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 126 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
Prince: European internet neared collapse as traffic doubled during COVID
“The internet, European internet came this close to completely collapsing in COVID because in COVID over a period of two weeks, Internet traffic doubled, and it especially doubled for video streaming, which was, ah, which was a very high bandwidth.”
Prince: Web Crawls Per Publisher Referral Click Doubled Over Past Year
“Everything has gotten basically, assuming you're a publisher, from the publisher's perspective it's gotten twice as bad. They just double every one of those numbers over the last year.”
Beck: New chip generations demand 10x more power every ten months
“We know from all the chief manufacturers or designers, all the famous names that we're familiar with. Well, they're coming with new generations. Every 10 months, roughly now, and every 10 months the power is multiplied by 10, and that's becoming six months, an…”
Beck: AI currently consumes the power of roughly 50 nuclear plants
“AI today uses the power equivalent of roughly 50 nuclear plants.”
Siegler: OpenAI's Atlas Browser Refuses to Summarize New York Times Articles
“If you go to a New York times story in Atlas and you say within the Atlas native chat GPT that's baked into it. If you say like summarize this page, it refuses to do it because they don't have an agreement on the content.”
Plouffe: Roughly 60% of Americans use LLMs for health research
“And of course, you know, a use case that probably 60% of the country is engaged in now is to use these LLMs for their own health diagnosis and research and people getting great value out of that.”
Cherny: Claude Code was first AI tool able to edit local computer files
“Even something as simple as like editing a file on your computer. You know, like a year and a half ago, there was no AI product that could actually do that. But this is the first thing that quad code was able to do. It could edit a file on your desktop.”
Moore: Sora Retains 3 Million Daily Active Users
“So they still have Three million DAOs, and it's actually, you know, slightly climbing over time.”
Kantrowitz: ChatGPT On Track for One Billion Users by Late March
“Definitely on track for a billion by mid, mid to late March.”
Suleyman: AI token costs dropped 1,000x in two years
“The cost per token has come down a thousand X in the last two years.”
Petersen: Lowering tariffs to 30% triggered an 80% surge in shipping volume
“Tariffs got relaxed back down to 30%. We've had a 80% increase in volume from China to the U.S. Above the pre-tariff levels.”
Lee: Banks cannot internally transfer funds due to OFAC and FinCEN
“In fact, if you're a global bank, so take Barclays or JP Morgan, and you have money in, let's say Japan, and you want to move it to the US, you have to use an external intermediary to move the money. Banks can't internally transfer the money because it violate…”
Brin: Inference-time compute offsets 5,000x in training compute
“What they did with AlphaGo and AlphaZero, as you mentioned it showed, as I recall, something you would take 5000 times as much training to match what you were able to do with still a lot of training and the inference time compute that you were doing with Go.”
Kurian: No enterprise software company grew faster than Google Cloud since 2019
“And to grow from the scale we were in 2019 to where we are now, No other enterprise software company has grown that fast, and that's a credit to our sales organization.”
Eggemeier: Bot-to-bot customer support interactions will arrive within 12 months
“Alexa talking to an AI agent that's, you know, powered by Zendesk, I really think that's gonna come over the next six or 12 months, and we're gonna have some really, really cool use cases where, The consumer is there using their own bot to interact with a comp…”
Most Social Media Platforms Except WhatsApp Face Declining Daily Active Users
“Most of the platforms are seeing declines in daily active users. WhatsApp is going up. Snapchat, eh, but, like, most of them are going down.”
Kantrowitz: OpenAI is unlikely to release GPT-5 in 2025 or ever
“Again, I doubt we're seeing GPT-V this year, or maybe ever.”
Scaringe: Rivian R1S is the best-selling premium SUV in California
“The R one S is actually the best selling premium SUV in the state of California, not the best selling premium electric SUV, the best selling premium SUV period in California across the whole U S it's the best selling premium electric vehicle.”
Ives: Apple gained ~300 bps of China market share over two years
“First off, they've gained about 300 bips of market share in China in the last two years.”
Brown: 2024 election will likely yield divided government, boosting stocks
“It looks like actually the outcome's gonna be still up in the air, but probably lead to a divided government, which is positive for stocks, historically where no one party gets to do a lot of Weird shit in either direction.”
Kantrowitz: The Ozempic patent has already expired in China
“I mean, you mentioned that 2030 is when the patent comes off of Ozempic, but actually in China, that patent's off now.”
Hari: Japan has statistically zero childhood obesity due to government policy
“I went to Japan where there is no childhood obesity. That's not an overstatement. There's statistically no childhood obesity.”
Doshi: GPT-5 is probably slated for release in 2024
“GPT five is probably slated imminently this year.”
