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
Google Announced a 40% Reduction in Data Center Cooling Energy in 2016
“Very quickly, July of 20 16, Google announces a 40% reduction in the energy required to cool data centers.”
Waymo Raised $3.2B in March 2020 with Alphabet Majority Ownership
“March of twenty-twenty, they raise 3.2 billion dollars from folks like Silver Lake Canada Pension and Investment Board Mubadala, Andreessen Horowitz, and of course, the biggest check, I think, Alphabet, and I think they're always the biggest check, because Alp…”
Sergey Brin Returned to Google as an Employee for Gemini
“Not to mention, apparently, Sergey Brin is, like, now back as an employee working on Gemini.”
Google Translate Was Google's First Production Language Model
“So this is the first large, I'm using large in quotes here, language model used in production in a product at Google.”
Noam Shazeer and Jeff Dean Are Co-Technical Leads for Gemini
“Once they get Noam back, when they do the deal with Character AI, bring him back into the fold, Noam joins the Gemini team, and Jeff and Noam are the two co-technical leads for Gemini now”
Google Designed and Deployed First TPU in 15 Months
“So, the TPU was designed, verified, built, and deployed into data centers in 15 months.”
Google's Core Business Has Grown 5x Since 2015/2016
“Google's core business has continued to grow five X since the end of our Alphabet episode in 2015, 20 16.”
Noam Shazeer Created Google's 'Did You Mean' Spelling Correction
“So the first thing that they do with this work is they create the did you mean spelling correction in Google search. ... Gnome created this.”
Geoffrey Hinton Was a Google Summer Intern in His 60s
“He was a summer intern in somewhere around twenty-eleven, twenty-twelve. And mind you, at this point, he's like 60 years old.”
Google's Self-Driving Team Completed the 'Larry 1000' Within 18 Months
“So, they start the project in 2009. Within 18 months, this tiny team, I think they hired, I don't know, it's like a dozen people or something. They've driven thousands of miles autonomously, and they managed to succeed in the full Larry 1000 within 18 months.”
Pichai Decreed Brain-DeepMind Merger and Gemini Standardization in Mid-2023
“Sundar makes these Two decrees mid-twenty-twenty-three. One, we're merging Brain and DeepMind into one team for AI within Google, and two, we're gonna standardize on one model, the future Gemini, and DeepMind slash Brain team. You go build it, and then everybo…”
Google One Has Over 150 Million Paying Subscribers
“What we do know is there are over a hundred and fifty million paying subscribers to the Google One bundle.”
Google Launched Gemini 1.5 with Market-Leading 1M Token Context Window
“February, twenty-twenty-four, they launched Gemini 1.5 with a one million token context window. Much, much larger context window than any other model on the market.”
Google Nerfed LaMDA in AI Test Kitchen to Five-Turn Conversations
“For the version of Lambda chat that is in AI test kitchen, they stop all conversations after five turns. So you can only have five turns of conversation with the chat bot, and then it's just, and we're done for today.”
Google Stock Dropped 8% After Flubbed Bard Keynote
“After the Bard launch and this keynote, Google stock drops eight percent on that day.”
Google Suffered a Nearly 50% Drawdown After November 2021
“The high watermark was November, 19th of 20 21. Google was right at two trillion dollars of market cap. About a year after that slide began, they were worth a trillion dollars. Nearly a 50% drawdown.”
There Are Currently Over Three Billion Active Android Devices Globally
“Over three billion active Android devices now.”
Google Invented and Published the Revolutionary Transformer Architecture in June 2017
“Google invented the Transformer and published the paper in June of 2017.”
Google Seeded Gmail's 2004 Launch With Just 1,000 Invites
“When they launch it on April first, 2004, they send out 1000 seed invites to Gmail.”
Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat Co-Authored Most Major Google Infrastructure Papers
“And basically, if you look at any big research paper about giant Google infrastructure stuff that was launched from, I don't know, 2000 two-ish, maybe even earlier, through the twenty-teens, Jeff and Sanjay are either the two authors or two of the five authors…”
Google's Orkut Peaked at 300 Million Users, Dominating Brazil and India
“Launches a social network within Google called Orkut, and it didn't become that big in America, but it got at its peak, I think, three hundred million users. It was the biggest social network in Brazil, the biggest social network in India.”
Global Digital Advertising Spend Did Not Eclipse Television Until 2018
“For listeners, digital advertising, you know, Google's universe would not eclipse TV. Until 2017, 20 18.”
