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 27 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 4 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…”
Starship Reusability Drops Orbital Compute Launch Costs Under $1B per Gigawatt
“What you have to compare it to is the cost of launch, and with Starship reusability, that goes to under a billion, so the economics just instantly flip.”
Musk and Huang Co-Designed an Orbital NVIDIA Rubin Rack for 2027
“Elon said that he and Jensen have co-designed a Reuben rack. And there, it's gonna launch in the fourth quarter of 27.”
Baker: Unlike 2000 dark fiber, no dark GPUs exist today
“At the peak of the bubble, 97% of the fiber that had been laid In America was dark. Contrast that with today. There are no dark GPUs.”
Baker: Larry Page said he would risk bankruptcy to win AI race
“Larry Page apparently internally said, I'm happy to go bankrupt rather than lose this race. And I think that is the mentality for sure at Google and perhaps Meta. It's just seen as existential and you have to win.”
Baker: GPT-V is not evidence that AI scaling laws are ending
“GPT-V is a smaller model. It was not designed to be better. It was designed to be more economical for OpenAI and Microsoft to run. Any reference to GPT-V and scaling loss is crazy.”
Anthropic Asks Candidates If They Are Fine With Equity Going to Zero
“Anthropic is now in their culture interviews saying, how would you feel if the equity went to zero? Because we're looking for people who are mission aligned.”
Frontier AI Labs Will Not Generate Free Cash Flow Anytime Soon
“They, I, for sure, I don't think they will generate free cash flow anytime soon. I think they're gonna generate a lot of operating cash flow, and then they'll use that to buy a lot of, you know, GPUs XPUs, whatever, whatever I'm gonna call them.”
Nebius and CoreWeave Compute Payback Periods Are Nine to Ten Months
“We calculate, you know, Nebius and Corweave both gave some interesting disclosures. But you can kind of get to a nine to 10 month payback for Nebius”
SpaceX Achieves Sub-10-Month Compute Payback on Large Rapidly Built Clusters
“And then SpaceX, because they build these really big clusters, and I think a really important point is they bring them on fast. They have an even faster payback, and they can monetize it, you know, higher”
American Open-Source AI Led by NVIDIA Will Reach Near-Frontier Capabilities
“I do think you're going to see American open source led by Nvidia get really close to the frontier.”
Baker: Google's TPU makes it Nvidia's biggest AI chip competitor
“NVIDIA's biggest competitor, it's not AMD, it's not Broadcom you know, it's certainly not Marvell. It's not Intel. It's Google. And more specifically, it is Google, because Google owns the TPU chip.”
Baker: AI may be a sustaining innovation for Big Tech
“I think there's reasonable arguments that AI could be a sustaining innovation because the raw ingredients of kind of data, you know, the capital to buy compute and distribution, which is what you need. All of the big you know, today's biggest tech companies ha…”
Baker: Frontier AI lab gross margins will stay structurally below SaaS
“And the nature of AI because of scaling laws, Richard Sutton's the better listen they're just more compute intensive. So their gross margins are structurally going to be lower. But that doesn't mean they can't be great businesses. I just, I think it's going to…”
Baker: Cursor's token flywheel will become tough for competitors to catch
“And the reality is, Kirscher, now they have a trillion, trillion tokens. And you know, there will be a point where they have enough coding tokens that it's tough to catch them.”
Baker: AI browser startups will regret competing against Google Chrome
“I think the AI companies that have launched these AI browsers may come to regret it, because there's something called Chrome that has whatever it is, five billion users, and if you're Google you know, you can just go look at what happened with Google Buzz.”
Baker: Major custom AI ASIC programs will be canceled within three years
“In the next three years, I think you'll see a bunch of high-profile ASIC programs canceled, especially if Google starts selling TPUs externally, which has been all over X.”
Baker: Global robotics market will be Tesla versus China
“Yeah, very real, and it's gonna be Tesla versus the Chinese in the same way it's Tesla versus the Chinese in, in cars.”
Private Credit Finances NVIDIA GPU Purchases at Low Cost of Capital
“Particularly if you're buying NVIDIA GPUs to a lesser extent TPUs, you can finance these. And there's a very sophisticated, you know. Yeah, it's a very low cost of capital to finance them today.”
Operating Cash Flow Funds the Majority of Current AI Infrastructure Buildouts
“Even today, a majority of this is still being funded out of operating cashflow, which I think is really helpful.”
Behind-The-Meter Data Centers Can Increase Local Town Tax Revenue 10x
“Particularly with behind the meter power generation, when a data center goes in, It transforms a town like tax revenue. It doesn't double it like 10 X's and it is revitalizing all of these like dying small towns all over America.”
A $50 Billion NVIDIA Data Center Requires Only $15 Billion in Equity
“Like, let's say it's fifty billion dollars. For an Nvidia data center, you need a fifteen billion dollar equity check. Okay. You can finance the other thirty five billion.”
Top GPU spenders gained 10-point ROIC increase after raising AI CapEx
“Those companies, since they ramped up CapEx, have seen, call it a 10 point increase in their ROICs. So thus far, the ROI on all the spending has been really positive.”
Anthropic's Next Financial Disclosure Will Likely Show Re-Accelerating Revenue Growth
“And then, you know, I would hypothesize, because they've executed well, probably the next disclosure is a re-acceleration, and then there's always this kind of funny game between the frontier model companies.”
Open-Source Models Require the Same Compute as Equivalent Frontier Models
“It takes the exact same amount of compute. All else equal to make an open source token as a, you know, frontier token for a comparably sized model. Now there's a lot of nuances there, but that's broadly true. It's just a question of what are the margins that a…”
Baker: AI business models will shift to outcome-based pricing
“Humans were fundamentally paid based on outcomes, and a lot of AI will be augmenting humans, but probably also replacing some humans, and that will involve being paid paid for outcomes.”
Kimi Model License Demands 30% Revenue Share on Downstream Usage
“And even then the Kimi license, something that I don't think a lot of people appreciate is the Kimi license stipulates a 30% share of any revenue. So, like, Kimi has taken a 30% cut of all the revenue generated on its, and this is because it's open weights, no…”