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 133 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 9 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
George: Anthropic and OpenAI add more monthly revenue than tech giants
“Anthropic and OpenAI are adding more revenue per month than Meta, Google, or Microsoft.”
David George: Anthropic and OpenAI combined run rate could hit $200B
“And I wouldn't be surprised if the combination of those two companies is doing two hundred billion of revenue run rate.”
David George: AI market is not currently in a bubble
“I feel pretty confident saying that we're not in a bubble right now.”
George: AI model companies are adding more revenue than public software combined
“The model companies are adding more than the entire public software universe in terms of revenue added, you know, combined.”
George: Top AI IPOs will individually exceed all recent VC IPOs combined
“We actually did a similar analysis where we looked at all of the VC backed IPOs that happened over the last six years. And if you sum all of them up, they're A little over a trillion dollars. Like that's probably gonna be smaller than any of the three of the l…”
George: AI coding assistant Cursor has reached billions in revenue
“Cursor, as an example, is, you know, billions of dollars of revenue. And they're very small, and it's very early in their life.”
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.”
George: Capital Directly Compounds Advantage for AI Labs
“But right now, especially with the labs for the first time, you know, in my career, you can take capital and throw it at a company and it compounds their advantage.”
George predicts AI wave will create over $25T in new market cap
“The last cycle created 25 trillion in market cap, new market cap, and a bunch of that went to the incumbents. But a lot of it went to startups and the new startups, and, you know, each one of these subsequent waves gets bigger than the prior one, and so, you k…”
George: Harvey's early software usage was mediocre despite strong commercial buzz
“They did a really good job commercially early days. Like, because they were smart. They were res, there was like a research plus lawyer combo. You know, they got some momentum and some, you know, high profile law firms to sign up early days. But, you know, the…”
George: AI diffusion beyond coding will be slow because tasks lack verifiability
“Coding hit, but that's kind of a head fake, right? Like coding, coding is perfectly documented, right? So it has like perfect data. It's verifiable and it's simulatable, right? And so like most tasks in business do not share those three attributes. And so, you…”
George predicts consumer AI's final form will be proactive agents, not chatbots
“The end use case for consumers is not going to be a chatbot interface. Like that's the skeuomorphic version. We're going to have a native version. It's going to be proactive. It's going to do work on our behalf.”
George predicts robotics will surpass language AI categories within ten years
“We are nowhere on robotics, but I think robotics is going to be bigger than the language stuff. And I think it's going to happen in the next 10 years.”
The AI Market Will Be Non-Zero-Sum Across Labs, Open Source, and Apps
“Like, this is not an or thing. It's an and thing, right? Like, this is an and thing. Frontier's gonna work really well. Like, N minus one models are gonna work really well. Open source is gonna work really well. There's gonna be a bunch of application companie…”
Top a16z Portfolio Engineers Now Write Over 90% of Code With AI
“Our most sophisticated engineers, you know, were doing whatever, 20% of their code, you know, with AI to like, you know, whatever, 90 plus.”
AI Compute Capacity Will Remain Massively Undersupplied Through 2028
“So it seems more likely than given that fact pattern, if you go back to just the sort of macro situation that we're in, that we're, we under build on the supply side. For like through 28. And by the way, like there's no capacity available with all the forecast…”
George: Corporate layoffs reflect trimming fat, not AI efficiency gains
“What's happening with some of the layoff things that we're seeing is kind of like trimming of previous fat. Like I don't think it's actually efficiency gains.”
George: Fewer than five companies currently offer frontier AI models
“Right now the number is smaller. It's not five. There's a tremendous amount of inelasticity for frontier intelligence right now.”
George: Scaled data center capacity unavailable until late 2028 or early 2029
“You can't get data center capacity at scale until late 28, early 29 right now, and that's just a fact.”
George: AI market will remain supply-constrained rather than bubble
“But I think it's more likely we remain supply constrained for the next three years than then we end up in bubble territory.”
David George: Top AI companies outperform SaaS while spending less on S&M
“The best AI companies that are growing the fastest are not the ones spending the most amount of money on sales and marketing, and they're spending less money on sales and marketing than their SaaS counterparts. And yet they're growing much, much faster.”
George: Exceptionally high gross margins in AI pitches trigger a16z skepticism
“So in an odd way, if we see an AI pitch and the gross margins are super high, we're a little bit skeptical because that may mean that the AI features are not actually what is being bought or used by the customers.”
George: High ARR per employee in AI is driven by demand outpacing hiring
“I would say my observation from our companies, even the AI native ones is they run leaner. Partially because they've just grown so quickly and the demand is so strong. I wouldn't say yet we're at the point where companies have fully reimagined the way they run…”
David George: AI will be the biggest model buster of his career
“Most importantly, we think that AI is going to be, you know, the biggest model buster that I've seen in my career, certainly.”
