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 23 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 1 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
OpenAI Rushed ChatGPT Launch After Learning of Anthropic's Chatbot Plans
“So, Anthropic was working on what would become Claude, and rumors were out there, and people at OpenAI Got wind of like, oh, hey, Anthropic and Dario are working on a chat interface. We should probably do one too. And if we're gonna do one, we should probably …”
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.”
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,…”
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.”
Microsoft's $1B Deal Spurred OpenAI's Captive For-Profit Restructuring
“And while they're there, they hash out a deal for Microsoft to invest one billion dollars into OpenAI in a combination of both cash and Azure cloud credits. And in return, Microsoft will get access to OpenAI's technology, get an exclusive license to OpenAI's t…”
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.”
Elon Musk Deserves Credit for Early OpenAI Researcher Recruiting
“And I think Elon deserves a lot of credit for having his name and his time attached to OpenA at the beginning. A lot of the big heavy hitter recruiting was Elon throwing his weight behind this.”
OpenAI Originally Planned to Be a B2B API Business Before ChatGPT
“They also just throw up a paywall randomly because they thought that the business was going to be an API business. They thought that the projections were all about how much revenue they were going to do through B to B licensing deals. And then they just realiz…”
OpenAI Only Collected $130M of Its Initial $1B Pledge
“The funny thing is, it was later reported that a billion dollars was not actually collected. Only about a hundred and thirty million of it was actually collected to fund this nonprofit.”
Google Doubled Its Offer to Keep Ilya Sutskever Before OpenAI
“Google came back with a big counter, something like double the offer, and I think it was delivered from Jeff Dean personally, and Ilya said, nope, I'm doing this.”
OpenAI is reported to have exceeded a $1 billion annualized revenue run-rate
“ChatGPT made it so OpenAI is rumored to be doing over a billion dollar run rate now. Maybe multiple single digit billions, and still growing, meaningfully.”
Rosenthal: Only giant platforms like Meta can afford to commoditize AI models
“Only a company of the scale of Meta can kind of run this playbook, playbook in quotes, because no startup is going to be like, oh, okay, what is my strategy to make sure that OpenAI and Anthropic don't get leverage over me?”
Huang personally delivered the first DGX supercomputer to OpenAI
“DGX, the first version that we built was used internally, and I delivered the first one to OpenAI”
OpenAI was founded to reach artificial general intelligence before major tech companies
“The founding of OpenAI was motivated by the desire to find AGI or Artificial General Intelligence first before the big tech companies did.”
Training early large transformer models was financially untenable for anyone except Google
“GPUs and NVIDIA and the transformer made it possible, but to work with the size of models you're talking about spending an amount of money that's certainly for a nonprofit and anybody really except Google was untenable.”
Generative AI and cloud compute convergence is Nvidia's greatest growth tailwind
“And the combination of those three things turns out to be basically the single greatest moment that could ever happen for NVIDIA.”
Microsoft Invested an Additional $2B in OpenAI in 2021
“So after that, Microsoft invests another two billion dollars in OpenAI, which seemed like a lot of money at the time.”
Microsoft Announced $10B OpenAI Investment in January 2023
“January 23, when OpenAI hits a hundred million registered users for ChatGPT, Microsoft announces they are investing another ten billion dollars in OpenAI. And says that they now own 49% of the for-profit entity.”
OpenAI Introduced Pre-trained Transformers with GPT-1 in June 2018
“So in June of 2018, OpenAI releases a paper describing how they have taken the transformer and developed a new approach of pre-training them on very large amounts of general text on the internet, and then fine tuning that general pre-training to specific use c…”
ChatGPT reached 100 million active users faster than any application
“First, with OpenAI's ChatGPT, which became the fastest app in history to a hundred million active users”
Microsoft is the exclusive cloud infrastructure provider for OpenAI
“Microsoft is the exclusive cloud infrastructure provider for OpenAI, which runs, as far as we know, solely on NVIDIA infrastructure, but they buy it all through Microsoft.”
Ilya Sutskever left Google in 2015 to co-found OpenAI
“So after the dinner, Ilya leaves Google and signs up to become, as we said, co-founder and chief scientist of a new independent AI non-profit research lab backed by Elon and Sam. OpenAI.”
GPT parameter counts grew from 120 million in GPT-1 to 1.7 trillion
“GPT-I had roughly a hundred and twenty million parameters that it was trained on. GPT-II had 1.5 billion. GPT-III had a hundred and seventy five billion, and GPT-IV, OpenAI hasn't announced, but it's rumored that it has about 1.7 trillion parameters that it wa…”