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 53 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
Meta AI leaders discussed temporarily licensing Google Gemini for their products
“The leaders of Meta's AI division Have instead discussed temporarily licensing Gemini to power the company's AI product.”
Haugen: Facebook VIP Cross-Check Whitelisted Users and Delayed Reviews Three Days
“In reality, because they weren't willing to spend a very small amount of budget, they didn't actually put that second check in for most safety systems. So for most safety systems, people got white listed. So if you were in cross check, the safety systems no lo…”
Kantrowitz: Top tech companies hold $3T in off-balance sheet AI commitments
“Nine, top tech companies had some three trillion dollars of off balance sheet commitments, mostly related to AI. Those obligations are growing faster than traditional capex, which totaled about six hundred billion over the past year past year they reported, an…”
Luria: Meta used a Blue Owl SPV to finance data centers off-balance-sheet
“The other thing that happened with Meta that was interesting is that when they Went out to borrow. They didn't borrow the capital. They created a special purpose vehicle, right? They went out with Blue Owl and they said, you know, we'll put a couple of billion…”
Kantrowitz: Zuckerberg Offered $32B for Safe Superintelligence and Was Rejected
“Zuckerberg tried to spend thirty two billion on Ilya Suskever's AI start, startup, safe super intelligence. Suskever ultimately turned Meta down.”
Haugen: Facebook's algorithm drove 65% of joins to German neo-Nazi groups
“In 2016, they found out that 65% of people who joined neo-Nazi groups in Germany, where they are illegal, like you can't have a neo-Nazi Facebook group in Germany, joined them because Facebook suggested that group to people.”
Kantrowitz: $27B in debt financing Meta's Hyperion project is off-balance sheet
“Meta's gigantic Hyperion data center project in Louisiana, which is the size of about 1700 football fields, helps explain how obligations wind up off tech companies' balance sheets. Though Meta is the builder, neither Hyperion nor the twenty-seven billion in d…”
Himel: Meta has not launched facial recognition on smart glasses
“We don't have a feature called that or that does that feature that's launched in the glasses.”
Demis Hassabis rejected higher Facebook offer because Mark Zuckerberg misunderstood AI's potential
“Facebook offered more money, but I wanted somebody who really understood why AI would be bigger than all those things. And then he sold to Google.”
Meta will use AI chatbot conversations to target Instagram and Facebook ads
“Meta has basically announced that, yeah, we're going to take everything you say to an AI chat bot and we are going to Basically have it affect the kind of ads that you see on Instagram and Facebook. Of course there are some exceptions if you are talking about …”
Kantrowitz: Meta agrees to $14.8B 49% stake in Scale AI
“Meta has agreed to take a 49%
stake in the data labeling firm Scale AI for 14.8 billion.
Meta will send the cash to Scale's existing shareholders and place the startup CEO Alexander Wang, former Big Technology podcast guest in a top position inside Meta.
Meta…”
Meta and Anduril partner to develop military AR/VR hardware
“Luckey's defense company Andrel and Meta said Thursday that they will together build a line of new rugged helmets, glasses, and other wearables that provide a virtual reality or augmented reality experience.”
Anduril and Meta's Eagle Eye system integrates AI models with battlefield sensors
“The system called Eagle Eye will carry sensors that enhance soldiers' hearing and vision, detecting drones flying miles away or sighting hidden targets, for instance. It will also let soldiers operate and interact with AI-powered weapon systems. Andro's autono…”
Bosworth: Wrist neural interfaces will eventually work without physical gestures
“Over time, we think we can do that without having any gestures at all. Just having the intention, expressing the intention down your control system.”
Kantrowitz: Meta increased metaverse spending despite its 'Year of Efficiency' cost cuts
“That's actually not what happened. They didn't cut spend at all. They, in fact, increased spend on the metaverse. I mean, they are not taking their foot off the gas pedal there, and they've just tried to trim elsewhere within the company.”
Haugen: Users Found Facebook Feeds Less Meaningful After 2018 Algorithm Change
“Back in 2018, Facebook switched from just seeing how long they could keep you on Facebook, to seeing could they drive you to do interaction. And they called it meaningful social interactions. Stuff that got more interactions was considered better content. Even…”
Kantrowitz: Meta Agrees to $18B Settlement Over Youth Addiction Claims
“Meta agrees to pay eighteen billion to settle U.S. Lawsuits over children's social media addiction, and it's going to pay it over the next decade, and strictly limit how teenagers use Facebook and Instagram under an agreement with nearly all U.S. States to res…”
Siegler: Zuckerberg Acknowledged Meta Could Launch Cloud Infrastructure For Outside Businesses
“Zuckerberg, even this week or this past week was in the news again saying, like, basically acknowledging that with all the capex spend, if they need to, they can roll out a cloud, right? They can roll out a cloud that other businesses can use.”
Meta Intranet Leaderboard 'Claudeonomics' Ranked Token Usage for 85,000 Employees
“The ranking set up by Meta, by a Meta employee on its intranet, use company data, measure how many tokens employees are burning through, dubbed Claudeonomics after the flagship product from Anthropic, the leaderboards, leaderboard aggregates AI usage from 85,0…”
Meta executives consider up to 30 percent budget cuts to metaverse group
“Executives are considering potential budget cuts as high as 30%, 30% for the metaverse group this year, which includes the virtual world's product, Meta Horizon Worlds, and its Quest virtual reality units. Cuts that high would most likely include layoffs as ea…”
Luria: Meta Lacks Enterprise Customers to Rent Out Excess Data Center Capacity
“Meta again is an unusual situation because they don't actually have business customers to rent this capacity to. It really is just Mr. Zuckerberg wanting a bigger and bigger toy.”
