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 216 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
Casado: Microsoft's initial Copilot product was actually created by OpenAI
“I learned recently it was created by OpenAI, so that kind of explains it.”
Casado: Early AI breakouts gain strong brand effects over model performance differences
“Honestly, last quick point on this is, like, for the first time in a very long time, we're seeing brand effects with an early technology, and what I mean by that is, if you look at, like, whatever, the major model providers, you know, how much better are they …”
Patel: OpenAI will not achieve profitability until 2029
“They're not turning a cash flow, they're not gonna be profitable until 2029.”
Casado: OpenAI lost early leads in code, image, and video to rivals
“It was co-pilot, right? But they lost that. And then they were actually the first to image, really, with Dali. They lost that, right? Mid-Journey came out. They were kind of the first to, like, real video with Sora, and they lost that. And yet, they've gotten …”
Casado: a16z avoids lesser-known SOTA AI model startups due to heavy subsidies
“So the state-of-the-art model market, this is like the, you know, the Anthropics and the Open AIs it's incredibly competitive, and it's very heavily subsidized, right? I mean, like with Meta and like Google, et cetera, and so kind of our view is, is you have t…”
Patel: OpenAI and Anthropic consume 30% of top-tier AI chips
“Just OpenAI and Anthropic and the compute that they have and are getting this year from Google and Amazon for Anthropic and from Microsoft, CoreWeave, Oracle for OpenAI, 30% of the chips are going to them, just those two companies.”
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.”
Patel: OpenAI will soon monetize free users via shopping affiliate fees
“And OpenAI makes nothing off of that. But they very, they really, really will soon, right? And partially that's because Amazon blocks chat, but like, you know, there's a way to make money from shopping decisions, whether it's Booking flights or looking for ite…”
Patel: OpenAI captures under 10% of the value created by ChatGPT
“I legitimately believe OpenAI is not even capturing 10% of the value they've created in the world already just by usage of chat.”
Kim: The leap from GPT-4 to GPT-5 is OpenAI's most impressive yet
“Maybe I'm biased, recency biased, but I think to jump to four to five is most impressive for me, because I guess with 3.5 when we first released it, the most common use case for me then also was still just for coding. And, but now, like, Even though four was b…”
Kim: Training tasks and RL environments matter more than algorithmic advances
“Tasks matter more at this point, given the fact that we have such a strong algorithm so I think the data, creating data and figuring out, like, the best tasks to train on is, like, the, One of the big questions we have.”
Patel: UBI is the only viable redistribution model if AGI eliminates wages
“If all human wages go to zero or go below subsistence, then the only way to deal with that is through some kind of UBI rather than, you know, if you happen to sue open AI, you get a trillion dollar settlement. Otherwise you're kind of screwed.”
Casado: OpenAI is vertically integrated while Anthropic operates horizontally
“I would say that OpenAI is very much a vertically integrated company now with ChatGPT driving a lot of it. I would say Anthropic, a lot of the usage really is more horizontal, and they're doing a great job of that.”
Acharya: DeepSeek's rapid release disproved claims China was years behind
“Just a year before DeepSea came out, you had a number of, like, tech leaders in Washington testifying that China was, like, five to six years behind the US, with confidence, on the record. And then DeepSea comes out 26 days after OpenAI puts out the frontier.”
Horowitz: OpenAI could not have completed its giant raise in public markets
“And then the public markets have become. I would say very difficult and dysfunctional to the extent that, you know, OpenAI just did a giant raise in the private markets, which I don't think they could have done in the public markets.”
Casado: DeepSeek's $6M reasoning model cost aligns with OpenAI and Anthropic
“The fact that they spent six million dollars just in the chain of thought is actually not out of whack with what Anthropik has now said they've spent in OpenAI has said that they spent.”
Casado: DeepSeek release is not a crisis for OpenAI, Anthropic, or Nvidia
“I personally don't think this is a crisis moment for open AI or Anthropic. I think like apps are hard to build. I think that like right now the apps that they put out are very complex. They actually know their users. They have very specific use cases. And so, …”
Schimpf: Sam Altman publicly committed OpenAI to supporting US national defense
“Sam especially has been very clear that he supports our war fighters and he cares about having the best minds in AI working on national security and like who better exists to work through these hard problems.”
Andreessen: Six Top AI Models Are Hitting a Performance Ceiling
“There is this very interesting asymptotic kind of thing that's happening right now where, you know, two years ago, there was one, you know, LLM that was like way out ahead of everybody else's, which was opening eyes. And sitting here today, there's like six th…”
Wang: OpenAI and Anthropic must build application businesses to stay independent
“You have to believe that, that an open AI or an anthropic can build great applications businesses to for them to be longterm independent and sustainable.”
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…”
Consumers unknowingly pay third-party wrapper apps for free OpenAI models
“If you're a normal person who doesn't know the names of these models, you might not understand that, like, on this other app, you're paying for access to the free version of the OpenAI model that you would get on ChatGPT.”
