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 239 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 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
Madra: NVIDIA's internal AI productivity gains for chip design exceed 100%
“I really, you know, been thinking a lot about Jensen's point in the pod about, you know, how much AI they're using internally for design, design verification for all those pieces. Right. And I think, you know, it's not 30%. I actually think sort of that's an u…”
Huang: NVIDIA's moat in inference will be greater than in training
“And I'm sure I said it would be greater.”
Gerstner: OpenAI has escape velocity to fund future models, unlike competitors
“OpenAI clearly has hit that escape velocity. They can fund their own future. It's not clear to me that many of these other companies can.”
Huang: Elon Musk Is Singular in Engineering and Large-Scale Construction
“Elon is singular in this understanding of, Engineering, and construction, and large systems, and marshaling resources.”
Huang: AI should be regulated at application level by existing agencies
“It's necessary to have regulation for important technologies but it's also don't overreach to the point where some of the regulation ought to be done, or most of the regulation ought to be done at the applications. The FAA, NHTSA, FDA, you name it, right? All …”
Gerstner: The AI world is currently constrained by inference compute
“I think the world is inference constrained. I think part of the reason for that is that you have new models emerging like this that are going to have machines talking to machines, lots of inference going on in the background.”
Gerstner: ChatGPT is pulling away; Gemini, Meta AI, and Claude are lagging
“ChatGPT beginning to run away with it. Gemini, Meta AI, Claude really are not even you know, keeping up.”
Zawalick: California renewable projects failed to match replacement expectations for Diablo
“This, the projects to replace, the renewable projects to replace Diablo have not made the progress that I think the state thought it would back in 2015, 20 16.”
Gerstner: California Should Build AI Data Centers at Diablo Canyon
“If we're going to build data centers in the state of California, as I was walking around here today, I was thinking to myself, they ought to be building data centers right here.
You have plenty of excess land.
And plugging them into these incredible, you know,…”
Gurley: The US needs a Manhattan Project-scale effort to fix nuclear power
“The first thing that comes to my mind, and maybe this could be applied to both SMRs and level three scale out, is we could choose to do something more like a Manhattan Project or a NASA Project, and you hinted at this already, where you get the best and bright…”
Musk: Shutting down existing nuclear power plants is total madness
“It's crazy to shut down nuclear power plants. I can't emphasize enough. Please do not shut down the nuclear power plants. Please reopen the ones that have been shut. This is total madness to shut them down. Total madness.”
Gurley: Big Tech Is Aggressively Undermining OpenAI and Anthropic Fundraising
“One of the objective functions may be just precisely to make it more difficult for OpenAI or Anthropic to raise, you know, ten billion dollars that they need to fund the next two model builds.”
Gurley: AI Will Not Replace All Software or Cause Mass Unemployment
“I don't think this replaces all software. I don't think people are going to be sitting around jobless and need UBI. I don't think You know, I don't think that, that all software just goes away. Someone said that this is the new operating system. I don't think …”
Gerstner: Stock Market Is Not Justified Being 10-15% Above January 2024 Levels
“This market could give up a hundred percent of the gains that we've had year to date, which would mean you'd still have another 10 to 15% down in the market, and that just takes you back to where you were on January one, and so you have to ask yourself, as an …”
Gurley: 100% Bing Revenue Share Would Earn Apple Less Than Google Deal
“So the reality is that Google's monetization is so much better than anyone else that's out there that I don't think there's a deal you can do with Bing that will create that amount of net income for Apple. So there's no, like, Apple's not mad about this deal. …”
Gurley: AI startup 'take-unders' are structured primarily to evade antitrust regulators
“One, it is almost certainly the case that this, the primary reason that these funky transactions are happening are, let's just call them non-standard is precisely to avoid federal Regulatory scrutiny.”
Gurley: Taxing unrealized capital gains would devastate the startup industry
“It would be catastrophic to the venture capital industry and to the startup industry to tax unrealized capital gains.”
Gerstner: Wiz IPO would yield $14B valuation, defying Google's $23B offer
“If this were to go public, it would probably trade at 13 or 14 times forward. That would be like 13 or fourteen billion, not twenty-three billion.”
Gerstner: Big Tech Stocks Are Not in a Valuation Bubble
“We certainly are nowhere near the trough. But these don't, this doesn't feel to me like the stuff that bubbles are made of, right? I can make an argument that you could, these things could all be down 10% in the next three months, and none of them would be scr…”
Gurley: Meta Gets AI Upside Without LLM Downside Risk
“My quick reaction would be that Meta is somewhat unique in the group in that if there were an air pocket, you know, or something that came out of the LLM AGI world, they're not really, I mean, they're playing with the open source models, but they're not really…”
Gurley: Big Tech Licensing Acquihires Like Adept Are Not VC Wins
“The adept thing is which was positioned by the press is similar to the inflection outcome. There's no way that's a win for venture capitalists. Like, I'm sure venture capitalists try and spin it, and we heard some spin around inflection, but it, you know, I, i…”
Gurley: Health Insurers Are Not Incentivized to Cut Medical Spending
“I don't actually think insurance companies are interested in cutting costs. They make a percentage of what is spent, and the more, the merrier. The more that's in there, the merrier.”
Gurley: AI venture investing is repeating the exact same overfunding mistakes as ZERP
“If the 1400 number of private unicorns that are the result of the age of access is a problem, it's not clear to me that we're doing anything different in AI. Aren't we doing the exact same thing? So couldn't we end up with the exact same result? We just said f…”
Gerstner: ISS coerces corporate boards toward societal rather than corporate interests
“Many of us have argued over the years that ISS veered off course, right? And this started becoming kind of this cudgel to, you know, to coerce board behavior into ways that they deemed, right in maybe societal best interest or in their perceived best interest …”
Gurley: Mega-round private capital abundance is now a permanent structural reality
“I think this is more permanent. I think it would take a massive shake out, like a gargantuan, oh, one style or more to change this at this point.”