Google Maintained 350 Different Mobile Versions of Maps Before Android
“Google is maintaining I kid you not, 350 different versions of Google Maps for mobile for all the just sea of phones out there.”
Larry Page Eliminated All Google Engineering Managers in 2001
“In 2001, famously pre-IPO at Google, Larry Page feels like Google is moving a little bit too slow and gets rid of all engineering managers.”
The Original iPhone Relied on Built-In Google Maps and YouTube Apps
“There are two apps that launch in the very first version of the iPhone. Remember, it didn't have an app store. It was not open to third-party developers. There is a YouTube app and a Maps app, both of which are Google services. Now, the apps are written by App…”
Sundar Pichai Never Worked in Search or Advertising Before Becoming Google CEO
“Interestingly, he had never worked in search or ads.”
Ben Gilbert Calls Google's YouTube Purchase the Best Acquisition Ever
“So, this is officially one of the best acquisitions of all time, and I am raising my grade from a C to an A+.”
Google Has Seven Products with Over Two Billion Users
“Astonishingly, today, Google has 15 products with over half a billion users. Seven of those have over two billion users.”
Google's initial AdWords launch had self-serve and ad quality without CPC auctions
“The first version they launch includes self-serve and includes ad quality.
But it doesn't yet include CPC or the auction, which is funny.”
Rosenthal: Urs Hölzle ran Google's infrastructure from 1999 until 2023
“Urs is now a fellow, but he ran all of Google's infrastructure from 1999 until 2023.”
Google generated $10M profit on $86M revenue in 2001
“Google for the year ultimately did eighty six million dollars in revenue that year, and ten million dollars in profit. So, turned profitable in 2001, like, great numbers by any metric for a startup, and especially in the middle of the dot com winter.”
Rosenthal: Google grew revenue over 5x from 2001 to 2002
“Yep, they more than five X revenue from 2001 to 2002, from the eighty six million to four hundred and forty million in revenue.”
Gilbert: Google's international revenue expanded from 18% initially to half of business
“Year one, because Omid spent the whole year on the plane, 18% of revenue is now international. 2002, it grew to 22%. 2003, it grew to 29%. Today, it's half of Google's business”
Gilbert: Most Google AdSense click revenue goes to website publishers
“Most of the revenue on a click in Google AdSense actually goes to the website publisher, and Google takes the smaller part as their SPF.”
Rosenthal: Early Google Ad Insertion Orders Had to Be Received by Fax
“All ad insertions were done by fax at this time. So Google had to install fax machines at its headquarters to take these insertion orders for these ads that they were selling.”
Stanford received roughly 1% of Google in tech transfer spinoff
“As part of the tech transfer to spin it out of the university, they end up getting like one percent of the company or something like that.”
Google initially monetized search ads using a fixed CPM model
“They're giving advertisers this great product of, hey, we have intent of people searching for these keywords, but Google's just getting paid on a straight CPM basis for what they're selling. They're not participating in the economic value.”
Early Google consumed about half of Stanford's total network bandwidth
“At one point, they're using about half the bandwidth of the entire university to be serving out google.com pages.”
Rosenthal: Google split its search index into 64MB distributed chunks
“Google needed like the entire page to compute all the rankings and find the links, find the backlinks. They needed to architect Google with this huge distributed computing system. So the index was so big that it wouldn't fit on A single machine or a single ser…”
Google AdWords maintained an incredible 85% gross margin
“And as best we can understand it, Google AdWords stayed an 85% gross margin business.”
Rosenthal: Yahoo paid Google $7.2M for search results in 2001
“And the next year in 2001, the first full year of this Yahoo portal search deal, Yahoo pays Google 7.2 million dollars for organic search results.”
Rosenthal: Early Google server hardware failure rate exceeded 10%
“So I read that industry average server hardware failure rate at the time was around like three to four percent per year. Google's hardware failure was over 10%.”
Overture had 8,000 advertisers when Google had only a couple hundred
“They had 8000 advertisers against Google's, you know,
Couple hundred.
That they were selling by hand.”
Gilbert: Half of Google searches were international with zero ad sales
“The other thing that's happening at this exact same time is Eric Schmidt arrives and discovers that 50% of Google's searches are outside the U.S., but they have no international ad sales.”
Jeff Bezos took 25% of Google's $1 million seed round
“And so all in, they end up raising a million dollars, had a ten million dollar post-money valuation, and yes, Jeff Bezos does a quarter of Google's seed round.”
Gilbert: 1999 Netscape deal brought Google three million searchers daily
“I mean, so the Netscape deal brought in three million total searchers per day.”