D'Angelo: Frontier AI model providers will maintain strong profit margins
“And so it's, you know, right now it's OpenAI, Google, maybe Anthropic. Maybe, maybe Meta can be there. Those who can get there, I think it's going to be good business. You'll be able to make a lot of money. You can have good profit margins. You'll have to work…”
Ghodsi: Enterprise CEOs want proprietary AI models to protect their data
“One of the things that's really interesting that's happened in the sort of brains of the CEOs and the boards is that they realize Maybe I can beat my competition. Maybe this is the kryptonite that will help me kill my enemy. I have the data with generative AI.…”
Murati: AI market will feature a diverse range of models
“You can see even today, you know, we make a lot of models available through our API and from the various, from the very small models to our frontier models, and people don't always need to use The most powerful, the most capable model. Sometimes they just need…”
Murati: No evidence that scaling compute and data is slowing AI progress
“So there isn't any evidence that we will not get much better, much more capable models as we continue to scale them across the axis of data and compute.”
Murati: OpenAI had already trained GPT-4 before releasing ChatGPT
“One thing that people forget is that actually at this time we had already trained GPT-IV. And so internally at OpenAI, we were very excited about GPT-IV and sort of Put Chagipiti in the rearview mirror.”
Murati: Reaching AGI will likely require breakthroughs beyond pure model scaling
“Whether that takes you all the way to AGI or not, that's a different question. There are probably some other breakthroughs and advancements needed along the way, but I think there's still a long way to go in In the scaling laws and to really gather a lot of be…”
Parsons: Midjourney iterates on image models faster than OpenAI
“But then, of course, you have now tools like Midjourney, who've been, like, iterating on their text-to-image model, like, a lot more aggressively than OpenAI, who Understandably, I think maybe have some other things in the cooker, you know, which have now grow…”
Kha predicts top venture outcomes will reach $100B with OpenAI and Anthropic
“Soon to be probably a hundred billion by the time Anthropic and then OpenAI came, come out.”
Sawhney: OpenAI models prune search trees instead of brute-forcing proofs
“You can sort of look at it, and it's reasoning like a mathematician, and because it knows a few very correct bits, it makes the right decisions and is eventually able to prune the search tree. It's not really trying everything. It tries a lot of different thin…”
Selke: OpenAI models discovered better bounds for spherical and binary codes
“Our models found better bounds for these cases as well.”
Selke: Coding theory was Astra's only proof requiring human interaction
“This was the one case where there was some interactivity involved. So for all of, so except for this pair, it was just, you know, we had some problems, we fed them in, and we you know, the model came back with some solutions.”
Sawhney: AI models update proof path likelihoods better than humans do
“The model somehow is much better able to, like, it seems, for several of the solutions we've seen, somehow it seems much better able to update the solution, like, how likely the path is to work, like, versus rejecting a path versus a human doing it.”
Bornstein: OpenAI and Anthropic models remain more critical than open source
“At any given point in time, including now, I think models from open AI and Anthropic are kind of more widely used and more critical kind of in general than open source models.”
Bornstein: Startups like Cursor and Harvey shifted to open source for customization
“But I do think we passed a threshold in like, I want to say about a year ago where a bunch of smaller companies or like new application companies, as they were trying to figure out, how do I really build an AI? Without just being a wrapper on top of open AI, t…”
Moore: Perplexity Comet Peak Download Traffic Reached 5x OpenAI Atlas
“If you look at kind of the highest spike for Comet and Atlas in terms of visits to the download page, Comet is five times ahead of Atlas”
Acharya: ChatGPT Has Reached 900 Million User Signups
“They have signups for nine hundred million people”
George: OpenAI has 30 to 40 million paying users
“There's, you know, whatever, probably 30 to forty million paying users today. The other platforms are kind of a rounding error relative to that. So maybe add another 10. So there's like, forty million people paying for this stuff today at some level. And, you …”
George: Most of OpenAI's Cash Burn Is Driven by Research and R&D
“The actual, like most of the burn comes from research, like research, like R and D, you know, and so future investments.”
Evans: Google and OpenAI cannot reliably execute Apple's Siri vision
“I mean, Google, I don't think Google or OpenAI could deliver the Siri demo that Apple gave two years ago. I mean, they could really do the demo, but they couldn't like consistently reliably make it work.”
Sherman Wu: OpenAI pilots free training for shared enterprise data
“If you actually build with a reinforcement fine tuning API, you can actually get discounted inference and potentially free training too, if you're willing to share the data”
Sherman Wu: OpenAI deployed a local model at Los Alamos National Lab
“We actually do have a local deployment. At Los Alamos National Labs. It's super cool. I went to visit it. It's like very different than what I'm used to. But yeah, in a like, you know, classified supercomputer with our model running there.”
Sherman Wu: Developer retention on OpenAI's API remains surprisingly high
“For or like the retention of people building on our API is like surprisingly high especially when people thought you could just kind of swap things around. You might have, you know, like even tools that help you swap things around. But yeah, the stickiness of …”
Sherman Wu: OpenAI views ChatGPT and Sora as interfaces for core intelligence
“At the end, like, at the end of the day, OpenAI is like a, an AGI company. It's like an intelligence company. And so, agents are just, like, one way in which this intelligence kind of be manifested. And so, the way that I'd say we actually think about internal…”
Sherman Wu: OpenAI has seen zero API cannibalization from open models
“Yeah, I mean, to be clear, like, we have not seen cannibalization at all.”
Epoch AI: Microsoft's Mount Pleasant data center will consume half NYC's power
“The one we found that's actually seriously underway and has permits and is, you know, setting up the electrical infrastructure for is one by Microsoft, which is going to be used by OpenAI, at least in part in Mount Pleasant. They're calling it Microsoft Fairwa…”