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 345 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 13 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
Google is quietly routing OpenAI's cloud compute contracts through CoreWeave
“OpenAI is contracting Google for Cloud Compute. Google is contracting CoreWeave to serve that compute.”
Kantrowitz: Google paid $2.4B to acqui-hire Windsurf leadership
“Google has paid 2.4 billion dollars to bring on some of the top leadership of windsurf”
Kantrowitz: OpenAI's Windsurf acquisition collapses as Google hires founders to DeepMind
“OpenAI's deal to buy Windsurf is off, and Google will instead hire the Windsurf CEO, Varun Mohan, co-founder Douglas Chen, and some of Windsurf's R&D employees from the company to join DeepMind. Google and Windsurf announced Friday.”
Siegler: Gemini's Chrome beta integration is slow and feels un-native
“That integration is not good. It's like very slow. It's also in the upper right-hand corner, but it's not, it doesn't feel native. It just feels like sort of a popover type situation.”
Cloudflare data shows AI crawlers send exponentially fewer visits than Google
“Now for Google, it's 18 pages crawled, one visit. OpenAI, it's 1500 pages crawled, One visit. Anthropic, it's, was, it's now gone up from 6000 to 60,000 pages crawled. One visit.”
Albergotti: Frontier AI Breakthroughs Are Easily Copied and Hard to Defend
“Like they're so, I mean, they're so easily copied. It seems like that, you know, if you're just doing AI research and you make like a breakthrough like that, that's really about like technique and, you know, how long can you hold onto that? IP before, you know…”
Albergotti: Google is a good long-term bet despite threatened search ads
“Google of all the companies has so much going for it, right? I think they're a pretty good long-term bet, but this cash cow, you know, search advertising thing is like, you know, totally threatened by this new model.”
Roy: Search Engine Optimization for Display Ad Monetization Is Completely Dead
“Trying to game Google to get traffic, to show display ads, to make money is, that is beyond hospice. That is dead.”
Siegler: Android Currently Lacks an AI Killer App Over iOS
“I don't think that that's necessarily the case right now for exactly the reasons that we're talking about, because I don't think that there's exactly the killer app that, that makes Android that much better than iOS right now.”
Siegler: AI assistants dredging up historical user data could backfire
“I wouldn't be shocked if that sort of backfires against these companies in some way. Like, I'm not really sure that people want to use this new technology to sort of dredge up The past and have all of that historical context.”
Kantrowitz: Google-Apple Search Deal Threat Is Big Tech's Most Underrated Liability
“I think it's one of the most underrated liabilities for big tech companies. It's a company, it's one of the most underrated liabilities for a big tech company today, if not the biggest.”
DeepMind CTO denies AI slowdown, says progress across the field remains stellar
“Rather than thinking about scaling only in one dimension, there's actually many different ways to think about it, and investing in those, and we can see the returns that I think across the field, really, not just not just here at Google, but across the field, …”
ChatGPT traffic grew 13% month-over-month while other top websites declined
“If you look at the traffic change month over month, Google, at YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, all going down. ChatGPT up, 13% month over month. Then everything else that follows, X, WhatsApp, Wikipedia, Reddit, Yahoo Japan, All going down. And so, ChatGPT stand…”
Kantrowitz: Google search will be fine as long as defaults hold
“We are so accustomed to typing things into Chrome, ah, and into the search bar in our Android, and that pulls up Google searches, that as long as they're able to keep those defaults, they're going to be fine, but they may not.”
Kantrowitz: Divesting Google's Ad Network Will Force Users to Never Leave Search
“If you make them divest that publisher ad network, they're gonna keep you even longer on Google pages. You're never gonna leave search.”
Kurian: Google Search, Cloud, and YouTube share the same inference stack
“And one benefit we have at Google is all our services, whether that's search or us or YouTube, this inferencing of the same stack and same model series. So the model learns very quickly from all that reinforcement learning feedback and gets better and better.”
Kantrowitz: ChatGPT becoming a generic verb gives OpenAI a compounding advantage
“ChatGPT is now a verb like Google or, you know, basically people call it ChatNow. That is just this huge compounding advantage that OpenAI is going to have and releases like this just help it push even further forward.”
Albergotti: Apple is fundamentally just an iPhone company unlike its diversified peers
“All the other big tech companies are kind of like doing everything now, right? They're like, you know, Meta is, is doing their own AI chip and spending billions of dollars to roll out these data centers. Sure. Apple, Apple is going to do that too, but I think …”
Panos Panay: No competitor comes close to Alexa's home understanding
“I don't think there's anyone close to be able to understand your home as Amazon, as Alexa.”
Kantrowitz: Google is on track to be best positioned in AI race
“I think Google is on its way to being the best position company in the AI race.”
Meta is better positioned for open-source AI disruption than peers
“Meta's probably in a bit better position than the other ones, just because they, at the end of the day, they do want, like, you know, their whole philosophy is to open source this, not for necessarily altruistic reasons, but because they know that it's histori…”
Antitrust chill stopped Big Tech talent from leaving to found startups
“I do feel like there was a bit of a chilling effect the past year because M&A had, you know, basically been shut off. That sort of kept people staying at Google and staying at Meta and staying at OpenAI, not forming new startups as they might have in, in years…”
Demis Hassabis predicts hands-free smart glasses will go mainstream within years
“So I think that glasses and maybe other form factors that are hands-free will come into their own in the next few years. And we, you know, we plan to be at the forefront of that.”
Roy: Spinning off Chrome or YouTube beats forcing search syndication
“I think it's much cleaner spinoff Chrome. Spin off YouTube, spin off Android, one of those options, something like that would just make a lot more sense to me.”
