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
Kuyda: OpenAI temporarily abandoned language models for video game agents
“And very quickly they stopped working on language models, and we were very upset because we really wanted to continue going there, but they didn't want to talk about any language models because no one was really working on them and that may have made us feel v…”
OpenAI o3 model completes 40% of internal research engineer pull requests
“That's another data point, by the way, from this was from the O three system card. They showed a jump from like low to mid single digits to roughly 40% of PRs actually checked in by Research engineers at OpenAI that the model could do. So prior to O three, not…”
Altman: Paid recommendation ads would destroy user trust in ChatGPT
“People have a very high trust relationship with ChatGPT. Even if it screws up, even if it hallucinates, even if it gets it wrong, people feel like it is trying to help them and that it's trying to do the right thing. And if we broke that trust, it's like you s…”
Altman: OpenAI aims to be consumers' primary personal AI subscription
“We want to be people's personal AI subscription. I think most people will have one, some people will have several, and you'll use it in some first party consumer stuff with us, but you'll also log into a bunch of other services and you'll just, you'll use it f…”
Altman: OpenAI sees AI model performance 1-2 years ahead of release
“We would not be going this aggressive if all we had was today's model. We get to see a year or two in advance though.”
Altman: OpenAI will likely charge users per video generation for Sora
“I assume it's like some version of you have to charge people per generation when it's this expensive.”
Fedus: Early ChatGPT was mathematically weak due to friendliness rewards
“The reward functions that we were using originally couldn't determine whether you were mathematically correct or not. So early versions of Chachapiti were mathematically not particularly strong, and it sort of results from the reward function. What did you opt…”
Pachocki: AI progress over the next year will dwarf current gains
“But I expect that well, now as we're seeing you know, these models like actually able to automate, well, yes, like we're saying solving contest problems over, over longer time horizons. I expect that that is, well, that's, that, that was quite small compared t…”
Casado: a16z portfolio includes four $100 billion companies
“Even in the Andreessen portfolio, I was just thinking off the top of my head, we have three companies that are at the 104 companies at the hundred billion dollar mark, right? I mean, there's Stripe, Databricks, Coinbase, OpenAI.”
Casado: OpenAI, Anthropic, and Cursor show tremendous real growth
“The reality is, is open AI has grown tremendously, and Anthropic has grown tremendously, and Cursor has grown tremendously, and so, like, there is some underlying market signals To fuel the chaos.”
Patel: Majority of OpenAI's revenue comes from consumer subscriptions
“Anthropic is fully focused on B to B, right? API code, et cetera, right? Where, or cloud code, whatever it is, right? OpenAI, yes, they have that business, Kodaks and API business, but really their majority of the revenue is consumer, right?”
Patel: AI labs are buying RL environments for Amazon and Shopify
“Everyone knows that, like, Anthropic and OpenAI and all the other labs are buying RL environments of Amazon and of, like, Shopify and of Etsy and of all the different ways to shop on the internet. Of airline websites, right?”
Patel: 10% of Etsy's traffic originates from AI chatbots
“It's like Etsy, 10% of their traffic now comes from chat. And OpenAI makes nothing off of that.”
Benchmark-topping AI models are not necessarily what consumers want for chat
“I don't necessarily think the like smartest model that scores the best on sort of all of these objective benchmarks of intelligence will be the model that people want to chat with.”
Fulford: OpenAI recycles agent model datasets to train frontier reasoning models
“We're able to take the data sets that we've created for The, you know, frontier agent models and then contribute it back to the frontier reasoning models.”
Kim: GPT-5 internal testers felt insulted by instant answers to hard questions
“I think we hear this with GPT-Five internally when people are testing and they're like, oh, I thought I asked like a really hard question. I feel like a little bit insulted that I thought for like two seconds or like when it doesn't even want to think at all.”
Isa Fulford: Deep Research was the first AI model to do comprehensive browsing
“Deep Research, it was the first model to do, like, very comprehensive browsing.”
Fulford: OpenAI bootstraps browsing models to generate synthetic training data
“For initial deep research, there's not really any data sets that exist for browsing in the same way that you have a math data set that already exists. So we have to create all this data. But once you have good browsing models or good computer use models, you c…”
Fulford: RL breakthroughs in math and coding unlocked functional AI agents
“When we saw the reinforcement learning algorithm working really well on math and physics problems and coding problems, It became pretty clear, like, just from reading through the chain of thought, like, okay, this thing's actually, like, thinking and reasoning…”
Fulford: ChatGPT agent's browser and terminal access enable most human computer tasks
“The ChatGPT agent, for example, has such a general tool. It has a browser and a terminal, and between those two things, you can basically do most of the tasks that A human does on a computer.”
Patel: OpenAI makes $10B annually, less than McDonald's or Kohl's
“This thing can reason, but it's making open AI ten billion dollars a year. And McDonald's and Kohl's make more than ten billion dollars a year, right?”
Sinofsky: Microsoft will eventually develop much more first-party AI software
“I, it seems obvious that at some point, you know, Microsoft will have much more first party software.”
Olivia Moore: Backlash over 'Sky' voice spooked OpenAI from releasing human-sounding AI
“I honestly think a big part of it might have been when they first released advanced voice mode, if you remember all the controversy around her, And was this gonna be a, you know, a companion that replaced humans, and some of what people would think of as kind …”
Olivia Moore: AI tools justify $200 monthly fees by replacing manual work
“Now with products like Deep Research, for example, that could replace 10 hours of generating a market report by yourself, and so that kind of thing is easily worth, I think for many people, 200 dollars a month, even on like one or two generations.”
