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 75 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
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.”
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.”
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.”
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: 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 …”
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.”
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.”
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…”
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…”
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.”
Acharya: AI consumer software is commanding unprecedented $300 monthly pricing
“Google's top SKU is 250 a month. Grox is 300 a month. I don't think we've ever seen a time where consumers were paying those kinds of prices.”
Google NotebookLM sustains flat or growing traffic until late summer
“And then right below the top 10 was Notebook LM. At number 13. And I take your wow as a little bit of a surprise, which was a surprise to me too, and I think a bit of a narrative violation that they went viral almost a year ago. In September of 2024. But they'…”
Anish Acharya: Google's top consumer subscription tier costs $250 per month
“The top Google consumer SKU is 250 dollars a month.”
Immerman: Google antitrust ruling proves default search deals were anti-competitive
“So earlier this year, Google was declared a monopoly. The court ruled that they're spending billions of dollars to phone manufacturers. In the case of Apple, tens of billions of dollars is monopolistic. It's anti-competitive and it's preventing their competito…”
Andreessen: ChatGPT stemmed from Alec Radford's early LLM work at OpenAI
“The origin story of even, even ChatGPT is this is not what OpenAI actually started to do. They started to do something different, and then there was actually one guy who actually his name is, I think Alec Radford, and he literally was, like, off in the corner …”
Ismail: Tech winners like Apple and Google succeeded by becoming platforms
“Yahoo, BlackBerry, Nokia all failed to become platforms, right? Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon all successfully became platforms, and that business model basically carries you through because now you wire yourself into the infrastructure.”
Casado: Google eliminated employee account takeovers by mandating security keys
“There's actually a pretty famous case study where Google rolled them out wall to wall. So every Google employee has a security key. They had account takeover issues, you know, six years ago, over six years of using them, account takeover went to zero.”
Bahcall: Google and McKinsey remove promotion decisions from direct managers
“Some companies, actually Google does this, and McKinsey does this, and others, they take the promotion decisions completely away from the manager.”
Russell: Current BCI tech will allow seamless thought-controlled computer actions
“And now with this current generation, it seems like between Elon, Facebook, probably something from Google that We're actually going to start to see these things that kind of invisibly actually just let you think something and have some kind of action show up …”
Evans: Google bypassed Android OS fragmentation using Google Play Services
“Always been kind of trying to get the handset makers to do operating system updates, and it's never worked. But they sort of got around that part of the fragmentation problem for their own services by putting Google Play services on top of everything.”
Sinofsky: Google pioneered infrastructure design based on continuous hardware failure
“Along comes Google, and they basically pioneered this whole notion that, like, all the disk drives, it's not like they're likely to fail, it's that they will fail. And so it was designing a whole system on the presumption of continuous failure, which was like …”
Fei-Fei Li: Google holds early self-driving advantage in data and algorithms
“Companies like Google, even though they didn't have cars at the beginning, they had algorithms. They started this early, so they now have both data and algorithms.”
Hariharan: U.S. tech giants dominate India without local equivalents like Alibaba
“You don't have an Alibaba yet in India. You don't have the buy, the Google of India is Google. The Facebook of India is Facebook.”
Burbidge: Nearly 80% of millennials trust tech giants over banks
“Certainly more than 50, I think it was close to 80% of millennials trust the brands, you know, Facebook or Google. Or Apple, I think was the top of the pile, much more than their banks.”
Boneh: Big tech security teams possess the authority to delay product launches
“In big companies like Microsoft, Apple, Google security teams in fact are involved in the process from the design phase, which is really important. And then if a product is about to ship out and a security, the security team discovers a big vulnerability, they…”
Nguyen: MapReduce Was Intentionally Designed for Reliability Over Speed
“Interestingly, a lot of people may not realize that MapReduce was designed to be slow.”