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 146 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 11 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: U.S. debt interest will surpass Medicare and defense spending within years
“If the deficit kind of continues at current levels and we were to refinance the debt at the prices that you know, David was talking about. You know, it's only a few years before spending on interest is significantly larger than spending on Medicare and Medicai…”
Baker: Political involvement is not the best use of Elon Musk's talents
“I think the American party is a great idea. I just don't know that it is the highest and best use of Elon's talents at this moment in time with what's happening with AI. And just, you know, to the extent Elon is a friend of the pod, I just think staying focuse…”
Baker: Grok 4 performed twice as well as competitors on ARC-AGI II
“And so RKGI-II, it has not seen the questions before, and it did roughly twice as good as, you know, the state-of-the-art Google Open AI and anthropic models.”
Baker: Low-cost token production will provide a major competitive advantage in AI
“Being the low-cost producer is really going to matter in AI because at some level, the amount of tokens you produce is intelligence because of test time compute you know, post-training reinforcement learning, and so if you can produce those tokens at a lower c…”
Baker: AI labs without major distribution partnerships must build browsers
“And if you're not going to strike a partnership with one of those distribution channels, you will eventually need to do your own browser”
Baker: Nvidia's H20 chip is two years ahead of Huawei's chips
“It's called two years ahead of kind of the chips from Huawei.”
Baker: China's power supply allows AI chip designs the US cannot support
“China, they do have more electricity. They can do things that we cannot do here in America.”
Baker: Exporting Nvidia H20 chips deters China from creating rival AI accelerators
“It's a smart decision for America to sell this chip that gives America an advantage in AI and keeps China from developing kind of their own domestic alternatives, which could eventually kind of challenge, you know, Nvidia, AMD, you know, other kind of American…”
Gavin Baker: Nvidia's neocloud investments did not boost its revenues
“If NVIDIA had not put any money into CoreWeave, not put any money into kind of other of these neoclouds, I don't think it would have impacted their revenues at all.”
Baker: Nvidia's Blackwell transition is unprecedented, comparable only to the iPhone
“There's never been a product transition like this in the history of semiconductors going from Hopper to Blackwell, you know, kind of the 2022 generation GPU to this one. The only precedent for this on planet earth is the iPhone.”
Baker: CoreWeave runs large GPU clusters as well as anyone
“And I do think core weave runs these big GPU clusters as well as anyone. And there aren't that many people on planet earth who can run them well.”
Gavin Baker: China zero percent likely to build Nvidia rival within five years
“In the next five years, I think zero. I think it's really, really hard.”
Baker predicts Vladimir Putin will be 2025's biggest political loser
“I think Putin is going to lose bigly.”
Baker predicts Xi Jinping will begin decoupling China from Putin in 2025
“I just think Xi is going to begin decoupling from Putin.”
Baker predicts a massive shortage of GPUs and compute capacity in 2025
“We're going to run out of GPUs, accelerators, compute in 2025, the same way we did in 23.”
Baker predicts government service providers will be 2025's biggest business losers
“Government service providers. You do not want to have the United States government at any level as over 35% of your revenue.”
Baker predicts traditional automotive manufacturers will entirely lose their Chinese business
“They're going to lose their Chinese business because they don't make competitive products anymore. If there's not massive protectionism, and we're seeing signs of that, they'll be caught between Tesla and the Chinese OEMs. And I think the only way that this do…”
Baker predicts multiple independent frontier AI labs will be acquired in 2025
“And then I do think you will see a lot of these frontier AI labs that are independent be acquired.”
Baker argues winning AI companies must own their compute infrastructure
“The ultimate AI winner will be the one with the lowest cost of infrastructure costs, the lowest cost of compute. And definitionally, you can't be the low cost provider if you're renting your compute from someone else.”
Baker predicts frontier AI labs will stop releasing leading-edge models publicly
“As far as a specific prediction for 25 because I don't know when that will happen, I think you will see the frontier labs stop releasing their leading-edge models to prevent knowledge distillation and their IP effectively being stolen.”
Baker predicts wokeism will decline while socialist economic policies gain traction
“Wokeism and progressivism will decouple from socialism. I think wokeism and progressivism You know, we'll be on a declining trend, but socialism in terms of the government.”