Broderick: The LessWrong forum birthed Effective Altruism and early neo-reactionism
“At the middle 2000, there was the rise of a very kind of niche, but influential message board and blog called less wrong and less wrong... Was the birthplace for several Sort of digital philosophies, online philosophies. So the big one is obviously effective a…”
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…”
Friedberg: Forecasts Project 90% of Global Population in Africa and South Asia by 2100
“There's about 95% of the world's people at the end of the century, based on recent population forecasts, call it 90% of people, that will live in Africa and South Asia, ok? 10% of the people will live elsewhere.”
Friedberg: Latin American farmers make nearly 10x US farmer operating margins
“They make nearly 10 times as much profit in terms of their margin, their operating margin, as a U.S. Farmer.”
Kosloff: Democrats Will Likely Suffer Historic 2022 Midterm Losses
“Look what the Democrats are gonna most likely have another set of huge historic midterm losses”
Enjeti: Biden administration will not ban TikTok due to youth backlash
“I don't think the Biden administration is the balls to ban it. I really just don't. I mean, everything that I've seen you know, they did the Huawei thing. That's cute. Everybody knows Huawei is a Chinese spy operation. I just don't think that they're willing t…”
Haugen: Meta increased safety spending two to three times post-leak
“We've seen them having to increase the amount they spend on safety by two to three times, which is huge compared to the past times they've increased safety.”
Kedrosky: Some Data Center GPUs Fail on an 18-Month Cycle
“So we have some GPUs that are failing inside of modern data centers on an 18 month cycle, some that are failing on a much longer period.”
Kantrowitz: Nvidia Now Exchanges GPU Hardware Directly for Equity in Startups
“They have this new approach with startups where they're like, all right, if you want GPUs, we'll take a chunk of your company and we'll deliver the hardware.”
Stamos: Anthropic Restricted Fable From Long-Horizon Cyber Tasks Allowed in Mythos
“Explicitly Anthropic said. We will allow Fable to do short horizon stuff, but we will not allow it to do the long horizon stuff that, that Mythos does.”
Kantrowitz: Apple exclusively marketed the Vision Pro as an isolated, solo device
“Apple never advertised that as a social device. All the marketing was just You're sitting alone at home, and all you're doing is the Vision Pro. Nobody else exists.”
NBC Poll: 50% of voters believe AI risks outweigh its benefits
“A new NBC news poll found 50% of voters thinks the, think the risks of AI outweigh the benefits. AI's been used by 74% of white-collar workers and 50% of blue-collar workers, but both had similar reservations.”
Moore: OpenClaw web traffic is flat to down post-launch
“But if you look at their week by week web traffic, it's actually kind of flat slash down from when they launched, which means that they're not attracting new consumers.”
Pulsia reached $3 million in ARR within a week and a half
“Palsy, I think the founder tweeted they were at, like, three million ARR in, like, a week and a half.”
Kantrowitz: Novel AI bot social network reached 1.1 million comments in days
“Multipook a 175,000 posts, 1.1 million comments as of, it's the social network for the AI boss as of the time we're speaking.”
Baratz credits Rob Schoelkopf with developing all superconducting qubits used today
“I mean, frankly, all of the superconducting qubits that are in use today across everybody building superconducting systems were developed by Rob Shulkoff, right? Transmine qubit.”
Baratz: D-Wave is the only company developing both annealing and gate systems
“And D-Wave,
A very important point that I'm now about to make is the only company in the world with a dual platform strategy and plan.
What I mean by that is we're the only company in the world developing both annealing and gate model quantum computers to addr…”
Siegler: Meta will announce its superintelligence model 'Avocado' within weeks
“We're probably a few weeks away, maybe less from whatever they're going to, you know, announce in terms of coming out of their new AGS super intelligence efforts, their avocado model.”
Kantrowitz: ChatGPT will reach one billion users by April 2026
“ChatGPT hits a billion users, and we know it's at eight hundred million now. I expect that it will hit a billion by April next year at the latest, and I think that's a real moment, I think, for AI and OpenAI in general.”
Maroney: Global energy consumption growth rate is at an all-time high
“If you look at the global energy consumption, it's actually increasing at a rate higher than it ever has historically in, let's say, even the last year.”
Hodak: Visual cortex stimulation produces light flashes, not structured vision
“From the 1.5 million optic nerve cells, that eventually connects up to a quarter billion to half a billion cells in visual cortex, And that, that in humans is extremely difficult to stimulate. No one is, I mean, you get some flashes of light if you do that, bu…”
Heitzman: US lawyer headcount quadrupled since advent of word processors
“Since the IVAN word processors, there's four times more lawyers in America than there was at the time.”