Gerstner: UiPath's fundamental value proposition is challenged by AI
“I do think there are companies like UiPath where the fundamental value proposition is challenged. They have to reinvent the model.”
Gurley: Software optimism cannot recover while peak AI hype persists
“I don't think you can simultaneously have people get re-optimistic about software and the hype cycle of AI to continue at the pace it's been on, because I think they're at odds with one another, because the most glorious statements about what AI is and can do …”
Gerstner: Frontier AI Labs Must Win Consumers to Justify Billions Invested
“So if you're going to be Anthropic or OpenAI or Mistral or anybody else, it's hard to see how you build a business, you know, with payback on the tens of billions that you're going to be required to invest unless you're in the consumer game.”
Gurley: Automotive innovation is most alive in China's car industry
“These companies are creating more competitive products, not just on AV, not just on landed price point, but even on features consumer care about. Much bigger screens, more interesting features you've never seen before. It's abundantly clear that innovation is …”
Gurley: Consumer AI Tools Lack Differentiation Needed to Reach Escape Velocity
“Right now, it's hard to believe that any of them, including the Google one, like, are going to have escape velocity because the differentiation, I'm not seeing, maybe you guys are, I'm not seeing an element of differentiation on the consumer facing tool that's…”
Gurley: Regulatory Scrutiny Has Curtailed Big Tech M&A Exit Options
“We do have a situation where at least the big guys have been pushed away from M&A by regulatory, which is another reason why you need to be more serious about the public option, because there are fewer Relative to history, I guess, fewer options on the M&A sid…”
Gerstner: Elite Tech Companies Like SpaceX and Stripe May Stay Private
“You know, think of, you know, the SpaceX's, the ByteDance, the Databricks, the Stripes of the world, all the companies people are waiting to see when they're going to come public. They all fit that profile. They don't need the public markets to provide the liq…”
Gerstner: Decline in Public Companies Is Permanent and Structural
“I'm evolving my own thinking to say this is permanent and this is structural, right? Because the government regulatory burdens are at least semi-permanent and the markets have responded by the private capital markets stepping in and providing the liquidity whe…”
Gerstner: France Out-Innovating the US in Nuclear Fission Is a National Embarrassment
“The French are driving more innovation and more efficiency out of nuclear fission than the United States, and we pride ourselves on innovation. That should be a shock and a national embarrassment.”
Gurley: Late-Stage AI Startup Multiples Make Me Nervous
“So when I look at all those things, And the entry prices that a marginal late stage investor would be asked to pay, which are these multiples here. I'd be like nervous. I'd be nervous. I'll leave it at that.”
Gurley: Developer Switching Costs Between LLMs Are Extremely Low
“Today the switching costs based on every developer I've talked to are we mentioned this before, but about as low as you could possibly imagine. And if you're just using big context windows and not doing fine tuning, then you're just not, you can bounce from on…”
Gurley: No tech CEO I work with would accept Elon Musk's pay package
“I would offer any CEO I work with the Elon package, and I'm certain none of them would take it.”
Gurley: Microsoft's Inflection deal is a warning against overpaying in AI
“This is a warning sign that you can't just pay any price For any deal in the AI sector and get paid. And cause I don't, you know, this, I don't see this now. I don't see the current status as a company that's going to have a venture-like return from here.”
Gurley: LLM switching costs are remarkably low at 2 out of 100
“Today, you know, as it stands, I would say if you were to rate these LLMs on their switching cost with zero maybe being none and a hundred being perfect, I'd say they're at two. Like, it's remarkably low”
Gurley: Tesla's end-to-end AI approach has much better chance of achieving FSD
“It seems to me this approach has a much better chance of going all the way and of being successful and certainly of being maintainable and reasonable.”
Gurley: Operating a robotaxi fleet service requires $100B in CapEx
“I've always thought this model that we're going to build this incredible car and our business model is going to be to run a service like the CapEx. Like if you just build a 10 year model, the CapEx you need, like they would have to go raise a hundred billion.”
Gerstner: Fears of an Impending Nvidia Chip Glut Are Inaccurate
“So everybody's just the wall of worry around NVIDIA is when does the glut come? We've pulled forward all this training demand. It's dark fiber like in the year 2000. I think those things are not accurate.”
Gurley: Ecosystem partners distrust Google and prefer OpenAI and Perplexity
“I don't think Google has treated its partners well in the search ecosystem. And so there's a lot of angst there and a lot of mistrust. And so if, OpenAI or perplexity came along and said, would you integrate and pass tokens? They might say yes. I think they're…”
Gurley: Silicon Valley has the "crudest, least intelligent" view of valuation
“You know, I've always said that Silicon Valley has the crudest kind of least intelligent view of valuation. They always rushed to price to revenue because it's easy. And because quite frankly, it's easier to be optimistic. And so, and then the other thing that…”
Gerstner: Google faces an innovator's dilemma moving from search ads to answers
“I just think it's this innovator's dilemma, right, that Google faces, which is that 99% of their profits or a 110% of their profits comes from an advertising model around 10 blue links that is just at its core seems somewhat at odds with what perplexity is doi…”
Levie: Google's business model in AI could be as good or better
“I don't think there's a totally, 100% classic innovator dilemma issue with the move to AI with Google. I think on the other end of this the business model could be as good, if not better.”
Gurley: Big Tech Cloud-Credit AI Deals Distort Markets Like ZIRP
“My concern, which was really a concern for the industry more than just those players is that those deals pervert and distort the market. And when that happens, people do things you wouldn't expect just like Zerp. All of a sudden competition doesn't look like y…”