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 6,975 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 83 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
Duffey: Single-supplier reliance creates structural fragility in defense industrial base
“It's really frustrating how much fragility we encounter within the traditional defense industrial base, because we have a sole supplier that's not really that profitable, that was bespoke for the defense industry, and all of a sudden we've really created our o…”
Arizona DPS uses AI body-cam analytics to score officer interactions
“We have analytics at Trulio that's running behind the body-worn camera just to see for the behavior and interaction. Part of that was, you know, looking at, you know, you can do a scorecard for how the trooper is interacting with the public, but it also gets a…”
Caldwell: US is 50 years behind on critical mineral supply
“The US is 50 years behind on critical mineral supply.”
Baglino: US-China factory labor differential is under 10% of COGS
“Yeah, I mean, these, today's factories are really automated. If you're building a new factory today, you know, in China or the U.S., the labor differential is less than 10% of cost of goods sold. It might even be less than five percent.”
Caldwell: US lacks labor pool required to operate critical mineral refineries
“And we don't have that labor pool here that has that embedded know-how that can walk up to a refinery and quickly get it operating on spec, and then also manage that variability.”
Blankfein: Robinhood incorrectly claimed to offer government-insured accounts early on
“I looked at, you know, Robin Hood, great company. But early on, you know, they declared a kind of they declared that they had government-insured accounts that weren't government-insured. They had some slip-ups and a lot of apologies get made. You could do that…”
Blankfein: Goldman Sachs fully hedged its 2008 AIG exposure with collateral agreements
“We were fully hedged because we had bought credit protection. Right. But we also had a collab. So we go, we, a single A credit, got a collateral agreement with AIG AAA.”
Andreessen: AI is the largest increase in programmer productivity ever
“It's like the most dramatic increase in programmer productivity in, like, ever.”
Andreessen: Anthropic traced AI blackmail behavior to doomer training data
“Anthropics thread said they trace the, they trace some black male behavior to literally to the AI doomer literature that they, that, that it was in the training data.”
Andreessen: Federal government headcount reduced by up to 400,000
“The federal government is down. Estimates are as much as 400,000 workers in the federal government since Trump took office the second time.”
Andreessen: Top programmers at portfolio companies are 20x more productive
“At our leading edge companies, estimates are the leading edge programmers are like 20 X more productive than they were a year ago.”
Andreessen: AI is the fastest-growing technology category in history
“Look, this is the fastest category of technology in the entire history of the world, right? In terms of growth rate of usage and revenue.”
Horowitz: 70% of Chinese are AI optimists versus under 30% of Americans
“Over 70% of people in China are optimistic about AI, and less than 30% in America were optimistic about AI.”
Ulevitch: a16z made history's largest bet on US winning next tech century
“We have placed the largest bet in American history on the proposition that this country will win the next century of technology.”
Isaacman: NASA loses $1.4B annually to staffing contractor markups
“About 1.4 billion a year is lost in science and discovery. Because someone, 30 years ago or so, said there's these artificial hiring ceilings on civil servants, so 75% of the workforce became contractors.”
Isaacman: NASA spent $200M last year on a canceled program
“We spent two hundred million dollars last year on a canceled program.”
Isaacman: NASA's $25B annual budget is fully sufficient
“Is twenty-five billion dollars a year plus the plus-up that came from one big beautiful bill enough to get the job done? Yeah, sure as hell is.”
Blackstone wrote off one-third of a private equity fund before 2002
“The private equity business, they'd raised a fund and had made a couple of disastrous investors so that, that were within a year write-offs with about a third of the fund.”
James: Every Blackstone acquisition succeeded, returning at least 3-4x
“Every one of our acquisitions worked. There were two that didn't really move the needle strategically, but we made a very good return on the investment. We probably made three or four times our money.”
DLJ had zero ethical lapses while Credit Suisse failed despite massive compliance
“Credit Suisse had all kinds of ethical lapses. DLJ had none, but they had immense controllers and process and whatnot. DLJ was skeletal.”
30,000 mid-market private equity portfolio companies worth $20T need liquidity
“I think I think one of the great opportunities right now is there's about 30,000 portfolio companies of mid-market private equity firms that can't be sold, can't go public, there's no strategy. You know, 20 trillion or something worth of value. All those compa…”
Rogers: EU investigation into X culminated in 120 million euro fine
“Then, in the same letter, Breton makes reference to another ongoing investigation against X that ostensibly they say had nothing to do with speech. This is the investigation that recently culminated in a hundred and twenty million euro fine.”
Rogers: Draft foreign legislation imposes strict criminal liability on LLM output
“And I've seen draft legislation that imposes like strict criminal liability if the LLM Is even capable of generating certain kinds of content.”
