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 229 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 2 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
Ballmer: Google remains only a one to one-and-a-half trick pony
“I might argue that Google's a one to one and a half trick pony. Still. I mean, if you just look at its revenue.”
Eich: Google is complicit with digital ad fraudsters by collecting fees
“And that Google still gets the fee when this advertising money is stolen by fraudsters makes Google complicit with the fraudsters to some degree. It misaligns the interests again. It's a conflict of interest.”
Eich: Mozilla became captured by Google and cannot compete on distribution
“When I was thinking about Brave, I realized not only had Mozilla become captured by its search partner and was probably going to die because it couldn't compete, not just on Chrome intrinsic qualities, but on distribution, which really matters at scale.”
AI Will Capture the Highest-Value Search Query Use Cases
“AI might take away the majority of the use cases of search, and even if it doesn't, I bet it takes away a lot of the highest value ones.”
Google's AI Market Share Will Stabilize Between 25% and 50%
“They own 90% of the search market. I don't know what they own of the AI market, but it ain't 90%. Is it 25%? I don't know, but at steady state it probably will be something like 25, maybe up to 50%, but This is going to be a market with several big players in …”
2017 Began a 5-Year Period of Google Failing on Transformers
“It is fair to say that 2017 begins the five-year period of Google not sufficiently seizing the opportunity that they had created.”
Google TPUs Are Only Scaled AI Chip Deployment Besides Nvidia
“They're a chip company with their Tensor Processing Units, or TPUs, which is the only real scale deployment of AI chips in the world besides Nvidia GPUs.”
The 2011 Google Brain 'Cat Paper' Drove Hundreds of Billions in Revenue
“I think it's not that much of a leap to say that the cat paper led to probably hundreds of billions of dollars of revenue generated by Google and Facebook and ByteDance over the next decade.”
DeepMind Would Be Worth $500 Billion as an Independent Company
“This is an asset that Google owns today that, again, I think is worth half a trillion dollars if it's independent.”
Google Is Only Company with Both Frontier Model and AI Silicon
“Somebody put it to me in research that if you don't have a foundational frontier model, Or you don't have an AI chip, you might just be a commodity in the AI market, and Google is the only company that has both.”
Noam Shazeer Urged Google Leadership to Replace Search with Transformer Models
“Gnome, though, immediately starts advocating to Google leadership. Hey, I think this is going to be so big, the transformer, that we should actually consider just throwing out the search index And the 10 blue links model and go all in on transforming all of Go…”
Waymo Can Become a Google-Sized Business if Costs Drop
“You could see a path to a Google-sized opportunity for Waymo as a standalone company just through this analysis, as long as they figure out a way to get costs down to the point where they can run this as a large and profitable business.”
Google's DeepMind Buy Directly Spawned Modern AI Labs
“This company and this purchase of it by Google was the butterfly flapping its wings equivalent moment that directly leads to OpenAI, ChatGPT, Anthropic, and basically everything.”
Steve Jobs Lawsuit Threats Kept Pinch-to-Zoom Off Early Android Devices
“So Steve Jobs threatens to sue Google over implementation of multi-touch gestures. And so, as a result, Android for several years doesn't have things like pinch to zoom or the sort of swipe operating system UI navigation gestures, and I'm pretty sure if you re…”
A Divested Chrome's Only Viable Business Model Is Selling Search Traffic
“If the DOJ's ruling is that Google has to divest Chrome, there is one way that Chrome is a business, and that is getting paid by Google to drive traffic to Google as a search engine. It's the only way to operate a business of a browser.”
Google Is the Only Tech Giant to Extend Its Business Across Eras
“Nobody stretches a business model across technology eras. Nobody. And Google did it.”
Ad Auction Liquidity Guarantees Google's Search Traffic Remains Uniquely Valuable
“The most liquid auction
Will always win, and Google has already run away with the search ads auction liquidity, and so traffic on Google searches will forever be worth more than traffic on the second place browser.”
Google Chrome Kept the Web Alive as a Viable Application Platform
“I don't think it is an exaggeration to say that Chrome kept the web alive. As a viable platform for applications.”
Microsoft Would Have Won Mobile OS Licensing Without Google Buying Android
“If they don't buy Android and they don't get started basically in the month that they did, this market belongs to Microsoft.”
Successful Google Products Require Core Academic-Grade Technical Insights
“Almost all of Google's successful products are based on a core technology insight that is underneath the whole thing. The type of insight that could be in an academic journal.”
Page and Brin offered to sell Google to GoTo for $200M
“And Larry and Sergey Before they raised the Sequoia and Kleiner round came to Bill and said, what about two hundred million?”
Rosenthal: Google Has the Best Business Model in Corporate History
“It's the same beautiful ballet where every piece of the Google business model works together and reinforces the other pieces, and in concert it creates the best business model of all time.”
