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 728 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 37 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: Global car manufacturing employment could drop to 400k in 5-10 years
“Because of automation, the entire global, you know, potential for car manufacturing in Five or 10 years from now could be like 400 K total.”
Gurley: Baidu Trades at Zero Enterprise Value Despite Apollo Robotaxi Asset
“While people are saying that, that the Waymos should be worth a hundred and seventy billion inside of Google, you can buy shares of Baidu for zero enterprise value. It's a thirty billion market cap, thirty billion in cash from the books.”
Gurley: Protective tariffs will lead to inflation and lower US living standards
“Now your consumers don't have access to those price points, and so you're buying inferior goods at inflated prices, and that's going to lead to inflation and prosperity and standard of living levels dropping in the US.”
Gurley: Vast Majority of US House China Committee Never Visited China
“On the 24 members of the select committee for the CCP, and I think all but four of them have never been to China. And the ones that went, it was seven years ago.”
Gurley: Chinese provincial government funds demand non-starter terms from VCs
“Now you have the provinces entering the investment space, which is an uncomfortable reality for some of the VCs. They're asked, I hear they're asking for terms that you and I would consider non-starters, you know and so that's, it's all a little bit messy.”
Gurley: Around 50% of US AI Researchers Are Chinese
“You've seen these other charts where like 50% Of the AI researchers in America are Chinese”
Madra: Alibaba's 30-billion parameter Qwen model matches GPT-4o performance
“There was a release today of a Quen You know, thirty billion parameter model, which is performing as good as GPT-IV-O.”
Madra: Chinese open-source AI offers 90% of top quality at 90% discount
“One of the things that you see with the leading open source models now, which are the Chinese is 90% of the quality in terms of intelligence, but at a 90% price discount.”
Madra: US open-source AI will hit the global top three by 2026
“I think if we look at Q four this year or Q one next year, I'd be willing to say, you know, that a top three worldwide model will be a U S based open source model.”
Gurley: Startups will build enterprise-sanctioned versions of Chinese AI models
“I just think you're gonna see, just like you saw Kimmy and Zipu pop up. I wouldn't be shocked if you see other new entrants pop up that are trying to be like sanctioned or, you know, cleaned, you know, use Red Hat as an example, Sonny version of these things, …”
Madra: Enterprise usage will shift back to US models if OpenAI open-sources
“With OpenAI's release and, you know, Meta charges back, or even if some of these startups emerge that, you know, we can point at, I think we'll see a huge shift back towards those models versus, versus the Chinese ones.”
Gerstner: ICONIQ will lead a $5B round in Anthropic at $170B valuation
“I think that Iconic is going to lead a five billion dollar round into Anthropic at a hundred and seventy billion.”
Gurley: OpenAI will lose $7B this year, a burn rate Google avoids
“OpenAI is going to lose seven billion this year, and Google won't.”
Gurley: AI foundation models are pricing below cost, subsidized by venture capital
“Because of the amount of venture capital out there companies are not pricing the cost. Like, no one, none of the model companies, I don't think anyone, even in the verticals, like, no one's pricing the cost, because they're pricing to take market share.”
Gerstner: ChatGPT will likely cross 1 billion weekly active users in 2025
“I think ChatGPT will cross a billion weeklies, like maybe this year you know, probably this year, I would guess.”
Gerstner: The US and China will strike a major deal before year-end
“I think that there's going to be a big Chinese deal done before the year's out.”
Gurley: OpenAI and Anthropic paid $10M annually before Meta's talent spree
“OpenAI, Anthropic, they were all paying people tons of money before Meta did this. They were paying them ten million a year, you know, maybe smaller than what you were talking about, but they were doing it.”
Gerstner: AI productivity gains will cause companies to shrink headcount
“My sense is that companies are generally going to get smaller, right on the backs of the productivity gains from AI, but they'll redeploy some of those profits into these areas.”
OpenAI is discussing launching an open-source model shortly, says Brad Gerstner
“OpenAI is talking about launching an open source model here shortly.”
The winning AI company will reach a $5T to $10T valuation
“At a hundred billion in revenue, it seems to me that this company could be on a path to being the most valuable company in the world, right? Five to 10 trillion dollar business in the fullness of time, which frankly would not surprise me for the winner in the …”
Gerstner: Meta is buying 49% of an AI startup for $15B
“Meta has done this interesting structured deal.
They're buying 49% of the company.
they're paying a thirty billion dollar valuation.
So they're paying effectively fifteen billion.
They're avoiding regulatory scrutiny.
the CEO of scale is going to help lead e…”
Gurley: Reddit Sued Anthropic Despite Having an Existing Deal
“Reddit just sued Anthropic this morning despite having a deal”
Gurley: Salesforce Bans Training External AI Models on CRM and Slack Data
“Salesforce changed their terms of service, and in a way that includes not only the CRM data, but Slack data, which, you know, is a company they bought, and they're putting an MCP connector on top of it, which allows AI to query it, but they're telling, they're…”
Gurley: Chinese solid-state LiDAR costs $130 per car vs Waymo's $5,000
“Chinese LIDAR is solid state and designed very differently than the LIDAR that Waymo's using, and it's actually in China right now is, I think, being priced at like a 130 dollars a car, this solid state MEMS LIDAR, whereas the Waymo LIDAR is like 5000 dollars …”
Gerstner: 40% to 50% of Top US AI Researchers Are Chinese
“I saw a study that suggested that 40 to 50% of the AI researchers in the United States, our best researchers, are Chinese.”
