communication, and then burst back …”
George: Consumer AI reached one billion users faster than any predecessor
“We've now gotten to the point where there's about a billion monthly active users of consumer AI applications, and this has grown significantly faster than predecessor companies, Google, Facebook, TikTok, and in the case of TikTok, they actually grew through, t…”
Moore: Google's Veo 2 video model likely releasing in 3-6 months
“I think we'll see even more of a shake-up here, because VO-II is the new Google model that is even next level beyond that, from what we've seen in testing, and that is probably finally gonna hopefully come out in the next, you know, three or six months.”
Immerman: Google AI Overviews has reached 1 billion monthly active users
“Google AI Overviews already has a billion monthly active users.”
Immerman: Perplexity average query length is 10-11 words vs Google's 2-3
“The average query on perplexity is 10 to 11 words. The average search on Google is two to three keywords.”
Khalaf: Payment cards have wider reach than Google, Facebook, and clean water
“Because if you think about a payment card, it's the most adopted technological product ever invented. More distribution than Google and Facebook combined. More distribution than clean water. And it's still a piece of plastic for many.”
Hicks: DoD R&D budget exceeds Alphabet, Apple, Meta, Microsoft combined
“It's more than what Alphabet, Apple, Meta, and Microsoft combined spent on R&D last year.”
Ehrensvärd: Google experienced zero successful phishing attempts after deploying FIDO U2F
“And since Google deployed this for all staff and contractors, they had zero phishing attempts.”
Costolo: Twitter partnered with Google to bypass Egypt's Arab Spring shutdown
“Egypt, you know, during the Arab Spring, we sort of started in Tunisia with people organizing protests on Twitter, and they were able to organize protests on Twitter because they were writing under pseudonyms and not, you know, their actual names, so people we…”
Unicode Voting Power Concentrated Among US Tech Giants, SAP, and Oman
“No, so of those 12, so of those 12, nine are U.S. Multinational tech companies. Oracle, IBM, Google, Yahoo, Adobe, Facebook, Microsoft, and Symantec. Then of the other three full voting members, one is the German software company SAP, another is the Chinese te…”
Paulus: Google, Volvo, and Mercedes accept self-driving liability
“Google Volvo and Mercedes have all said that for their cars, while they're in assault driving mode, they have the liability”
Evans: Apple, Google, and Facebook Won Initial Mobile and Messaging Wars
“The smartphone wars are now over, or at least the first smartphone war is over, and Apple and Google both won in different ways, and the kind of the first messaging app wars are now mostly over, and Facebook mostly won in sort of various ways”
Markoff: Google acquired robotics startups to build an automated delivery network
“When Andy Rubin was going around the valley and buying and around the world and buying up, you know, the world's best roboticist, he was sketching out a vision which I would describe as a Google competing with Amazon. And you know, and if you can kind of see t…”
McMaster: Google's Android Wear contains no open-source components whatsoever
“If you look at Android Wear today, that is incredibly close. There is no open source component to Android Wear whatsoever, right?”
Evans: iOS users spend four times more than Android users
“You have double the revenue on iOS for half the users, and so very roughly four times the spend.”
Balaji Srinivasan: Google will eventually merge Chrome OS and Android
“Obviously, I think it's, you know, like, there's going to be some fusion of Chrome OS and Android now that they're both folding into the same person.”
Active Android devices will reach 2-3B; iOS will reach 700-900M
“And, you know, as things play out with the current dynamics, which aren't really going to change in the next two or three years, we will end up with seven, eight, nine hundred million iOS devices in use on Earth. It's probably about 500 now. And we'll end up w…”
Chan: Google paid up to $70M for a single self-driving engineer
“In fact, Google has been known to pay up to seventy million dollars for a single engineer working on their self-driving car project.”
Evans: Google and Facebook captured half of print's internet ad revenue
“Internet took about half of the print industry's advertising revenue and growing, but Google and Facebook took half of that.”
Rampell: Apple and Google will fully open their mobile wallet platforms
“Apple and Google need to open up their respective wallets, but I think they will, because Apple and Google, if they want to build a powerful position and actually truly have the mobile wallet not just be a payment type that has three credit cards in it, But ac…”
Evans: Combined GAFA revenues remain smaller than TV and advertising
“Even Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon combined there, or GAFA, as the telecoms industry tends to call them add up to less than TV business or advertising and are much, much smaller than mobile or proper, proper industries like cars or clothes.”
Evans: Big Tech produces more profits than the entire telecoms industry
“You have a pretty safe bet that Google, Meta, Amazon Microsoft, Apple produce more profits than the entire telecoms industry.”
Horowitz: Google Reversed Its Position to Work With Defense Department
“Google has definitely since Google slash Alphabet has reversed their position and now do work, ah, with the US government and the Defense Department.”