Meta cuts approximately 600 jobs in its AI division
“Meta said on Wednesday that it cut approximately 600 jobs in its artificial intelligence division.”
Kantrowitz: Meta to cut off ChatGPT access on WhatsApp next year
“Meta said Saturday it would cut off access to non-meta chatbots like OpenAI's ChatGPT on WhatsApp beginning next year.”
Kantrowitz: Zuckerberg Testified Only 17% of Facebook Time Goes to Friends' Posts
“Only 17% of Facebook and seven percent of Instagram time are spent with friends posts.”
Kantrowitz: Meta AI has 600M users compared to OpenAI's 400M
“And I was just speaking with Jan LeCun, the chief AI scientist at Meta, and he said there's Six hundred million people using their AI assistant within their apps compared to four hundred million of open AI's chat GPT.”
Meta's new real-time image generation model produces outputs under one second
“And that's why we did all this model work to really get this thing very fast. It's under a second, which is like really, really exciting.”
Ranjan Roy: Meta rebuilt its ad infrastructure using LLMs and agentic AI
“They rebuilt their entire advertising infrastructure to incorporate large language models and agentic processes and the newer vintage of AI rather than the traditional machine learning, and that's what's made it, I mean, it basically just, not saved, but like,…”
Kantrowitz: Meta Ray-Ban smart glasses have sold 2 million lifetime units
“Guess how many lifetime Meta Ray-Bans glasses, the most successful quote unquote AI wearable, Ever has sold. Guess how many units it sold? Two million.”
Kantrowitz: Meta poaches Apple UI design chief Alan Dye
“Apple's head of user interface design, Alan Dye, along with the deputy and maybe some other team members, went over to Meta. Meta poached them.”
Kantrowitz: Meta AI cuts spared new superintelligence hires
“The cuts on Wednesday did not affect the newest hires who have been empowered to develop super intelligence.”
Kantrowitz: Close to a dozen Apple AI leaders have left for Meta
“I think this is, what, close to a dozen. Folks from Apple's AI division that have left to Meta, including a large percentage of, it seems like a large percentage of its leadership.”
Boureau: Facebook M was a hybrid AI-human system
“No, we had some, so the way I worked on the M team for a bit. So no, there was a, it was a hybrid thing. Like the AI would make suggestions and the humans were just to make sure that it was still a good quality, which a lot of the systems are still like that.”
Kantrowitz: Meta raised AI CapEx guidance to $64B–$72B
“CapEx, spending that they're gonna go from AI, is gonna go, the original range was 65 60 to sixty-five billion. Now it's going to be 64 to seventy two billion, largely on artificial intelligence investments.”
Patel: Meta's next Llama model will match DeepSeek-V3's cost efficiency
“And Meta's Meta is going to release their new llama soon enough. Right. And that one is going to be, you know, a similar level of cost decrease probably similar areas, deep seek V three.”
Kantrowitz: Facebook's own research showed passive media consumption harms users
“Even Facebook's own research shows that passive media consumption leaves people worse off. And that's why they went through this whole moment to do meaningful social interactions, but they ended up pivoting right back to this TikTok style of media.”
Meta trained Llama 3 8B and 70B models on 15 trillion tokens
“So if you look at something like the eight billion and seventy billion,
They were trained on almost 15 trillion tokens and tokens roughly you can imagine as a word.
So roughly like 15 trillion words, which is an incredible outcome.”
Kantrowitz: Apple's Anti-Tracking Changes Cost Meta $10 Billion in Revenue
“I mean, there was a real hit, especially with Apple's anti-tracking moves. We're talking about a ten billion dollar loss coming in or a contraction of revenue coming in.”
Kantrowitz: Facebook named office conference rooms after countries smaller than its userbase
“When I visited the first time, the conference rooms were all named after countries that Facebook was bigger than. Yeah, you walk in, you're like walking past the Brazil conference room, like, oh, why Brazil? They're like, we're bigger.”
Albergati: Meta Tried to Acquire DeepMind Before Google Did
“Meta, you know, they were so early on AI, they tried to acquire DeepMind, you know, before Google did and then sort of just lost focus on it.”
Kantrowitz: 20% of OpenAI Employees Previously Worked at Meta
“Of the people who list OpenAI as their current employer on LinkedIn, approximately 630 previously worked for Meta, which represents 20% of the roughly 3000 total employees at OpenAI.”
Meta's Vibes video app doesn't let users generate videos of themselves
“And that product doesn't let you make videos of yourself or your friends.”
OpenAI and Anthropic consumer product leaders hail from Instagram and Facebook
“Head of product at Anthropic, Instagram founder, head of product at OpenAI, former head of product at Instagram, person who's running what all consumer applications at OpenAI is also someone who's come from Facebook.”
Kantrowitz: Europe Represents Nearly a Quarter of Big Tech Revenue
“Apple sales in Europe 26% of total revenue. Meta's ad sales in Europe, 23% total revenue. Amazon's international sales 23% of total revenue.”
Hoffman: DST Won Big on Facebook by Offering $10B Post With No Caveats
“In Valley history DST led around in Facebook when the traditional funds were all like, oh, we'll only do a three to five billion pre, you know, with lots of caveats and everything else. And DST came in and said, we'll do a ten billion post and no caveats. And …”
Tech stocks plunged in pre-market trading after DeepSeek R1's release
“NVIDIA down 10%, Microsoft down four percent. Google down three percent meta down 2.6% SMP down two percent. So this is all based off of this deep seek reckoning or this deep seek realization.”