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 89 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 3 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
Gerstner: OpenAI Hit 1 Billion Daily Searches 8 Years Faster Than Google
“Open AI reached you know, four hundred billion annual searches, eight years faster than Google. Right? So they're doing over a billion searches a day now.”
Gurley: Google's Wiz Acquisition Satisfies FTC Antitrust and Monopoly Standards
“Well, and I would argue that, that at least in terms of Google Whiz, the it passes that test. Like, it's none of those three things. So hopefully it will move through quickly.”
Gerstner: Google's product velocity on consumer AI has been unimpressive
“Their velocity on product has not been impressive. The velocity on consumer has not been impressive, so they have them. They've had them for a long time, Bill. They had ChatGPT before ChatGPT.”
Gerstner: AI model inference will deliver strong gross margins at maturity
“I would just posit for you that you'll be able to come up with a variable expense structure using the right mix of models that will be a great margin. May not be as high as retrieval was for Google, but still a great margin.”
Patel: Apple rents Google's TPU silicon, but GCP AI rentals remain GPUs
“While they do have some customers for their internal silicon externally, such as Apple the vast majority of their external rental business for AI in terms of cloud business is still GPUs.”
Patel: NVIDIA holds 98% of AI workloads outside Google, 70% overall
“So I would say if you ignored Google, it would be over 98%. But then when you bring Google into the mix, it's actually more like 70 because Google is really that large a percentage of AI workloads especially production workloads.”
Patel: Google and Anthropic will both release reasoning models soon
“There's a Google model that is doing reasoning right now, and it's not released yet, but it's gonna be released soon enough, right? Anthropic is going to release a reasoning model.”
Microsoft missed early deep learning opportunity with Geoffrey Hinton to Google
“In fact, even Hinton worked, like some of the early work in DNNs happened when he was in residency in MSR and then Google hired him. So we missed, I would say, even in the early 20 tens, some of what could have been doubling down at around the same time that G…”
Gerstner: Hyperscalers and OpenAI are solely focused on 1-3 gigawatt power sites
“When I talk to CoreWeave, when I talk to Azure, when I talk to OpenAI, when I talk to Amazon, Google, et cetera, not one of them Is talking about anything other than how do we find the facilities that can support a gigawatt or two gigawatts or three gigawatts …”
Gerstner: OpenAI has 250M weekly users, double Google at IPO
“They have two hundred and fifty million, yeah, two hundred and fifty million weekly average users, which we estimate is twice the amount Google had at the time of its IPO.”
Gerstner: Current AI consumer products cannot dislodge Google
“What's clear to me is that the current State of the consumer product. It's not enough to dislodge Google.”
Gurley: Google possesses the best asset stack for personal AI assistants
“When I think about the personal assistant side, having the assets of Gmail Docs, spreadsheets, and Android, you know, and I actually ran into Samir Samadhi runs Android the other day, and I had this discussion with him. It's the best set of assets. Like, if yo…”
Gerstner: Altimeter passed on Character.ai due to unsustainable CapEx requirements
“I would say that we looked at both inflection and character. We really liked what we saw at character. We wanted to be involved in it, but it was really hard to underwrite it for exactly this reason. We said the most likely outcome is that they're going to be …”
Gurley: Antitrust concerns likely did not derail Google-Wiz deal
“I wouldn't, I have a hard time believing this one was a concern about The antitrust because Google doesn't have a huge security business and there, there's actually concern about consolidation around Palo Alto and Microsoft and Cisco in the industries, or in C…”
Gerstner: Google's Astra Demo Felt Pre-Recorded and Clunky vs. GPT-4o
“Google yesterday, you know, at their IO event showed off Astra, their version of Her, albeit a little Recorded and maybe a little bit more clunky.”
Gerstner: Google search query growth slowed to 4% per year
“The number of queries that are asked of Google has slowed down a lot, right? So they're growing at about four percent a year. Monetization is up a lot, 13%, more ads on the page. We've talked about that. And so you have a 17% CAGR around search.”
Gurley: Apple and Google will block AI apps overlaying mobile OSs
“Or some of them might try and sit on top of your phone. Of course, Google and Apple will stop them from doing that.”
Gerstner: Buying Perplexity Would Cannibalize Google Unlike Meta's M&A
“With Instagram and WhatsApp, it was not, they were not facing innovators dilemma. They, those deals did not cannibalize their core business in the way that perplexity would cannibalize, at least in part, the core business at Google.”
Gerstner: Google has not gotten real on organizational efficiency
“Google cloud was pretty uninspired. And I think I don't think they've gotten real on the efficiency and the fitness.”
Gurley: Antitrust Scrutiny Puts Google in a 1990s Microsoft-Style Penalty Box
“Google's like not allowed to do that right now, which it's totally crazy. I mean which, it's actually one last thing is. It's similar to Microsoft in the 96, 97 timeframe where they were, you know, in the penalty box and couldn't do those similar things.”
Turley: Google's NotebookLM is awesome and differentiated
“Credit where credit is due. I think Notebook LM is awesome and differentiated and helps me learn new stuff. I think it's great.”
