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 2,685 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 35 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
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.”
Astro Teller: Google Brain Gains More Than Funded All Google X Bets
“Astro Teller, who would take over running Google X after Sebastian Thrun left, he would get quoted in the New York Times in a profile of Google X that the gains to Google's core businesses in search and ads and YouTube from Google Brain Have way more than fund…”
Elon Musk Offered to Buy DeepMind with Tesla Stock in 2013
“He immediately calls up Demis and says, I will buy the company right now with Tesla stock. This is late 2013, like, early 2014. Tesla's market cap is about twenty billion dollars.”
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 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 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.”
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.”
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…”
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…”
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.”
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.”
Waymo Reportedly Surpassed Lyft in San Francisco Gross Bookings in January 2025
“This year, in January, they were reportedly doing more in gross bookings than Lyft in San Francisco.”
Waymo Study Shows 91% Reduction in Serious Injury Crashes vs Human Drivers
“The study that Waymo just released last month showed that they have 91% fewer crashes with serious injuries or worse compared to the average human driver, even controlled for the fact that Waymo's right now are only driving on city surface streets.”
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.”
Google Announced Gemini Reached 450M Monthly Active Users
“So they announced there are now four hundred and fifty million monthly users of Gemini.”
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.”
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.”
Google Maps Generates an Estimated Five to Ten Billion Dollars Annually
“They don't break out revenue, but estimates are that Maps does well over five billion in revenue, maybe even ten billion in revenue.”
Google Docs Has Up to a Billion Users Compared to Office's 200M
“I think if you look at users of docs or sheets or slides, it's in the billion-ish, five hundred million, billion range for each of those. Office, I think, has a couple hundred million users worldwide.”
The Motorola Droid Reached One Million Sales Faster Than the Original iPhone
“That original Droid, I think it sold a quarter million units the first weekend it was on sale, and then it sold a million units faster than the original iPhone had.”
Google Owns Eight Distinct Products With Over One Billion Users
“It is wild that this one company has eight products with over a billion users and started this era with just one search that didn't even have a billion users yet, but search, Android, Chrome, YouTube, Gmail, Maps, Drive, Photos, and then if you count the Play …”
Dimon: JPMorgan merger required 75% board vote to deny him CEO role
“Inside the merge agreement, and this is almost unheard of, when we get the premium, is that to not have me become CEO 18 months later, 75% of the board would have to vote me out. And the board was eight Bank One people and eight J.P. Morgan people.”
Dimon: Big investment banks increased leverage from 12x to 35x before 2008
“The leverage, if you may not remember this, but the leverage, because of accounting rules in Basel III, Basel I, investment banks, particularly the banks, the big investment banks, went from 12 times leverage to 35 times leverage.”
Dimon: JPMorgan Wrote Off Bear Stearns' Entire $12B Tangible Book Value
“It was three hundred billion of assets and a twelve billion dollar book, tangible book value. We wrote off the whole tangible book value in the, when we bought the company to pay, we had to liquidate the loans.”
Dimon: JPMorgan bought WaMu at a $30B discount to book value
“We bought it for a thirty billion dollar discount to tangible book value. Because they had debt, and we left the debt behind. And so, and that thirty billion was approximately what the mortgage loss was gonna be.”
Alphabet generates more net income than any other U.S. company
“Google, and I should say Alphabet today, generates more net income or profit than any other U.S. Company. More than Apple, Microsoft, Exxon Mobil, JPMorgan Chase, Berkshire Hathaway.”
Google technically became the world's largest computer manufacturer
“Pretty quickly, maybe even while Google is still a private company, they technically become the world's largest computer manufacturer.”
Page and Brin told VCs only Steve Jobs met their CEO bar
“There's one person that we met in this whole process who we think meets our bar, who we would be willing to come in and hire as our CEO here at Google. Oh God, who is it? Steve Jobs.”
Ballmer: Microsoft's first antitrust inquiry came from FTC over IBM collusion
“This was our first antitrust problem. I don't know if you guys know this, is the FTC at the time thought we and IBM were working to divide the market because we had done some positioning. What's windows good for? What's always too good for? We and IBM had done…”
Ballmer: Office backend hit cloud infrastructure scale before Azure did
“The office three, what's now M three, 65, the office backend, because that got critical mass as a cloud infrastructure before Azure did.”
Ballmer: Verizon Chose Android Because Microsoft Missed Product Window
“Look, they would've taken our stuff cause they could put pressure back on the manufacturers, but we didn't have the stuff they wanted at the right time. They went Android.”
Ballmer: Microsoft was the first major company to replace options with RSUs
“And we transition then from stock options to stock awards. Which, if you notice, I think we were the first to make that as a major transition, but everybody's made the same transition.”
Ballmer: Neither Gates nor I ever attended a quarterly analyst call
“Bill never went to a quarterly analyst call and I never went to a quarterly analyst call.”
Ballmer: Satya Nadella volunteered to report to Qi Lu to recruit him
“God, there's a lot, and I don't know who throws the idea out at first. Maybe Satya. We should hire Chi, and I should work for him. So Harry, and Harry was all in. Harry worked for Satya, who worked for Chi. No. We flipped it around.”
Epic has zero customer churn among its major hospital clients
“They have the majority of the U.S.'s major hospital systems using their software and of their over 600 customers, they have never lost a single one.”
Epic's core differentiation is its single unified database
“It is true that Epic's core database, the core single database, and this is Epic's big differentiation. There's only one database that every application pulls from.”
Sequoia Capital acquired a massive secondary stake in Epic
“One fun thing is at one point in time, I think this was probably the 2000, maybe a pretty good chunk of those shares Made their way to Sequoia Capital.”
Cerner merged 36 entities together before Oracle acquired it
“By the way, earlier when I said 24 different companies merged together to create Cerner, I forgot that this chart that I'm looking at predates when Cerner then bought Siemens. So then there's another 12 companies that had merged together to become Siemens that…”
Epic posts '10 Commandments' barring IPOs in every campus bathroom
“They have them posted in every bathroom and in every break room across the entire campus. And so any visitor who goes there and it's open to the public, you can just go in and see the 10 Commandments in the bathrooms there. The 10 Commandments are number one, …”
Epic operates with minimal middle management and zero divisional budgets
“So, because of that high level of trust, there's very few middle managers. You understand the system that everybody else works within, and you don't have to corral chaos. Most of the people they're hiring are right out of school, so they've been there for a lo…”
Epic screened candidates using a test written by the founder's 7th-grade son
“And for 18 years, listeners, that was how they tested to determine if someone should work at Epic.”
Epic Systems has no sales department and only eight inbound salespeople
“There's not a sales or marketing department. There are eight or so salespeople, quote unquote, in the company who only react to inbound requests and they all came from either project management or technical specialists.”
Epic sends annual 1-5 report cards to hospital client executives
“So they will send separate report cards.
Every year to your CEO, CIO, and CFO, and they will grade you one through five on a bunch of dimensions, and then they will show you benchmark data against other customers at your peer set of like relative similar size …”
90% of US medical students currently train on Epic's software
“And I think now, 90% of med school students train on Epic.”
Epic's trust rules mandate its next CEO must be a software developer
“One, must be a longtime Epic employee, and two, must be a software developer.”
BCCI became the largest revenue pool in global cricket by late 2005
“He's created the single biggest pool of money anywhere around the globe in cricket as a sport. I mean, this is Way more money that we're talking about here than England or Australia or the West Indies or Sri Lanka, New Zealand, you know, the other cricket play…”