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 31 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 2 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
Sam Altman is highly effective at convincing executives to fund AI
“Sam Altman is the single most gifted business idiot whisperer of all time. He convinced, look at what he's done. I think he's reprehensible, a real scumbag, but I cannot ignore the work he's doing.”
OpenAI has no viable path to profitability, Zitron argues
“They also have no path to profitability. They don't have one.”
OpenAI effectively operates as a Microsoft subsidiary, Zitron argues
“OpenAI is a Microsoft subsidiary. That's what everyone needs to just accept right now, and what's happening in the news, which I imagine we'll talk in a bit.”
VCs rarely inspect accounts or codebases when investing in AI startups
“I had someone tell me, a source tell me, that there are, it's very rare that venture capitalists see the books, the actual accounts, and they almost never see the code base.”
OpenAI is an asset-light company relying heavily on shared Microsoft IP
“OpenAI is an asset-light business with research and IP that's owned by another company. They don't have much to trade other than their name.”
Perplexity gave $30 million in discounts to reach 50 million users
“Well, first of all, they're an insanely badly run company. They did, like, thirty-five million. They lost, I forget exactly how much they lost, but they did refunds or discounts of, like, thirty million dollars. They're literally giving money away to make peop…”
OpenAI reports weekly users to mask terrible subscriber conversion rates
“They talk weekly. And the reason is, because if you compared what their real monthly active users would be, five hundred million weekly, so I'm gonna guess seven hundred million monthly? Divided by the 15.5 million customers that pay for it. That's a dog's doo…”
OpenAI will not achieve $100 billion in annual revenue, Zitron predicts
“Even if OpenAI was profitable, okay, they're the biggest AI company, cool. Are they going to a hundred billion a year? Bullshit. No.”
There is no scientific evidence that AGI is computationally possible
“AGI, we do not have evidence it's possible. We don't understand how humans think. How the fuck are we meant to create it in a computer?”
OpenAI will burn $12B to $13B this year, Zitron projects
“They will burn probably 12, thirteen billion dollars after revenue this year. That's based on projections.”
Microsoft's $13B AI revenue largely comes from OpenAI cloud spend
“The information also reported that Microsoft will only make about thirteen billion dollars, not profit, just revenue, on AI this year. Ten billion of that is OpenAI's Azure cloud spend. Three billion is them selling Copala.”
Amazon is spending $105B in capex for $5B AI revenue
“There's an analyst, I was quoted by Laura Brattner at Yahoo Finance, who said that he only thinks that Amazon is going to make five billion dollars in revenue, again, not profit, this year on AI. They are spending one hundred and five billion dollars in capita…”
Total generative AI industry revenue is only $35B to $40B
“What the current combined revenue of all the generative AI companies is like And that's including the big tech companies. It's about 35, forty billion dollars.”
Building a Google-scale search business will cost OpenAI tens of billions
“Making that into a search size business is an entirely different thing and will cost them tens of billions of dollars.”
Salesforce expects zero AI revenue growth in 2025 despite agent rebrand
“The information reported a few months ago that Salesforce does not expect any growth from AI this year. That is absolutely bonkers for a company that's rebranded, and I paraphrase here, as an agent first company.”
OpenAI holds no technological advantage over competitors besides scale
“OpenAI isn't ahead of everyone else other than scale.”
OpenAI's contractual payments to CoreWeave escalate in October 2025
“OpenAI starts paying Corweave in October, twenty-twenty-five, just as Corweave's second loan, DDT-L-II, starts requiring them to pay probably more than OpenAI will be paying them.”
Anthropic lost approximately $5.2 billion in 2024 despite strong API sales
“Anthropic is doing better on API. They're selling more, a larger percentage of their business is API, but they still lost like, 5.2 billion dollars last year.”
OpenAI is directly undercutting Microsoft's enterprise subscription deals
“OpenAI has been undercutting Microsoft in deals, selling their models, and undercutting their enterprise subscription deals.”
OpenAI must convert to for-profit by year-end to keep SoftBank funding
“By the end of the year, OpenAI must convert to a for-profit entity, or SoftBank does not have to give them more than twenty billion dollars total.”
The Stargate data center corporate entity hasn't even been formed
“The Stargate entity does not exist. They haven't formed it yet.”
The AI coding assistant total addressable market is $30B to $50B
“I think this is a 30 to fifty billion dollar TAM, total addressable market business. I think that, what's that, the IDE market, development environment, I think that's like a thirteen billion dollar one.”
Salesforce research shows AI agents fail most multi-step processes
“The reason that we keep hearing about agents, but never about what agents can do, is because the most common feature of agents is that they fail. There was a Salesforce paper that came out fairly recently that said, I think that they just categorically break d…”
OpenAI's o3 model failed to calculate a basic spatial measurement
“I tried O-three out the other day. Yeah. I took a photo of a thing I had hung up, And I said, how much space from the bottom of that photo, of that picture, the poster, to the floor? It took four minutes. It wrote multiple Python scripts to give me the wrong a…”
AI companion bots are an easily commoditized and replaceable product category
“AI companions feels like something that ChatGPT, again, because they are all over the place with all their use cases, it's something that they're getting because they're the biggest name said to everyone at all times. It's something that can be replaced by any…”
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.”
SoftBank required a $15B bridge loan from 21 banks for OpenAI
“SoftBank, to give OpenAI that money, And to buy Ampere for, I think, six billion or something, they had to get a one-year, fifteen billion dollar convert, convertible bridge loan, even. And it, they had to go to 21 banks.”
OpenAI hasn't signed a compute contract for the Abilene data center
“OpenAI, according to the information, hasn't even signed a contract for the compute in, in Abilene.”
Perplexity sought a massive $50 CPM for its advertising product
“Perplexity hasn't. They wanted 50 dollars a CPM!”
You.com received a $1B valuation on under $20M in revenue
“You go and you see, like, a company like u.com. Everyone's saying, wow, they got a valuation of a billion dollars. Annualized revenue of, like, oh, I'm gonna misquote this. It was, like, 12,000,020 million dollars. That's insanely small, man.”