Madra: Google's monthly AI token volume exploded 200x to 1 quadrillion
“In the Mary Meeker bond deck, you know, they have a slide there that shows Google went from five trillion tokens a month to 480 trillion tokens a month, and they had just put some press out that they crossed, like, you know, 800 trillion, and I saw something t…”
Dell: Custom ASICs gain share at hyperscalers, but customer count remains small
“I think for the larger model companies and hyperscalers certainly custom ASICs are gaining a lot of share. And when you have control over the workload and you can you know, take the time to optimize your workload you know, that's certainly going to be a part o…”
Gurley: Google open-sourced Kubernetes defensively to break AWS cloud lock-in
“Google had a Piece of technology called Kubernetes. It was orchestration that would allow you to move a workload. If that became a standard from one, you know, one large server vendor to another, right? It basically created ease of distribution. So you could r…”
Gerstner: ChatGPT cannibalized 80% of my Google search activity
“The amount of activity that I used to do on Google has been 80% cannibalized by ChatGPT because there's search embedded within ChatGPT.”
Gurley: ChatGPT cannibalizes informational search, not high-monetizing commerce searches
“Informational searches are what, Check GPT cannibalize first, not the commerce searches, which is where most of the money is on the paid.”
Gerstner: Reasoning models dwarf single-shot ChatGPT in compute consumption
“You have these O series models, and now you have deep reasoning out of Google that launch this whole different vector of scaling intelligence and reasoning. But the thing about those, Bill, as you well know, is they are compute hogs. Right? The number of token…”
Gerstner: Big Five Grew 2024 Earnings by 44% vs 2% for S&P 495
“And in 2024, the big five, so in this case, Microsoft, Meta, Nvidia, Amazon, and Google grew earnings at 44%... If you look at the other 495 companies in the S&P, their earnings only grew two percent.”
Gurley: Gemini has an unmatched advantage in local search reviews
“Gemini is really good at local. Because they have all the local reviews. So I find myself now, if I'm going to a restaurant, you can say, what are the three dishes people have loved the most? What are the two that you stay away from?”
Patel: Google has run transformers in Search workloads since 2018
“Google was running transformers even in their search workload since 2018, 2019. The advent of BERT, which was one of the most most well-known, most popular transformers before we got to the GPT madness is, has been their, in their production search workloads f…”
Patel: Google built rack-scale AI systems with Broadcom in 2018 before NVIDIA
“Google actually did this alongside Broadcom you know, and they did it before Nvidia, right? You know, today everyone's freaking out about, or not freaking out, but like everyone's like very excited about Nvidia's Blackwell system, right? It is a rack Of GPUs. …”
Gurley: Anthropic Open-Sourcing MCP Matches Google's Kubernetes Strategy
“I think it is one of the most savvy competitive Weapons you can bring to the field. I'm sure they were worried that open AI would create proprietary data connectors and they want everyone to use this one very similar to what Google did with Kubernetes.”
Gerstner: OpenAI Reached $4.5B in Revenue Much Faster Than Google and Meta
“OpenAI got to, you know, four and a half billion dollars of revenue in a fraction of the time it took Google and Meta.”
Gurley: 80% to 90% of Users Will Pick Google on Choice Screens
“If they're forced to do the search and Apple's somehow cut out of the economics, and then Google ends up making more money, because I think the consumers are going to choose 80 or 90% Google.”
Gurley: Gemini in Workspace and Android could be a huge win for Google
“They've always had sheets and docs, and a lot of the startups in our community live on that stuff, but it hasn't really competed with the Microsoft stack, and with Satya's comeback, everyone's been super, you know, super excited about what this means for Micro…”
Gerstner: Cloud hyperscalers will beat consensus revenue forecasts due to AI
“You know, our belief is that they will. We think they will beat those forecasts because we do see that real acceleration coming out of AI.”
Gerstner: Microsoft, Amazon, Nvidia, and Google invested $25B in VC in 2023
“We go from almost no venture capital investing, you know, out of these folks six or seven years ago to all of a sudden this twenty five billion dollars last year in VC investing”
Gerstner: Earnings from Google, Meta, and Microsoft all report compute shortages
“Google, Meta, Microsoft, Satya, you had your earnings yesterday, you know, and we heard consistently not enough compute.”
Gerstner: Wiz Deal Valued at 30x Revenue vs. Public SaaS 6-7x
“When I look in the public market, I see great businesses that are growing You know, 10, 20, 30% that are trading at six or seven times revenue. This deal just got done at over 30 times revenue.”
Gerstner: Big Tech Earnings Are Up 38% Over the Past 12 Months
“So if you look at it for Microsoft, NVIDIA, Amazon, Google, Meta, earnings are up 38% over the last 12 months.”
Gerstner: Google trades at the lowest P/E and growth rate among MANG peers
“This is the 23 through 25 expected growth rates. 14% for Microsoft, 12% for Amazon. 42% for NVIDIA and 11% for Google. So Google's already expected out of those four to be growing at the slowest rate. But then what's interesting, if you come down here, To the …”