Baker predicts high bandwidth memory manufacturers will be 2025's best asset
“I think the companies that make high bandwidth memory, going back to, we're gonna run out of compute. It's actually a pretty shocking stat. High bandwidth memory is a bigger part of Nvidia's cogs on GPUs than Taiwan Semi is. And today there's two companies tha…”
Baker predicts Trump and Xi will reach a trade deal isolating Putin
“I think Trump and Xi both want a deal. I think there's a deal to be done that leaves Putin out in the cold, as I referenced.”
Baker predicts enterprise application software will face immense pain in 2025
“Enterprise application software, I think is going to be in a lot of pain.”
Baker predicts AI progress per quarter will exceed yearly progress in 2023-2024
“I think AI is going to make more progress per quarter in 2025 than it did per year in 23 and 24.”
Baker: BRICS nations will never replace the U.S. dollar
“I do not think the BRICS will ever be able to replace the dollar.”
Baker: Musk saved Nvidia during Blackwell delays by proving Hopper cluster scale
“I actually think you can argue that Elon doing that in a lot of ways kind of saved Nvidia from a tough six month period when Blackwell was delayed because everyone who was waiting for Blackwell and thought it was impossible to make a 100,000 hoppers coherent r…”
Baker: Grok 3 will prove if AI scaling laws are hitting walls
“Grok three is a big card and will resolve the this question of whether or not we're hitting a wall.”
Baker: AI has another innovation decade even if training scaling breaks
“Even if scaling laws for training break, we have another decade of innovation ahead of us.”
Baker: Microsoft's largest GPU cluster remains smaller than xAI's Memphis cluster
“The best information I have is the largest cluster Microsoft has after panicking. It's still smaller than XAI's cluster in Memphis.”
Baker: xAI's Grok 3 should take the AI lead in early 2025
“Grok three should take the lead if scaling laws hold in January or February.”
Baker: Training a single AI model will cost $100B within three years
“It's going to cost a hundred billion dollars to train a model in two or three years which I think is a realistic estimate.”
Baker: Human language will become the dominant programming language within a year
“But I think next year, human language will be the dominant programming language.”
Baker: Starship will carry 100+ metric tons to orbit under $2M variable cost
“Once you do that, they should be able to send over a hundred metric tons to orbit at a variable cost of under two million dollars per public data.”
Baker: Data centers are repurposing private jet engines for power
“Residuals for private jets are, like, extremely strong these days. And a big part of the reason is people are taking jet engines off old planes and repurposing them as turbines to power data centers.”
Baker: Open-source AI models make frontier AI tokens more valuable
“Open source makes frontier tokens more valuable.”
Baker: Capitalism Will Always Value Human Intelligence Over AI
“Capitalism, there, it's, there's gonna be a use for the most computationally efficient intelligences on planet Earth, and those are human intelligences.”
Baker: Nvidia might reach the frontier of open-source AI models
“I think you might see Nvidia at the open source frontier.”
Baker: Divergent Chinese open-source model architectures favor Nvidia GPUs
“If you look at the underlying architectures of the three, what I call big Chinese open source models, and maybe even through a few, or four, You know, if we have Quinn, if we have Kimmy, if we have DeepSeq, and then we have GLM, they're actually evolving in ve…”
Baker: xAI will release Grok 4.7 in a few weeks
“And this is still a relatively small model. It's one .1 trillion parameter models. A larger model, Grok 4.7, that should be significantly more capable, is coming out, you know, in a few short weeks.”
Baker: Closed model dominance creates a tough environment for software companies
“A world where Anthropik, OpenAI, and, you know, maybe even SpaceX are kind of the only model providers that dominate the model layer, that is a hard world for software.”
Baker: Micron locks in 50% of revenue with four customer agreements
“They announced that they have these SCAs, these supply chain agreements, That have a floor and a ceiling for prices with an increasingly large group of large customers. And this covers essentially 50% of their revenue, I think, with just four customers.”
Baker: Broadly applicable biotech platforms produce rare $100B+ outcomes
“If you ever get a biotech company that can become a platform and they have a mechanism, whether it's of drugging, whether it's targeting, if you have something that is broadly applicable, that is when you can get these really, really big hundred billion dollar…”
Gavin Baker: There is no good reason for companies to remain private longer
“I don't think there is actually a good reason to stay private longer.”
Gavin Baker: Baillie Gifford was forced to sell SpaceX for regulatory reasons
“Bailey Gifford was forced to sell SpaceX last year for regulatory reasons.”