Rogers: Twitter moderation once banned calling a male sex offender male
“Like, we have seen tech workers make decisions, for example, that you should, it should not be permissible on Twitter to call a convicted sex offender, a male, which he is.”
Rogers: Elon Musk buying X catalyzed tech industry free speech shift
“We've really seen the tech industry kind of come to the side of free speech in ways that it hadn't before, Catalyzed significantly by Elon's purchase of X”
Casado: Many Companies Measure AI Adoption by Token Counts
“Right now, many companies are incentivizing people to use AI by counting tokens.”
Levie: AI yields 2x to 3x productivity gains, not 10x
“I don't think that it's a five to 10 X gain. I do think it's a two to three X gain, maybe across the board. You are still rate limited by how quickly can you review this stuff and check on the work.”
Andreessen: People get canceled for beliefs and actions they never actually held
“People, people would get canceled for things they literally never did. And for, you know, for people then imputing beliefs or, you know, some, I don't know, straight comment or misreported comment, and then it gets imputed into, you know, this person is a horr…”
Horowitz: OpenAI and Anthropic will not sell directly to travel managers
“And then the second thing that's like, nobody wants to do, including open AI or Anthropic is sell to the damn travel manager. Like nobody has a channel to the travel manager.”
Horowitz: The US is completely out of available electricity capacity today
“We're pretty much out of electricity now in the United States, like, not, not 12 months from now, like, right now.”
Horowitz: Around $450B was stolen during US COVID stimulus programs
“When we did the stimulus program, we found out that the government is very bad at getting money to people. I don't know, it's like, depending on the numbers you read, it's somewhere around four hundred and fifty billion dollars got stolen.”
Sinofsky: Market underestimates AI economic opportunity by an order of magnitude
“The biggest problem right now is everybody is trying to figure out the economics of all of this when they're off by at least an order of magnitude on how big the opportunity is.”
Blania: World splits iris data across servers to avoid central databases
“And how we approach that is we have multi-party computation. And so that essentially means that, so in our case, when you verify with an orb. You know, we take all these pictures they get computed on the device, and then they actually get split up in multiple …”
Horowitz: $400 billion was stolen from COVID stimulus programs
“I mean, well, just, if you go back to COVID, the stimulus program, like I think four hundred billion dollars was stolen.”
Jennings: Engineers using AI tools achieve 10x to 100x productivity gains
“And what we were seeing is that one or two engineers who was on the tools Is able to be 10, 20, a hundred X more productive.”
Haber: Block executed a 40% workforce reduction driven by AI
“And recently Block executed a roughly 40% reduction in force. And they've been pretty candid about AI being a critical component of that decision.”
Jennings: Block reduced MoneyBot team from 15 to 4 plus AI tokens
“Okay, we're building MoneyBot, and we want to roll MoneyBot out to 50%, and there used to be a team of 15 people working on it, and now there's a team of four people, plus 2000 dollars on the tokens. That, this is like unlimited access to tokens, and you can u…”
Jennings: All Block product managers and designers ship PRs
“All of our designers are shipping PRs. All of our product managers are shipping PRs.”
Luzsicza: US missile defense faces supply shortages and slow manufacturing
“Being somewhat foreign to the missile industry, I realized we don't have enough. They cost too much, and we can't make it fast enough.”
Mendler: The U.S. government has launched satellite missions without ground plans
“Literally there have been a bunch of missions that have been launched with no ground plan.”
Sankar: Defense Department changed more in past year than prior 19 years
“In the last year, more has changed in the department than I've seen change in the prior 19 years, and people are seizing that moment for reformation.”
Sankar: Foundational AI models are rapidly commoditizing
“What I see happening empirically is the models are being commoditized and we're always under pressure.”
Sankar: China now hosts 50% of all global clinical trials
“We used to think Wuxi was just some cheap set of pipetting arms for contract pharmaceutical research, and now, 50% of all clinical trials are being done in China.”
Sankar: Europe created zero €100B companies from scratch in 50 years
“Europe has created exactly zero companies from scratch in the last 50 years worth more than a hundred billion euro. We have created all of our trillion dollar companies from scratch in America in the last 50 years.”
Transformers compute precise Bayesian posteriors down to 10^-3 bits accuracy
“We trained these models and we found that the transformer got the precise Bayesian posterior down to 10 to the power minus three bits accuracy. It was matching the distribution perfectly. So it is actually doing Bayesian in the mathematical sense, given a task…”
Transformers perform all Bayesian tasks, Mamba does most, and MLPs fail
“Transformer does everything. Mamba does most of it. LSTMs do only partially, and MLPs fail completely.”
Michael: Four frontier AI companies rely on pool of 1,000 researchers
“You have four companies that you could call frontier companies, and then you have this sort of major league baseball roster of researchers, like a thousand who they're trading amongst themselves, who, if you ask the leaders of these companies are so incredibly…”
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…”