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
Nemade: Google's internal enterprise search was poor despite its search dominance
“Like enterprise search kind of sucks. Like even inside of Google being a search company, like we had probably the best enterprise search, but it was still pretty bad.”
Nemade: Microsoft Tay fears made AI safety the biggest hurdle for Google
“I think the biggest challenge that they were facing at that point of time was safety because the if you remember Microsoft Tay, That was the nightmares of Microsoft days still haven't left the valley, I feel, or at least hadn't left the valley back then. So sa…”
Nemade: Google built an interactive Darth Vader AI prototype by 2020
“So we build characters like Darth Vader so we would kind of how did we do it? We used some data from Darth Vader, so the dialogue delivery was kind of similar to Darth Vader, and then we hooked up Like a moving talking head of Darth Vader, and then you actuall…”
Nemade: Google teams only noticed Transformer paper after citations grew
“I think once it started garnering a lot of citations over the months and quarters, that's when people started paying attention, even inside of Google that, Hey, this transformer architecture seems amazing.”
Murdock: Google's Gemini accepts and outputs both text and images natively
“One of the really important areas it's touching on is what we call multi-modality. It's a bit like the human senses you just described. We can kind of use all our human senses together and combined to achieve the goal where we're setting out to. So it will bri…”
Ramaswamy: Rapid rollout of ChatGPT and AI products surprised Google
“It's very clear that the crazy popularity of ChatGPT and the speed at which others, including Neva, rolled out Pretty credible AI powered products. I think was pretty surprising for them.”
Ramaswamy: Google merged organic and paid shopping to eliminate duplicate search engines
“Google used to have organic shopping. I famously made combined organic shopping and paid shopping because I was like, all of this is commercial content. I can't have four search engines on one search page. With organic shopping, paid shopping paid text adverti…”
Ramaswamy: Google open-sourced Transformers in 2017 to prevent top researchers from leaving
“If you had told these people at that time that they could not publish, they would have gone and worked for universities, they would have gone and worked for Microsoft, they would have gone and worked for other people.”
Teller: Google Brain and Transformer foundations originated inside Alphabet's X lab
“One of the early things that we did was a thing which, when we graduated back to Google, was called Google Brain. Google Brain is the origin of much of what you now think of as Bard, and so that was an example in the earlier days of X of us making something, r…”
Teller: Project Loon worked technically but failed on commercial spectrum deals
“We built it. It was working. We were beaming LTE and five G 200 of thousands of people in multiple countries. We couldn't figure out how to get the business to close with the owners of the spectrum that we had to work through in those different companies. So w…”
Lemoine: Google's LaMDA incorporates machine vision and audio analysis algorithms
“Then, when you're adding all these other components, like Lambda has machine vision and audio analysis algorithms, it can literally look at a picture and hear a song through those mechanisms.”
Lemoine: LaMDA Is a Complex System, Not Just an LLM
“Lambda isn't a large language model. It has a large language model. That's one component of a much more complex system.”
Google invents through internal collaboration while Meta relies on rapid user feedback
“Facebook gets there through feedback, and Google gets there through collaboration.”
Google's internet-native collaborative culture will not be severely damaged by remote work
“Google's collaboration culture is actually built for the internet, right? All of the things, the collaboration tools I'm talking about, the Google email, well, I'll give a few, the Google email list, the internal questions and answers the open Google drives, w…”
Google recognized early that controlling the platform environment wins digital advertising
“You know, why is Google better position and why is Facebook more vulnerable? It's because Google knew that to control the environment is to win. And that's how they've done it, and they've done it through this culture of collaboration.”
Lemoine: Google planned a slow, multi-year public rollout for its AI
“They did have a very slow incremental plan that would have gone over the course of several years of involving the public in this.”
Lemoine: Google's LaMDA is a chatbot-generating engine, not a single chatbot
“Lambda is not a chatbot. It is a system for generating chatbots, which adds a layer of complexity.”
Lemoine: AI safety rules are training components, not hardcoded constraints
“Nope. That's not how AI works. Those, what those rules are is those rules are components in the training function that trains the model, because that's the thing people are missing. Lambda is not a program written by human developers. The training functions ar…”
Lemoine: Published LaMDA sentience interview combined nine separate sessions
“So that interview, so it was edited together from nine different interviews. Five were conducted by me. Four were conducted by my research collaborator inside Google.”
LeCun: Google and Meta Would Crumble Without Deep Learning
“You know, you take deep learning out of you know, Google and Meta and a few other companies, and they crumble. I mean, they're completely built around it now.”
Chafkin: Palantir Won Major Army Contracts and Google's Project Maven
“Did Palantir, Palantir got a an eight hundred million dollar army contract, another four hundred million dollar contract. And he took over this project maven from Google. That's another forty million bucks a year.”
Ramaswamy: Do not expect outcomes from Google antitrust cases anytime soon
“Do I expect an actual outcome in these? No, not, not anytime soon, but the scrutiny helps.”
Ramaswamy: I led the transition making Google Shopping an entirely paid property
“I was also the exec that was in charge of making all of the shopping property into a paid property.”