George: Oracle will be cash flow negative for years due to CapEx
“They're going to go cashflow negative for many years to come.”
David George: AI model companies will add 75-80% of public software's net revenue in 2026
“And I think if you were to do that same comparison for 2026, all of the entire public software industry, I mean, SAP, this is not just SaaS, like including SAP and older software companies. I think the AI companies, the model companies will be something like 7…”
George: $4.8T AI CapEx requires $1T annual AI revenue by 2030
“So current estimates put cumulative hyperscaler CapEx at a little less than five trillion by 20 30. So if you do napkin math on that to achieve a 10% hurdle rate on that 4.8 trillion or almost five trillion of investment, annual AI revenue would have to hit ab…”
George: AI CapEx payback will occur between 2030 and 2040
“I think the payback of this probably happens, you know, over a longer period of time, like, you know, between 2030 and 20 40 as well.”
a16z View: AI will become a ubiquitous utility like electricity or Wi-Fi
“Our house view now is that AI is going to end up like, You know, electricity or wifi. Like if you're getting, if you're accessing, you know, electricity at somebody's house, you're not like, Hey, let me chip in, you know, a few pennies for, you know, sitting i…”
Over half of global internet users have already used AI tools
“It's probably well over half of the global internet population has used AI tools already.”
AI infrastructure will be utilized more predictably than early internet broadband
“That is heartening to me that the supply build out will be utilized. Maybe in a more predictable way than, you know, broadband in the early internet build out days just cause it, you know, it's built on the back of the previous infrastructure stuff.”
George: a16z is lenient on AI startup gross margins expecting cost drops
“Relative to like mature SaaS apps, we probably are a little bit more lenient on assessing a company's gross margin today, because we strongly believe that their input costs are going to go down over time.”
George: OpenAI Has More Monetization Upside Than Downside Risk
“I think there's way more upside to monetize the base than there is risk of price pressure on, you know, today's thirty million people paying for it.”
George: Portfolio Coding Startups Will Instantly Switch Models for Better Performance
“If there's a new coding model that comes along, that's better than the latest version from Anthropic, like, Our coding companies will just switch and it's pretty easy to do because it's an API call.”
George: Enterprises will not vibe code their own Salesforce replacements
“I don't think that like companies are going to vibe code up like their salesforce.com. That's just not worth it.”
George: a16z was the first outside investor in xAI after Elon Musk
“XAI. First outside money in beyond Elon.”
George: a16z expects a 3x to 4x return on Databricks investment
“I happen to think that the return profile of that recent one in Databricks is, is very attractive. But, you know, we don't want an entire portfolio of things that we think are like pretty safe two X's, you know, where I think the question is, can we make five …”
George: AI Startups Need UI, Data, and Pricing Shifts to Beat SaaS Giants
“I think for startups to win, I think you need all three and that's just in the head-to-head stuff.”
George: There is currently no second Ilya Sutskever available in AI
“Like right now, there's not another Ilya floating around in the AI market”
George: Low gross margins signal real product engagement for AI startups
“We always look at the gross margins, and it's become like a badge of honor for them to actually have low gross margins, because we're like, oh my god, people are actually using your AI stuff. But if you show up, and you're like, I'm an AI company, and it's lik…”
George: AI model capabilities on higher-order tasks double every seven months
“I think if you give it a set of tasks that are slightly higher order, I think the models are currently doubling their capabilities every seven months.”
George: Google's Gemini models are currently state-of-the-art across multiple domains
“They actually have the best models right now. Like, they have the leading, you know, the state-of-the-art models in Gemini across a bunch of different domains.”
George: AI business models will adopt freemium over simple subscriptions
“And so, you know, I think there's a question of how it will play out. Will it just be a simple subscription or is there gonna be something more You know, freemium that comes along. I would bet on the latter. I would bet on the latter.”
George: AI market value will accrue primarily to applications and chips
“We're very high conviction that at the application layer you will have tremendous value and at the chip layer you will have tremendous value.”
George: Tech Investing Power Law Is Most Extreme in Decades
“Right now, clearly the power law is more extreme than it has been in the last, you know, 10 to 20 years of technology investing, probably going back to, you know, the emergence of the network effect driven consumer companies.”
George: a16z's best-performing early-stage venture funds have a 60% loss rate
“And so, you know, if you look at our best performing venture funds, Over time, I think the loss rate is 60% or so.”
George says post-reasoning AI models drove an adoption takeoff for Harvey
“Now, fast forward, post reasoning models, like that totally flipped. And you could see, you know, absolute takeoff of adoption, right? And so a bunch of different things happen at the same time. Lawyers got way more value out of the product. You could see it i…”