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 1,871 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: Chinese open-source AI helps US firms catch leading frontier labs
“In a strange way, the Chinese open source model ecosystem is a godsend to any American company that's trying to catch those four leading labs.”
Baker: Debate between humanoid and non-humanoid robots is over
“Is it going to be humanoids or not humanoids? I think that debate is over because humanoids can kind of learn, you know, from watching YouTube videos, and then it's easier for a human being you know, to put on a suit and show the robot how to do it.”
Patel: Relying solely on Broadcom silicon creates a predatory monopoly
“Is, if you're just a rapper around Broadcom, Then you've got a monopoly that's gonna be a very predatory one. And so, one of the big reasons where Cisco is super relevant is you don't just have a Broadcom world with people just wrapping Broadcom, that their sy…”
Masad: Bearish on true AGI breakthroughs due to current AI profitability
“I, I'm kind of bearish on, on, on true AGI breakthrough because what we built is so useful and economically valuable.”
Rose: Students should not pursue computer science degrees right now
“I wouldn't go as a CS degree. I would not go into that right now, you know?”
Andreessen: Hollywood creators avoided political themes fearing career destruction
“These are all the hot button issues that if you screwed them up, you, in, in Hollywood, you got your career destroyed, right? So if you said the wrong thing about COVID lockdowns or vaccines, if you said the wrong thing about Trump, if you said the wrong thing…”
Keith Rabois claims half of the non-military federal government can be cut
“I actually believe you could probably cut 50% of the federal government ex-military easily.”
Rabois: Promoting CFOs to CEO Is Almost Always a Mistake
“Promoted this completely mediocre CFO, which is almost always a bad idea, to be CEO. And she went from mediocre to, like, the worst CEO in the planet.”
Horowitz: Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi's competitors are pseudo-technologists
“He is a real technologist, like not a, you know, pseudo technologist like his competitors.”
Labenz: GPT-4 to GPT-5 capability leap matches GPT-3 to GPT-4
“And if you look back to GPT three, you know, there's a huge leap. I would contend that the leap is similar from GPT four to five.”
Altman: AI regulation should strictly apply to superhuman frontier models
“The one thing I would like is as the models get, the thing I would most like is as the models get truly, like, extremely superhuman capable. I think those models and only those models are probably worth some sort of like very careful safety testing as the fron…”
Horowitz: Falling Behind China in AI Development Is Extremely Dangerous
“China's not gonna have that kind of restriction and you getting behind in AI, I think would be very dangerous for the world.”
Rampell: Zillow's lead gen model is terrible and deserves -100 NPS
“And what Zillow and others do is they just do lead generation. It's a terrible business model from a consumer perspective. Like it should have like negative a hundred NPS because they're just, you're just getting called all day by real estate agents.”
Kaz Nejatian: Real estate agents routinely fabricate competing offers
“Your agent has said something along the lines of this. Oh, they just turned down an offer exactly like that. Or, oh, they have another offer coming on Tuesday. They never have another offer coming on Tuesday. They didn't just turn down an offer like that.”
Nejatian: Federal Reserve interest rate hikes were deeply irresponsible
“The place at which interest rate increased were I mean, I think we can say in hindsight, this was, like, deeply irresponsible for the country.”
Sinofsky: Restricting rural migrant movement enabled China's economic system to work
“In the factories in Shenzhen, there are the rural people, and they're not allowed to just move. Like, they can temporarily relocate for work, and then the state sort of requires them to go back, and in a sense, they are forced to repatriate what they earned as…”
Schimpf: Government grants to Intel are the worst form of industrial subsidy
“Grants are, in my opinion, the worst possible form of this. It's like, you know, giving Intel an outrageous amount of money to build a facility that they didn't believe they had demand for. It's like, why would they not take the money to build a facility? They…”
Casado: Replacing H-1B lottery with pricing helps startups beat big tech
“This system has been gamed for a very long time. It's very hard for startups. To hire because of the lottery system. It's locked up by the large companies, the consultants, Amazon and Google and like that has to change, and I think a very reasonable way to do …”
Bhattacharya: Scientists destroyed public trust by falsely claiming certainty during COVID
“The problem is that scientists conveyed certainty about things they had no business conveying certainty about, and then changed people's lives for the worse as a result of it during the pandemic.”
Dylan Patel: Intel is crawling to NVIDIA in a full-circle reversal
“It's kind of poetic that everything's gone full circle and Intel's sort of crawling to NVIDIA.”
Appenzeller: Intel-Nvidia partnership means AMD is 'fucked'
“I think AMD is fucked, right? I mean, they're, you're just, If your two arch nemesis suddenly team up, that's the worst possible news you can have, right? They were already struggling, right? Their cards are good, their software stack is not, right? They were …”
Patel: Apple has lacked visionary innovation under Tim Cook for a decade
“The reason why Apple hasn't done anything interesting in like, you know, nearly a decade is, is, you know, they've got a not visionary at the head. Tim Cook's greatest supply chain. And they're just plowing the money into buybacks.”
Hsu: AI pharma commercial pitches outpace fundamental research breakthroughs
“I think in many ways the kind of pitch and the framing of these companies precedes The fundamental research capability breakthroughs.”
Acharya: Today there are no marketing problems, only product problems
“There are no marketing problems, only product problems because the technology allows you to be so ambitious on behalf of your customer.”
