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 450 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 9 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
Gurley: OpenAI Reaches ~$2B, Anthropic ~$100M, and Perplexity ~$25M from Subscriptions
“Playing around with credit card data, I think OpenAI is about two billion Anthropics about a hundred million in perplexities at like twenty-five million.”
Gurley: OpenAI's 12-Month Subscription Retention Rate Is Around 35%
“On the 20 dollar thing, but at 12 months, the retention even in OpenAI is like 35%, so I doubt that anyone that is looking at that, even at two billion, Feels great about that as a durable business model”
Gerstner: Chinese AV developers are three years behind Tesla FSD
“She said, you know, they're still catching up to FSD 11. Now remember, FSD 11 was, so they're like three years behind on full self-driving. Those were still the deterministic models before the big breakthrough of 12.3.”
Gerstner: Amazon Spent Over $100 Billion on AWS Before Turning Profitable
“By our analysis, for example, just Amazon, Spent over a hundred billion dollars on AWS invested for over eight years before they saw profitability in that business.”
Gurley: Over 90% of NIH Grants Target Monetizable Products Over Prevention
“I listened to this podcast once, I need to find it, but where a gentleman argued that over 90% of NIH grants go towards things that are potentially monetizable, so either a product or a drug, and that the NIH is less interested in funding things that might be …”
Madra: Developers replace OpenAI with Llama 3 with no performance loss
“And people are doing a direct replacement with open AI across the board. They come to us. So they come to, you know, all the different providers and they replace out open AI. And they don't really see any performance impact or any reasoning impact”
Gerstner: Cloud providers are paying revenue shares to open-source model creators
“I can definitely confirm that the data clouds are paying a revenue share. To the open models.”
Gerstner: 83% of CIOs plan to repatriate workloads on-prem
“So this among enterprise CIOs moving back to hybrid and on-prem, the number was the 83% of respondents said that they were going to repatriate at least some of their workloads. Right. Back to on-prem and that was up from 49% or 43% in 2020.”
Gurley: Tesla has not applied for regulatory driverless permits
“Tesla's, one, they haven't even applied for those things, but we don't have them driverless on the road yet.”
Gerstner: US Data Center Power Consumption Projected to Reach 18% by 2030
“And here's a forecast I think coming out of semiconductor analysis, it's similar to a lot of the other ones, and it has data centers as a percentage of US power generation going from something like four percent today to something like, you know 18, 19% in 2030…”
Gurley: Gary Steele cut Splunk's stock participation from 87% to 15%
“Gary, you know, crushed it at Proofpoint and a huge value creator, and he said, you know, in a very short window, he went, he said he took stock participation from 87% to 15.”
Gerstner: Tesla FSD 12 model improves 5x to 10x faster monthly than prior systems
“In fact, I think what, you know, we learned was that the rate of improvement of this is order of magnitude five to 10 X better per month as a model versus the rate of improvement of those Prior systems.”
Gurley: Tesla uses generic open-source AI models for FSD V12
“And these AI models that Tesla's used for FSD-II are these generic open source AI models that you can find on hugging face, you know, and they obviously customize them.”
Gerstner: Tesla's autonomous driving engineering team is roughly one-tenth the size of Cruise's
“I think the engineering team working on this at Tesla is about one-tenth the size of the teams at Cruiser.”
Gurley: Tesla pay package plaintiff lawyers are seeking $5B–$6B in fees
“The lawyers that, that pursued this case are asking for five or six billion dollars in payment.”
Gerstner: AI search query answers cost 10x more than 10 blue links
“So if you say, like, what's it cost to provide 10 blue links? It's about a third of a penny or less per query. Now, what does it cost to do that for 750 tokens today? And of course, this will go down over time, but it's 10 X more, right? It's four cents. Per q…”
Gerstner: Meta completely recovered from Apple privacy changes using AI
“Basically, because of AI, they've been able to backfill that monetization completely. Nobody thought, no investors thought that was going to be the case 18 months ago. So their core business got a lot stronger.”
Gerstner: OpenAI has caused almost no share shift from AWS to Azure
“We've seen almost no share shift from AWS to Azure as a result of OpenAI.”
Gerstner: Nvidia's $700 consensus price assumes market share drops to 26%
“The consensus forecast that has the stock at 700 dollars a share assumes, if you believe this TAM to be accurate, assumes that their share will go from 55% today to 26% in twenty-twenty-eight.”
Baker: Musk builds data centers faster than anyone at 122 days
“We do know from Jensen that
Elon brings data centers up faster than anyone, a 122 days.”
Fox: xAI signed compute deals with Anthropic and Google worth billions
“They just signed Anthropic at 22 to 23. They just signed Google at 50.”
Baker: Ground AI Data Centers Cost $60B Per Gigawatt Today
“It costs sixty billion dollars to put a gigawatt on the ground today. Yeah. And we'll call it 35 of that is, are the GPUs and the silicon that's doing the training and the inference, and twenty-five billion is the land, the shell, the power, and the cooling.”
Baker: Grok 4.5T parameter model is injecting Cursor data into pre-training
“The Grok 4.5 trillion parameter model is training. One would hypothesize based on scaling laws that that will might be a better base model. And then the cursor data is being injected into the pre-training process, not just reinforcement learning.”