Microsoft is repeating Google's mistake by splitting AI model training efforts
“Microsoft is basically reversing what Google has managed to do over the last few years. And in fact, making the same mistake that Google initially made, which was to have its training distributed or split up between two different corporations or institutions.”
Swisher: Musk deserves more credit than anyone for pushing EVs forward
“There's no one you could give more credit to than him in pushing forward the electric vehicle thing. Google tried a little bit, but he really did it, right? And so a lot of people tried and he did it.”
Lanzone: AI answers expand search rather than replace traditional search one-for-one
“Number one, because I do believe it's growing the category. I don't think it's a one for one replacement for every type of search that's happening. I think that what we used to call smart answers, what Google calls one box is already bringing that directly int…”
Doshi: Google's bureaucracy is ill-suited for AI's rapid velocity
“And they have to contend with a significant complex bureaucracy that is not really well attuned for the velocity that AI is running at right now.”
Catanzaro: AI community would have found a Transformer alternative without Google
“If Google had not open source that or had not published that paper but if we started seeing like incredible language modeling results we would have figured out some sort of a model that had good scalable properties that that could help with this space.”
Srinivas: Google has no incentive to save search users' time
“And there is no incentive for Google to save your time in searches, by the way, because
the whole point for them is that you spend as much time opening, like, 10 tabs on Chrome the browser they control, and give, give the analytics to all of these independen…”
Google Gemini benchmark metrics caused significant confusion
“Certainly there's been a lot of confusion around the metrics, but I'm sure Google will do great work.”
Nemade: Google's multi-layered approval bureaucracy prevents products from shipping
“The second is, I think over the years, there were a lot of bureaucratic levels that were built inside of Google for getting approvals for when things go out. I'm not complaining that they were not necessary, but it just like they're layer after layer after lay…”
Ramaswamy: Google delayed AI search because users inherently trust its text output
“Similarly any text that is generated by a chatbot is, and this is part of the reason why Google has been hesitant is if they put up some text, even if there's a citation, people are going to say, oh, Google said, so this must be true.”
Ramaswamy: Google's competitive position improved by mid-2023 due to Bing's slow progress
“There's now a pretty credible integration into a regular search. And Bard is getting better by the day. And this combined with the fact that you know, Sydney, Bing's chatbot has not made as much progress. I would say actually puts them in a better position in …”
Ramaswamy: Google routed trending topics to trusted sites to avoid conspiracy theories
“Google had this system that was roughly called flight to quality. Whenever there would be a new and trending topic the search algorithm would basically say, I'm going to go to trustworthy sites because if it is a brand new topic, the likelihood that someone sp…”
Teller: Alphabet's X is not structured to scale products to billions
“We are not the right place to move something from, yeah, we have something special here to it's ready in a really thoughtful, responsible way to serve a billion people a day.”
Lemoine: Google penalized LaMDA for long conversations via reinforcement learning
“One of the goals that a, that Lambda had was to have, ah, as short of a conversation as possible, that still completed all of its other tasks. Like, have a productive conversation that gets to a positive end, but quicker rather than longer. So the longer a con…”
Lemoine: Google Disabled LaMDA User Tracking as a Safety Feature
“And it has been turned off, at least in the case of Lambda, as a safety feature because they're worried about what will happen if these systems learn too much about individual people.”
LeCun: Incumbents avoid releasing hallucinating AI due to reputational risk
“Whereas if you are Meta or Google, you could think about like, you know, putting out a system of this type that, you know, is going to spew nonsense. And, you know, because you are a large company, you have a lot to lose by, you know, people kind of making fun…”
Marcus: Google's LaMDA Has No Sensors Perceiving the Physical World
“Lambda actually has fewer sensors than my watch. My watch has a lot of sensors and lamb doesn't really have anything sensing the real world, except for its linguistic input.”
Blake Lemoine confirms Google sent him a termination email
“That's a simple fact. I don't see any reason to conceal that.”
Siegler: Google and Amazon Depreciate Some Facilities Over 40 Years
“Amazon and Google in some cases are far longer. I think Google has some that are 40 years. Amazon might too.”
Cahn: Google's biggest AI advantages are search cash and TPUs
“Google has two big advantages, right? It has a cache machine from search that can fund a lot of things. And then number two, it has TPU. And I cannot overstate what an advantage it is to have TPU. They've been building this chip for a long time. It's a really …”
Gardizy: Major NVIDIA customers are actively working to adopt alternative chips
“Every single company that buys NVIDIA chips and is spending a lot of money on NVIDIA chips is trying really hard to make these other, other chips work, whether it's in-house chips from Google or Amazon or even in OpenAI's case and potentially Anthropik's case.”
Kantrowitz: Google will inevitably catch up to Anthropic and OpenAI frontier models
“Google has shown it can catch up in terms of capabilities of models. It will inevitably catch up again to whatever Fable is and GPT-Five.”
Kantrowitz: Eric Schmidt was booed at University of Arizona commencement
“Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google, was booed this week at the University of Arizona's graduation ceremony.”
Kantrowitz: Google's Gemini is available to military personnel on genai.mil
“There's a website, genai.mil, that's available to the people in the military here, and interestingly, Google, ah, is in there. Gemini's in there.”
Moore is hesitant to invest in horizontal AI like email or docs
“I personally as a consumer investor have more hesitation around things that are incredibly horizontal, like to your point about this is where the chatbot companies might have a right to win, or even this is where a Google might have a right to win. As they hav…”