Gerstner: Rare earth shortages could disrupt the US economy for six quarters
“If we don't do this, then we're going to have a massively disrupted economy over the next six quarters, slowing down economic growth and causing problems and critical shortages in parts to the military, in parts to our US auto industry, et cetera.”
Gurley: Private Delaware unicorns trading secondary shares face litigation risk
“Litigation around shareholder events are tied solely to public companies. That is not true. If you're incorporated in Delaware, you can be sued. You know, if your shares are trading more freely in the secondary market, you're at risk as well.”
Gerstner: Trump Administration Repealed Biden AI Diffusion Rule in May 2025
“The Trump administration just repealed the Biden diffusion rule in May of 25.”
Gerstner: US Secured Trillion-Dollar Investment Deals With Saudi, Qatar, UAE
“In the first five months of this year, we would have gotten a trillion dollar deal signed with Saudi in terms of their investment in the United States, another trillion dollars with Qatar. Another trillion dollars with the UAE. Those are all investments into t…”
Gerstner: Abu Dhabi Announced 5GW AI Campus with Nvidia, OpenAI, Oracle
“In Abu Dhabi, they announced a five gigawatt USAI, you know, it's a UAE USAI campus. It's an incredible architectural campus. It's in collaboration with NVIDIA and OpenAI and Oracle. And think of it as almost like a global Stargate. So to put that perspective,…”
Gerstner: Gulf sovereigns will out-invest all others in AI infrastructure
“All three of these countries are going to invest aggressively at a level that really no other sovereign on a global basis is investing at to ensure that this part of the world becomes a center for technology and AI.”
Gerstner: $2T in tariffs is a 600-700 bps GDP headwind
“That's what sent the markets down 20%, because we knew two trillion dollars in tariffs is probably a 600 to 700 basis point headwind to GDP.”
Gerstner Predicts NVIDIA May Soon Sell Deprecated AI Chips to China
“I think that we could still see as part of the negotiation over the next 90 days, I would not be terribly surprised to see NVIDIA allowed to sell some form of deprecated chip into China”
Gerstner: House renamed Invest America to 'MAGA account'
“In the House version of the bill, they renamed it the MAGA account, which stood for Money Account for Growth and Advancement.”
Gurley: Delaware Court Legal Fee Multipliers Far Exceed Federal Courts
“What he found was he compared a bunch of Delaware judgments with a bunch of judgments in the federal courts. And he looked at a bunch of different breakings, but one of the breaks was, you know, what's the frequency of awards seven times or higher? And what ar…”
Gerstner Predicts OpenAI Will Release an Open-Source Model by Summer 2025
“I do think you're going to see the open AI open source model. I mean, Sam's talked about it many times. I think you're going to see that in the next 30 days or so, certainly by the end of summer, but I would guess sooner rather than later.”
Gerstner: The US banned Nvidia H20 chip exports to China
“What we did last week is the US did ban H-twenties going to China”
Gerstner: Navarro-style protectionism will shrink the U.S. AI gap with China
“If we head in the direction of Navarro, it's quite clear to me that we're going to so anger the rest of the world that, ah, the chance that the rest of the world is going to run on US compute. I think what we do in that instance is you move everybody in the di…”
Gerstner: Banning Nvidia H20 exports increases US trade deficit by $15B
“I think NVIDIA sold, you know, 12 or fifteen billion dollars worth of H-twenties. So if you ban those, then your trade deficit with China goes up by fifteen billion dollars.”
Gerstner: Huawei AI chips already surpass Nvidia's H20 performance
“And we just unilaterally disarmed around that in a way that doesn't even advantage us against Huawei because their chips are already surpassing the H.”
Gurley: Tesla or Apple could plausibly get kicked out of China
“Both Tesla and Apple have a huge amount of revenue in China, and when you sense that this thing may be escalating or that there are ripple effects going back and forth, what one plausible thing that could happen is either one of them get kicked out of the coun…”
Gerstner: US tariffs will settle at 5-10% globally, 25-30% on China
“I think we're going to probably land somewhere in this kind of five to 10% terrace for the rest of the world. Right. If you add that up, that's going to be somewhere order of magnitude, two hundred billion dollars of tariffs, and you're not going to end up at …”
Gerstner: Enacted US Tariffs on China Will Not Land at 54%
“There's no, no way that lands, I think at 54%. That's the headline tariffs.”
Gerstner: US tariffs will ultimately settle around $300B to $400B
“I think we're going to land the plane here closer to three or four hundred billion in tariffs, not six or 700, and certainly not a trillion in tariffs.”
Gurley: AI agents will disrupt Google's high-fee ad model to OpenAI's benefit
“I personally don't think there's any way when that world you're talking about, that agent world evolves, that that partner in a hotel is gonna pay a fee anywhere close To the fee that's paid to Google by someone that's marketing a service that I always say usi…”
Gurley: The next 3-6 months will dictate AI leadership for 5-10 years
“Cause I think it's a really critical window. I'm talking about like next three to six months could dictate who's standing on top of the hill five, 10 years from now.”
Gerstner: China No Longer Depends on Nvidia for AI Inference
“BYD is designing a better car, and CATL is designing a better battery, and their glow, their vertically integrated supply chain around semiconductors no longer is dependent upon NVIDIA for inference. Now they're running inference at DeepSeq on the Ascend nine …”