Mark Cuban calls Zohran Mamdani a progressive Trump who lies to voters
“He learned from Trump. He's the progressive Trump. Just lie. You know, Day one, groceries are going to be cheaper. I'll just, I'll open the grocery store because I'll sound more progressive that way, right? Day one, buses are free. And then everything else, he…”
Mark Cuban says research hospitals are idiots to publish or patent IP
“Because if I'm MD Anderson, if I'm Stanford, any research hospital, any scientist in healthcare, you're an idiot if you publish it. You're an idiot if you patent it. Because it's immediately going to get absorbed into a large language model. And you've lost co…”
Mark Cuban says Pharmacy Benefit Managers are the core problem in healthcare
“You know, everybody, Amazon, everybody else. Okay. We're going to work with the big PBMs. Cause that's where the money is. And I'm like, no, they're the problem.”
Mark Cuban says only Steph Curry and LeBron James are arena draws
“There's only like two players that fill an arena. Steph and LeBron.”
Casado: Non-consensus investing is dangerous because solitary views are often wrong
“It's dangerous to do non-consensus investing. Like, that's a dangerous idea. If you're alone in your view, you may just be missing something.”
Casado: Traditional media turned on tech and hates the industry
“One of them is the traditional media just turned on tech and it hates tech.”
Casado: Tech platform shift value accrues primarily to infrastructure, not apps
“My view is, is the infrastructure is where the value is. Every time you have a platform shift, you'll get a new set of infrastructure companies, and then a bunch of apps get built on top of those. But like the value is going to accrue largely to the infrastruc…”
Joe Schmidt says targeting 85 percent AI gross margins is a mistake
“I think that's a tremendous mistake. Like I think it's actually probably the biggest mistake you can make right now.”
Horowitz: SoftBank and Tiger Global created a mess by over-capitalizing
“As we saw, I think with both SoftBank and Tiger Global, if you try to change that demand supply imbalance, you just end up creating a mess.”
Horowitz argues the venture studio model is fundamentally flawed for founders
“With the studio model, the, to me, the big problem with that historically and, you know, I think Bill Gross was probably the greatest practitioner of that historically is that it's not idea. It's an idea maze. And so and it's very hard to run through the idea …”
Horowitz: Shutting down open-source AI serves regulatory capture and monopoly
“If AI is a super weapon that will also be true there, and so if you believe that, then I think what you want is open source, and I think if you want regulatory capture or monopoly for yourself, you want to shut that down.”
Casado: China excels at AI models but struggles in enterprise software
“Historically, China's just not been able to build software, at least for, like, the prosumer enterprise market, which is kind of my world. They've just never really been able to do that, and so I think that, you know, their ability to compete at, like, a softw…”
Cass: Economic consensus warnings of instant tariff doom were wrong
“Everything from, you know, the direction of the dollar to the performance of the stock market, to the level of retaliation we should expect. There was a sort of consensus Model of here's what's going to happen if you impose tariffs and why it's extreme. It's a…”
Smith: Elon Musk is the only entrepreneur to scale US manufacturing
“Who's the only entrepreneur who's been able to successfully scale manufacturing in America, you know, even in the face of international competition, and it's been pretty credible because his supply chains are far more domestically sourced than most manufacture…”
Cass: A 10 percent baseline tariff would protect domestic production
“My view has always been that a baseline tariff on the order of 10% is a sort of skewing of the playing field in international trade in a way that helpfully reflects a preference for domestic production. And that if you could do it in a way that actually had lo…”
Patel: Microsoft's custom AI silicon lags behind Amazon, Google, and Meta
“Microsoft, their custom silicon kind of sucks but the other three, they're really upping their orders massively over the last year. You know, Amazon is making millions of Tranium. Google's making millions of TPUs. TPUs clearly are like a hundred percent utiliz…”
Casado: The probability of existential doom is higher without AI than with it
“The answer is the PDoom without AI is actually quite a bit greater than the PDoom with AI.”
Midha: Existing regulatory tools are sufficient to manage AI risk
“Marginal risk is, I think, a slightly just more technical way to say, we have the tools to manage risk. We don't need new ones.”
Srinivasan: Twitter elected Trump in 2016, and X elected him in 2024
“Twitter elected Trump, and then Twitter deplatformed Trump, and then ex-elected Trump.”
Srinivasan: Tech platforms face market constraints, but Washington DC is a monopoly
“See the thing is these platforms are at least competing with other platforms, and if Apple or Microsoft or Google makes too bad decision, Then the people on those platforms have exit, they have choice, they can move between platforms, so there's ultimately a m…”
Andreessen: European regulation has made AI illegal, pushing talent to the US
“Europe has basically made AI illegal. Like, they're regulating themselves to death. And so the smart AI people in Europe are moving to the US.”
Noah Smith: Most of Leopold Aschenbrenner's AI predictions have been proven wrong
“I would say that already most of the things he predicted have been invalidated or made irrelevant in the last year and a half, like, and especially in terms, like all the comp stuff about competition with China you know, like it turns out filtration was able t…”
Balaji Srinivasan: The New York Times is A.G. Sulzberger's personal blog
“But with the NYT, they're granted The enormous shield of calling it the NYT, calling it the institution, as opposed to Sulzberger's paper. It is just Sulzberger's paper. It's his blog, right? There's nothing that is printed there without his approval, right?”
Balaji Srinivasan: NYT, WSJ, and WaPo functioned as the presidency's board
“Think of Wall Street Journal, NYT, and Washington Post as the three board of director seats on top of the presidency. The president was, it was like the titular CEO, But the Journal, the Times, and the Washington Post, if they all put their multi-sig key in th…”