Acharya: DeepSeek offered reasoning models for free vs OpenAI's paid tier
“So, one I think important nuance is the fact that they released their reasoning model for free at scale, so previously you had to use O-one Pro, and you had to pay ChatGPT's premium subscription to get access to it.”
Rocha: OpenAI adopting MCP would make it the de facto AI protocol
“Imagine if open AI adopts that, then it's over, you know, like that will be the de facto protocol.”
Appenzeller: All future state-of-the-art AI models will use reasoning techniques
“And I think looking forward, From now on, pretty much any state of the art model will use some of those techniques, and we've seen this already, you know, from models from OpenAI and models from Google that are structurally very, very similar, and this has hug…”
Dixon: OpenAI paid Shutterstock $100M for data licensing deal
“You have open AI going to shutter stock and they paid them a hundred million dollars.”
Sinofsky: DeepSeek DAUs reached roughly 35% of OpenAI's total
“DeepSeq, I think is, was the number I saw this morning is like 35% of the DAUs of open AI.”
Casado: DeepSeek's Threat to OpenAI Is Limited if AI Apps Require Proprietary Models
“It could be that the apps actually require you to own the model. And in that case, DeepSeek is less relevant because they're not building apps. And then, you know, this means that the impact to the opening AIs or Anthropics are not as great, right?”
Schmidt: Fewer than ten organizations worldwide can train Llama-scale AI models
“Yeah, I mean, I would, it would probably be in the number of ones on my hand and it probably wouldn't use all my fingers, you know. Yeah, I mean, you basically have, OpenA, Anthropic, Meta, X, Google, and then you have a few Mistral, and then Deep Seek and a c…”
Multiple top mobile AI apps are copycat wrappers arbitraging OpenAI's models
“So there are quite a few apps on our mobile app list that are essentially copycat products and using OpenAI's own model, but are named slightly differently, and are just kind of playing this, like, maybe short to medium term arbitrage on App Store optimization…”
Horowitz: OpenAI maintains a small headcount relative to its revenue
“Like if you look at open AI, which is the big spender in startup world which, you know, we are also investors and is yeah, headcount wise, they're pretty small against their revenue.”
Ben Horowitz: Pricing on business value tests a startup's true depth
“The test for whether your idea is good is how much can you charge for it? Can you charge the value? Or are you just charging the amount of work it's gonna take the customer to put their own wrapper on top of OpenAI? Like, that's the real test to me of, like, h…”
Horowitz: Only researchers can tell top AI models apart
“I think if you look at the very top models you know, Claude and OpenAI and Mistral and Lama The only people who I feel like really can tell the difference as users amongst those models are the people who study them. You know, like they're getting pretty close.”
Field: OpenAI is aggressively hiring product and design talent
“Look at open AI. Like they're on a hiring acquisition spree trying to get product people and designers right now so that they're able to make great consumer products.”
Scott: OpenAI is by far Microsoft's most important AI partner
“I think if you think about AI, like, by far, in a way, the most important partner we have is is OpenAI.”
Murati: ChatGPT was originally released to gather research feedback for GPT-4
“One of the main things was actually to put chat GPT in the hands of researchers out there that could give us feedback since we had this dialogue modality. And so this was the original intent to actually get feedback from researchers and use it to make GPT-IV m…”
Murati: OpenAI feared ChatGPT was not good enough a week before launch
“It's a strategy that we, we've been using from the beginning and also with ChatGPT where, you know, the week before we were worried that it wasn't good enough. And we also, what happened, you know, we put it out there and then people Told us it is good enough …”
Dario Amodei says he co-invented RLHF while working at OpenAI
“I was one of the, like, co-inventors of that at OpenAI, but since then it's been, you know, improved to power ChatGPT”
Barry McArdle: Context building and model chaining are AI's hardest work
“And I think that is really actually the hard work in many ways of Incorporating AI into your product, right? Like it feels really simple. Like you can go get an API. Anyone listening to this today could go to the open air website and get an API key. It's every…”
Wang: AI apps need end-to-end workflow ownership for long-term defensibility
“And so I think in this next gen of applications built on open AI and open AI's competitors, the way to really differentiate yourself is to further build and develop workflows that are not just sort of a one click button of add AI to X, Y, Z , Is really neat ov…”
Sawhney: Model reasoning traces resemble a collaborator's rough notes
“It's very much like reading a colleague's, like, notes. I mean, it's a little more disorganized in some way, but kind of, like, especially if you work close enough with a collaborator, sometimes you'll just see them, like, spill out their thoughts in an email …”
Litt: Claude was useless for research math until Opus 4.5 or 4.6
“One thing is that ChatGPD got better at math earlier. Yes. So, like, for a long time the Claude models were just, like, not useful for research math. And then I think maybe around Opus 4.5 or Opus 4.6, they, like, more or less caught up.”
Bornstein: OpenAI, Midjourney, and Replicate engineers adopted Cursor early
“Engineers working at the time, the leading AI companies like OpenAI, Midjourney, Replicate, a bunch of others you know, all, all kind of use this and subscribe to this model.”
Acharya: OpenAI is focused on health and finance
“Self-improvement, kind of health and finance are the two areas that OpenAI is focused on.”
Bornstein: Open source was the norm for early frontier AI models
“Open source was the norm for AI models early on, right? I mean, we literally had this company called OpenAI, which, you know, it's become a little bit of a joke. It's not as open as it once was or not nearly as open as it once was, but early on, all, all the f…”
Marc Rowan predicts a surge in tech growth and finance partnerships
“The number of partnerships I believe that are going to Sprout up, whether it is the open AI ecosystem that they're building to be able to democratize their LLM, or is the anthropic ecosystem that is being built to democratize their way of doing things. I think…”