Rosenthal: Google would not have succeeded if GoTo acquired it
“Well, there's almost zero chance that Google becomes Google if that deal had happened, so”
Portals optimized for retention while Google optimized for exit speed
“This is basically why Google beat Yahoo. I mean, there's a lot more to it, but The portals all had this mentality of we want to build more and more and keep people on our site, in our ecosystem, continue to look at our banner ads, and Google, from this point, …”
Zuckerberg: Meta might be twice as profitable if it owned mobile platforms
“You know, we did this calculation or estimate at some point where it's like, how much money do we lose from our core family of apps to the various, like, taxes that the platforms have to, like, when they tell us we can't run the ad business the way that we thi…”
Gilbert: Microsoft would have missed mobile regardless of the DOJ antitrust case
“Even without the whole DOJ thing, Microsoft probably would have visted themselves. Microsoft almost certainly would have missed mobile because there's no chance they would have realized that the business model that Google had Meant that they were gonna win in …”
Benchmark almost assuredly could have won a slot in Google's Series A
“But could they have beaten one of those two firms to get one of the two primary VC slots in Google? Almost assuredly. I mean, at this point, this was Bench where they had just done eBay. You know, they were at the height of their powers. They were the internet…”
Gilbert: Data gravity gives AWS an ML moat over Google's superior models
“What's becoming clearer to me is the machine learning capabilities that Amazon has need to be good, but they actually don't need to be as good as Google's. Because here's sort of the strategy with machine learning. You're gonna use whatever ML is available wit…”
Gilbert: Microsoft and Google initially missed the cloud wave via PaaS
“And the unfortunate thing for Microsoft and for Google, who really started at this platform as a service layer, was you basically didn't get the startups because you didn't have a mature platform yet that people were excited to build on and understood how to b…”
Rosenthal: Google effectively killed eBay through superior search
“Honestly, I mean, I think this is drawing too broad of a brush, but I think Google killed eBay, right? You know, the best way to search eBay is Google. It's not eBay.”
Eich: Google Chrome Changed in 2018 to Auto-Sign In Users for Ad Tracking
“In 2018 September, Google said, gosh darn it, people aren't signing into the browser enough. We're going to just do it whenever you sign in to Gmail or YouTube in a tab. We'll just sign you in across all the tabs and we'll track you.”
Unprofitable AI Startups Are Not Self-Sustaining Competition for Google
“None of these AI companies are generating net income, and just because they've raised a huge amount of money, It doesn't mean that will last forever. They'll all burn through their existing cash in a pretty short period of time, and if the spigots ever dry up,…”
Google Paid $2.7B to License Character.AI and Rehire Noam Shazeer
“Google ultimately in twenty-twenty-four, after ChatGPT launches, pays 2.7 billion dollars, I think, to do a licensing deal with Character AI, the net of which Gnome comes back to Google.”
OpenAI Probably Would Not Exist if Google Had Bought Tesla
“I mean, I think if that had happened, DeepMind would not have gone down in the same way, and probably OpenAI would not have gotten founded.”
Google Is Threading the AI Needle Better Than Other Big Tech
“I think if you look at all the big tech companies, Google, as unlikely as it seems given how things started, Is probably doing the best job of trying to thread the needle with AI right now, and that is incredibly commendable to Sundar and their leadership.”
Page and Brin Would Rather Risk Bankruptcy Than Lose at AI
“Larry and Sergey control the company. They have been quoted repeatedly saying that they would rather go bankrupt than lose at AI.”
All Eight Transformer Paper Co-Authors Left Google Within Years
“And also, of course, within a couple years, all eight authors of the Transformer paper had left Google to either start or join AI startups, including OpenAI.”
Google Cloud Exceeds $50B Run Rate at 30% Growth
“And today, they're over fifty billion dollars in annual revenue run rate. It's growing 30% year over year. They're the fastest growing of the major cloud providers, five X in five years.”
Modern AI Revolution Is Predicated on Google's 2017 Transformer Invention
“The entire AI revolution that we are in right now is predicated by the invention of the transformer out of the Google brain team in 2017.”
In the Mid-2010s, Nearly Every Prominent AI Researcher Worked at Google
“Basically, every single person of note in AI worked at Google, with the one exception of Yann LeCun, who worked at Facebook.”
Google Announced Gemini Reached 450M Monthly Active Users
“So they announced there are now four hundred and fifty million monthly users of Gemini.”
Google Operates an Estimated 2 to 3 Million Custom TPUs
“But today, Google, it's estimated, has two to three million TPUs. For reference, Nvidia shipped, people don't know for sure, somewhere around four million GPUs last year.”
Eric Schmidt Proposed Google Acquire Tesla for Self-Driving Tech
“There's what Eric Schmidt wanted, which is crazy. He proposed, oh, let's just go buy Tesla, and that'll be our starting place, and then we'll just put all of our self-driving equipment on all the cars.”
DeepMind Is Among the Greatest Tech Acquisitions Ever
“They bought this thing for, we'll talk about the purchase price, but it's worth, what, five hundred billion dollars today? I mean, this is as good as Instagram or YouTube in terms of greatest acquisitions of all time.”
Waymo Has Burned $10B to $15B Developing Autonomous Driving
“When you consider this opportunity, they have burned somewhere in the neighborhood of 10 to fifteen billion dollars.”