Turley: Giving flagship AI model away for free boosted revenue and retention
“So we just gave it away for free and that ended up being totally revenue positive and retention positive because it just provided access to the tech.”
Turley: About 10% of the world currently uses ChatGPT
“We've got about 10% of the world coming to us now.”
Turley: Most ChatGPT ads inquiries ask how to run ads, not disable them
“The most common inquiry about ads is not, you know, how do I disable ads or turn off ads, but it's like, how do I run an ad?”
Turley: AI demand and token consumption increase despite falling prices
“When you just look at token consumption per user especially in the enterprise too, which is, you know a massive opportunity. You see a lot of very GPU hungry, hungry workflows, and yes, demand keeps going up even as prices go down.”
Turley: Raw GPT-4 Did Not Impress Anyone Before Post-Training
“A few weeks or so after I joined OpenAI GPT-IV had finished training, and I remember trying it out, and it actually It didn't impress me at all nor anyone else that week, because it kind of didn't work, and it's because we hadn't figured out how to post train …”
Turley: Early OpenAI reasoning model swore after making a mistake
“We were showing this chain of thought as it was streaming out of the model and the model swore and said, like, oh, damn it, may have to adjust, because it realized it had made a mistake in the puzzle. And the fact that it did that, But in particular, the fact …”
Gerstner: OpenAI non-profit is capitalized with $130 billion in stock
“The nonprofit is already capitalized with a hundred and thirty billion dollars, a hundred and thirty billion dollars. Of open AI stock.”
Gerstner: California AG will not object to OpenAI restructuring
“The California attorney general said they're not going to object to it.”
Nadella: OpenAI has beaten every business plan presented to Microsoft
“And let me just say one thing Brad as both a partner and an investor, there is not been a single business plan that I've seen from open AI that they're put in and not beaten it.”
Altman: Cost per unit of intelligence has dropped roughly 40x annually
“This unbelievable reduction in cost per unit of intelligence, let's say it's been averaging like 40 X for a given level per year”
Gerstner: OpenAI revenue share sends billions annually to Microsoft
“So, you have the value in the rev share, billions per year going, going to Microsoft.”
Gerstner: OpenAI has a $250B Azure compute commitment with Microsoft
“You have the profit you make off the two hundred and fifty billion dollar of the Azure compute commitment from OpenAI.”
Nadella: Copilot adoption pace is bigger than any Microsoft product in decades
“In fact, one of the things about Microsoft three six five was what was the next big thing after E five? Guess what? We found it in co-pilot. It's bigger than any suite. Like, you know, we talk about penetration and usage and the pace. It's bigger than anything…”
Gerstner: Circle and Tether issue $15B monthly, becoming top Treasury buyers
“Circle and Tether are issuing fifteen billion of stable per month and becoming the largest buyers of U.S. Treasuries.”
Gerstner: 65M children qualify for Invest America accounts, $1,000 for under-twos
“So at the start today, there are sixty-five million kids in the country qualified for an Invest America account. Every kid under the age of 18. And every kid under the age of two will automatically get a thousand bucks in their account, right?”
Gerstner: Over 40% of NVIDIA's revenue comes from AI inference workloads
“Over 40% of your revenue today is inference.”
Huang: OCI, OpenAI, and SoftBank have contracted 5 to 7 gigawatts
“The second is the OCI build out. And I think there's some five, six, seven gigawatts about to be built out. And so working with OCI and OpenAI and SoftBank to build that out. Those projects are contracted.”
Huang: Alibaba CEO Eddie Wu plans to 10x data center power by 2030
“Eddie, last night, Eddie Wu at Alibaba said, between now and the end of the year, and excuse me, now and the end of the decade, they're going to increase their data center power by 10 X, right?”
Huang: Hyperscalers have consistently underforecasted GPU demand for years
“Now what's, what's going on, of course, is that every one of their forecasts that they provide us, it turns out to have been wrong. Because they under forecasted, and so now we're always in a scramble mode, and so we've been in the scramble mode now for, you k…”
Huang: Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick is actively accelerating US tech exports
“Secretary Lutnik was all over it.”
Wu: Los Alamos OpenAI supercomputer deployment is shared with Lawrence Livermore and Sandia
“The other cool thing is it's actually being shared between Los Alamos and some of the other labs Lawrence Livermore Sandia as well because it, it's the supercomputer setup where they can all kind of connect with it remotely.”
Wu: GPT-5 Pro solves previously unsolved problems but takes ten minutes
“These like unsolved problems that none of the other models could handle, you throw out a GPT-V Pro, and it just like one shots it is pretty crazy, but the trade-off here is you're waiting for 10 minutes.”
Wu: OpenAI is currently operating in a GPU crunch
“We are in a GPU crunch, so we'll see how, you know, how long that goes.”
Gurley: AI startup capital and burn exceed Uber-DoorDash wars
“Look, there's just no denying that the amount of capital that is going into these companies earlier in their life and the scale of hiring and their willingness to take on risk, which I think you can use cash burn as just a proxy for risk because you get furthe…”