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 51 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…”
George: OpenAI and Anthropic added half of public software's 2025 net revenue
“Public software companies added forty six billion dollars of revenue in 20, 25. If you just add up OpenAI and Anthropic on their, on a run rate basis, they added almost half of that.”
Patel: OpenAI signed up to pay Oracle $80+ billion annually
“With OpenAI, it's not, and so there's gotta be some, like, error bars as you go further out in terms of, like, Will OpenAI exist in 28, 29 30, and will they be able to pay the 80 plus billion dollars a year that they've signed up to Oracle with, right?”
Evans: OpenAI's Deep Research marketing case used inaccurate mobile data
“OpenAI launched Deep Research. Their whole marketing case is it goes off and collects data about the mobile market. I used to be a mobile analyst. The numbers are all wrong. Their use case of look how useful this is, their numbers are wrong.”
Sherman Wu: ChatGPT has reached 800 million weekly active users
“The first party app is a really great way to get, you know it was like eight hundred million wows or whatever now.”
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.”
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…”
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.”
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.”
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…”
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…”
Selke: OpenAI models discovered better bounds for spherical and binary codes
“Our models found better bounds for these cases as well.”
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…”
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 …”
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…”
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: 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.”
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.”
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.”
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?”
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.”
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.”
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…”
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.”
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”
Yang: OpenAI Will Integrate Personal Agent Capabilities Directly Into ChatGPT
“I mean, I think that's what Peter Steinberg is working out at OpenAI, right? Yeah. He's probably going to build something to ChatGPT, which everybody uses so that ChatGPT can actually get stuff done for you and, like, maybe feels more human.”
Moore: ChatGPT enterprise usage grew 8x to 9x year-over-year
“ChatGPT enterprise usage, they publish a big study, but it's ups, Somewhat like eight or nine X year over year.”
Truell: Cursor's first acquisition was Supermaven, founded by Tabnine's creator
“The first real M&A we did was SuperMaven. And so This as just one concrete example, this was a team of five people. It was started by the person who had built Copilot, GitHub Copilot before GitHub Copilot, which was tab nine and was also a researcher at OpenAI”
Patel: Sam Altman has softened his opposition to ChatGPT ads
“Cause he's shifted his tone massively on like ads over the last, Six months. Right. He used to be like, no way. And now he's like maybe, you know there's a way to do it without, you know, harming the user.”
OpenAI's GPT-5 scored highest on the physician-trained HealthBench medical benchmark
“They talked about how GPT-V was kind of the highest scoring model on this thing called HealthBench, which is a benchmark they trained with like, 250 plus physicians. To measure how good an LLM is at answering medical questions.”
Kim: WebGPT was the first large language model to use tools
“I originally worked on WebGPT, which was the original first LLM using tool use.”
Andreessen: Andrej Karpathy's open-source GPT-2 costs under $100 to train
“And Andre Karpathy, who was a co-founder of OpenAI, who has left, actually now has an open source version of GPT-II where you can train your own GPT-II from scratch for less than 100 dollars in compute costs.”
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 …”
Murati: OpenAI charter defines AGI as autonomous execution of most intellectual work
“In our chart, OpenAI Charter, we define it as a computer system, basically, that is able to perform autonomously the majority of intellectual work.”
Masad: GPT-3 slashes parser development time from weeks to 15 minutes
“GPT-III is incredibly good at parsing. If you give it a malformed JSON, it will still parse it. Writing parsers is one of the hardest things you can do in programming. Writing parsers in GPT-III is one of the easiest thing you could do. You could spend 15 minu…”
Vasquez: Swedish dropout Gabriel Petersson worked at Midjourney and OpenAI before founding
“So this was a high school dropout from Sweden, came to the U.S. With no education, got a job on MidJourney, then became one of the youngest researchers at OpenAI, and now he started a company.”
Kuyda: OpenAI research shows one-third of ChatGPT usage is writing help
“OpenAI published one of those research one of those studies showing that these are, in fact, the main use cases for Chagipty. I think a third of all, all of the use was around writing writing help.”
Kim: OpenAI grew from 200 employees to several thousand
“It was around like two hundred-ish people, and I think we're close to like a few thousand for sure.”
Mytton: OpenAI operates four to five distinct bot types
“Particularly with AI coming in where something like OpenAI has four or five different types of bots, and some of them you might want to make a more restrictive decision over, but then others are going to be taking actions on behalf of a user search.”