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 28 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
Pentagon pays Google 47 cents annually for Gemini deployment
“They were the first of the big frontier AI companies to say, we want to work at Department of Defense. They were easy to work with on the contract. We're paying 47 cents For the whole year for all of this. So they're like taking, taking a loss to make sure tha…”
Verdon: Big Tech ideological subversion stops government collaboration, helping adversaries
“What I saw with my own eyes was that a sort of cultural subversion within big tech more broadly was stopping a big tech from working with the government, right? Like basically ideologies that sort of were very pervasive within the middle layers of the organiza…”
Ross: Foundation models will build apps targeting high-volume token usage
“Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, they're all gonna, in the same way that you probably don't want to build an email company while Google's on its arise, because they're gonna come and eat that, like, every one of these companies is looking at, where are our tokens be…”
Gil: Google's Med-PaLM 2 outperformed human physician experts
“Google released a model, I think two years ago called MedPalm too, where if you compare the answers from that model relative to physician experts, it outperformed them. In other words, if you use physicians to train the model will get worse.”
Google's culture lacks resilience because it never faced a survival crisis
“And the culture they created was one that was born out of abundance. And the abundance has not stopped. It started and it continued. It was always up and to the right. They've never had a near-death moment.”
Emil Michael: Pentagon is deploying AI across corporate, intelligence, and warfighting tiers
“So the Google win was just getting everyone the basic access to AI so they could get familiar using it and understanding it. Then we're going to do it. Then I would say that's a corporate use case, right? Like any big organization. Then we're going to do the s…”
Lonsdale: Google dropping Project Maven triggered founding of Anduril and Epirus
“Maven came up and they gave it up. And then, you know, that was like the alarm bell that led to the founding of Andrel and Epros and Saronic and these big companies we were building now”
Lessin: Elite Corporate Resumes Do Not Select the Best Performers
“You're kind of looking from, you're saying, hey, who worked at Goldman and Morgan and Bain and McKinsey and Google? It's like, not the best people. It's the people who happen to be credentialed, right? In a lot of ways, but that's clearly not the way to do it …”
McCord: 4,000 Google Employees Protested Project Maven Military AI Work
“After I left, after I rolled off the project, we had deployed it in Afghanistan, all that, 4000 people came together and they protested Google's involvement.”
Solana: Gmail Is a Huge Long-Term Risk in the US
“Yeah, no, I think longterm Gmail is a huge risk in the country.”
Meyer: Waymo's Biggest Business Will Be Built in Texas
“I think it's super entertaining that, you know, Waymo, which is you know, owned by Google, self-driving cars, it's very much a Bay Area company. But the place where they're doing the best and where they're going to have a massive business is Texas.”
Lonsdale: Google employee protests stopped Google from working on Project Maven
“This is the one that famously Google's protesters stopped it from working on, which scared a lot of us.”
Rubin: Rumble's Lawsuit Against Google Will Yield Major Discovery on Search Algorithms
“Rumble's in a lawsuit with Google. That's going to end up with a lot of discovery. We'll see what they've been doing with their with their search algorithm.”
Gil: Recruited Google's early mobile team secretly without their managers knowing
“I recruited a lot of the early mobile team without their managers knowing because their managers didn't know what they were doing. So they'd just come and start working with me on mobile.”
Winston: Government seed funding successfully backed breakthroughs like Google and genomics
“There's certain things that government certainly has done that have been successful. Obviously it helped fund led to Google. It's funding you know, genome project, you know, various sort of things like that, where they've given some, you know seed money for in…”
Gerstner: Buying Google at its IPO captured 90% of search upside
“You could have waited until 2004. Google's IPO. You would have captured 90% of the upside ever created by search. And you would have avoided all of those zeros.”
Andreessen: Search will shift from links to direct synthesized answers
“Does the defining paradigm of the era go from, oh, here's a bunch of links. Good luck to here's the answer. Yes. On that, I think it's very, very clear that that's what's going to happen.”
Andy Rubin pitched Android to Apple before selling it to Google
“I got a couple of calls from Andy Rubin at the time, who I worked with at General Magic, working on Android before Android was bought by Google. And so that was really like, Steve, we should listen to this.”
Zu Fürstenberg: Pitching 20-year data visions would have made early founders look crazy
“Had Zuckerberg or Larry Page, had these guys gone out initially and said, you know, we are going to create data as a currency, and this is actually what Google is going to become. 20 years from now, people would have called them crazy, right? So what they did …”
Wu: Google achieved an IMO silver medal equivalent with AI
“Google had a really amazing result where they got a silver medal at the international math Olympiad.”
Sirota: Big Tech Global Hubs Are Training International Engineering Ecosystems
“It's compounded by the fact that a lot of the best US companies have had to go to different markets, and so not only is the talent there, but then they're grooming them. So you've got Google offices all over, you've got Amazon offices all over, and so that is …”
Gil: Larry Page eliminated three management layers at early Google
“Larry Page was still very active at Google, and he decided to get rid of all middle managers. And so when I joined, he removed like three management layers, and suddenly every director or VP level person had 50 to a hundred people working directly for them.”
Gil: Google used to maintain a webpage of things it would never do
“Google used to have this web page up that was like, here's all the things we're never going to do. And I said, we're never going to do IM or chat. We're never going to do a browser. We're never going to end up doing all those things, right? We're never going t…”
Greenblatt: Google, Apollo, and J. Crew Joined ADL Workplace Pledge
“We created something called the Workplace Pledge Against Anti-Semitism. Google, WPP, Apollo, J. Crew, a bunch of gigantic companies and firms have joined that.”
Alperovitch: US Municipal Utilities Lack Security Personnel and Cybersecurity Budgets
“Like your typical municipal utility is not going to even have a security person maybe an IT person if you're lucky. Not gonna have a budget for a lot of security technologies. So it's ironic that these are the critical infrastructures that we depend the most f…”
Google acquired Verdon's quantum TensorFlow prototype and hired his team
“During that first startup I ended up Being approached by Google to prototype, really, what would a TensorFlow for quantum computing look like? So TensorFlow at the time was the core software framework for Google to do deep learning, and we wanted to extend tha…”