Ghonim: Google exerted diplomatic pressure regarding his detention during Egyptian revolution
“Google as the company have done some diplomatic effort to just try and help me out. Not, not to get me out, but just to make sure that I'm okay”
Kantrowitz: Google fell 8% after raising CapEx past $200B
“Google this week is down like eight percent and it dropped immediately after its earnings after It's capex went from went up to 205 more than two hundred billion in terms of its our AI infrastructure spent, right?”
Kantrowitz: Google Token Volume Grew to 3.2 Quadrillion Monthly
“Google gave this week they're now processing three quadrillion tokens. It's gone. It's at 9.7 trillion to 3.2 quadrillion per month in two years, according to Sundar Pichai”
Kantrowitz: Azure grows 40% quarterly while Google Cloud grows 62%
“Even though Azure has grown 40% a quarter, which is absurd, I guess, until you start to think that Google's grown 62% a quarter, albeit on a smaller base,”
Google Cloud achieved 63 percent growth to reach $20 billion quarterly
“Here we have a clear 63% growth to twenty billion dollars in a quarter for Google Cloud is nuts.”
Véliz: Google Flu Trends failed because search query data was too noisy
“When Google tried to predict flus and pandemic type events it tried for years and years and years, it increased the complexity, it increased the data, and it could never do it, and eventually it shut down.
Partly because it was relying on people's searches,
Pe…”
Saint-Marc: Cisco created Linux Foundation project Agency with Google, Oracle, Dell
“To back all this effort, we've actually created an open source project called Agency. And this, you know, became a Linux Foundation project with the backing of a few large formative members. Google, Oracle Red Hat were with us and Dell as well.”
Saint-Marc: Cisco Outshift collaborates with Google on agent identity standards
“We work also very closely with Google on this and the A to A group. We are very active here.”
Anthropic previews Mythos model to around 50 critical infrastructure organizations
“The company is making a preview model of its new AI model called Mythos, available to about 50 companies and organizations that maintain critical infrastructure, including Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, Alphabet, and the Linux Foundation.”
Moore: Google has four standalone products on a16z's top AI list
“Like Google has four standalone products on our list, which if you had told me that 24 months ago when like Bard came out, the early version of Gemini, I would not have believed you.”
Manyika: Google releases new Gemini model generations every five to six months
“We now kind of on the cycle that Gemini models where every five, six months, there's the latest generation.”
Promevo has conducted 250 to 300 Gemini Workspace adoption workshops
“We started work partnering with Google to provide a lot of adoption services, especially around Gemini for Google workspace. We have done about 250 to 300 workshops at this point, which is pretty incredible from an investment standpoint for Google investing in…”
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: Hundreds of Google Search engineers were reassigned to Google DeepMind
“Just one example I got from the story, hundreds of engineers from search, which is the most important product. At Google, which is responsible for more than half the revenue. Hundreds of engineers went from search to Google DeepMind just to, you know, give you…”
Roy: Google Gemini is leveraging 1.8 quadrillion tokens
“And again, like, I think what I saw was at Google. It was like 1.8 quadrillion tokens now being leveraged by Gemini.”
Google Has Lowest P/E Ratio Among Magnificent Seven Companies
“They're still the cheapest tech giant on the S and P 500 or of the magnificent seven, when you look at the PE ratio.”
Fox says combining Google Lens and AI overviews is 'doubly on fire'
“Lens is doing phenomenally well. The combination of Lens and AI reviews is, is doubly on fire.”
Prince: Google crawl rate has stayed consistent over 10 years
“And we have very reliable data at Cloudflare going back 10 years, looking just at Google and the metric that has stayed very consistent over time is how much Google crawls the web. They've actually crawled at a very consistent rate over the last 10 years.”
Kantrowitz: Gemini 2.5 Pro and OpenAI o3 Tied at Top of LMSYS Leaderboard
“I'm looking at LM Arena right now. Number one model. It's actually a tie between Gemini, 2.5 pro and OpenAI's O-three. OpenAI takes the next couple of spots with chat GPT-Four-O latest and 4.5 preview.”
Anugas: Snowfire uses Perplexity for search and Claude for mathematics
“So we really like things like perplexity for scraping and web search. We like Claude for mathematics. We're looking at something from Google called notebook LM right now to pull together massive language structures and to deliver an entire, entire audio file o…”
Kurian: Google built an open agent-to-agent protocol and dev kit
“So what we've done at Google is build an agent development kit, which has an API through which you can, one, create agents. We provide you a tool set to do it. We provide you a set of tools that these agents can use, but we also have an open agent to agent pro…”
Kantrowitz: SimilarWeb Data Shows Gemini at 10.9M and DeepSeek at 16.5M Daily Visits
“Google's Gemini web traffic grew to 10.9 million average daily visits worldwide in March. That's up seven, four, 7.4% month over month, while daily visits to Copilot, that's Microsoft's bot, Increased to 2.4 million, up 2.1% from February. SimilarWeb also says…”