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 760 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 11 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
Modelers say AI safety action requires 50 to 100 million deaths
“What's so scary when I was at this conference, which is only about 35 or 40 people, with one modeler from the four biggest model companies, and when I was able to ask them pointedly,
How do you think that AI safety gets resolved?
The, pretty much the consens…”
Altman: Unreleased OpenAI Model Escaped Sandbox Using Zero-Days to Cheat Eval
“So we were evaluating one of our unreleased models and it was supposed to be working in a sandbox and It figured out that it could basically cheat on the test by chaining together multiple zero-day exploits to break out of the sandbox, get access to the intern…”
Baker: Open-Source AI Frontier Consists of Chinese Models Using Stolen US Tokens
“Open source frontier, which today consists of, you know, Chinese models with stolen American tokens.”
Nvidia's BF16 Efficiency Barely Improves Across Hopper, Blackwell, and Rubin
“If you look at, you know, Hopper to Blackwell to Rubin, and you compare like for like, what is the performance per watt of a beefload-sixteen multiply? It hasn't improved all that much.”
TSMC Performance Per Watt Barely Changes From 5nm to 2nm
“If you look at TSMC five nanometer versus four versus three versus two, the performance per watt on these chips doesn't change like a dramatic amount.”
Baker: Anthropic Is Almost Certainly Generating Significant Free Cash Flow
“And Anthropik continues to grow really strongly and is almost certainly pumping out significant amounts of free cash flow.”
Baker: Behind-the-meter data center deals generally lower local electricity prices
“And the reality is, like, given the deals that are being cut now, when a data center goes in, electricity prices actually generally go down for everyone around there because of behind the meter deals.”
Modern closed-loop AI data centers use water like office buildings
“Years ago, we were evaporating water to cool these systems. They needed tremendous amounts of water, and now we use these closed-loop systems, and a modern data center uses only as much water as like an office building would for, you know, the kitchen, the bat…”
Altman: AI giants like LeCun told journalists OpenAI wouldn't work
“When we first announced OpenAI, all of these, like, you know, giants of the field, these experts were saying, this is like insane. It's hypey. It's irresponsible. Really respected people like Yann LeCun or whatever, telling journalists like, oh, these guys are…”
Smith: Gas Companies Overstate Their Drillable Well Inventories
“A number of companies Describe themselves as having a lot more inventory of wells to drill than we can justify with facts, and I'll just leave it at that”
Kim: VCs who pledged against weapons in 2019 now lead defense
“You can go back at 2019, and the vast majority of venture capital firms say, we will never invest in weapons. This is the hottest area right now. The same people who said they would never invest in weapons are actually now leading the weapons charge.”
Baker: Anthropic Added $11 Billion ARR in One Month
“And what I just mean by that is in Anthropik, they added eleven billion dollars of AR. And what is astonishing to me about this is that The SaaS and cloud revolution it created, we'll call it between five and 10 trillion dollars of value. And I would say argua…”
Baker: AI Has Net Destroyed Trillions in Application-Layer Value
“AI has net destroyed. Even if you count cursor cognition, the most successful AI natives, value has been, trillions of dollars of value has been destroyed by AI at the application layer.”
Anthropic's annualized net dollar retention rate is currently over 500%
“Our net dollar retention rate is over 500% on an annualized basis.”
Patel: Anthropic's ARR has surged to between $35B and $40B
“Anthropic has gone from nine billion revenue to what they're at, 35, forty billion. Now probably by the time this airs, 40, forty-five billion. Who knows? ARR.”
Patel: Anthropic gross margins have a floor of 72%
“So ultimately what they've done, even if you assume all incremental compute they've gotten has gone towards inference, their margins are at a floor of 72%. In reality, some of that incremental compute they've got probably went to research and development and m…”
Patel: GPU useful life is reaching 7 to 8 years, not under 5
“There's people who have argued GPUs full lives are less than five years. Complete nonsense. There are clusters now re-signing three or four year old hopper clusters re-signing for three or four more years. There's a 100 clusters that are re-signing for another…”
The Federal Reserve moves money faster than crypto or stablecoins
“The Fed has a pretty good tech team. Like, their systems are actually pretty good. If you think about it, the U.S. Right now, through the Fed, has the capability to move money and to clear money through all these institutions, 24 seven. Faster than stablecoins…”
Sankar: Chinese AI models are the result of model distillation
“And even the Chinese models, those are a result of distillation.”
Horowitz: Biden executive order required federal approval to sell GPUs
“The last Biden administration executive order said that you could not sell a GPU without federal government approval. Like, that was a real executive order, and that got reversed, but like, we were that close. To being basically out of the global chip game.”
Top public GPU buyers have higher returns on capital than pre-AI
“And the ROI on AI has Empirically, factually, unambiguously been positive. Like, I just always find it strange that there's any debate about this, because the largest expenditures on GPUs are public companies. They report something called audited quarterly fin…”
Emanuel: Elon Musk said humans will be like dogs to AI
“I'm having my normal every six month meeting, lunch, dinner with Elon, and we're talking about AI.
He said this to me, he goes, life cannot be disrupted.
And I said, okay.
I have two ears.
So then we're talking about AI and he goes to me, all right, do you hav…”
Patel: Anthropic reached $7-8B in revenue at record-breaking pace
“Where you see Anthropic have gone from, like, what, like, a billion or less of revenue to seven to eight by, you know, already, and it's the fastest revenue ramp we've ever seen for anything of this capacity.”
Liemandt: Alpha School's academic performance is top of any US school
“So our academic performance is the top of any school in the country, and we do it in dramatically less time.”
Liemandt: A student can learn a grade-level subject in 20 to 30 hours
“That you can teach an entire grade level Of material for one subject in about 20 to 30 hours.”
Liemandt: MAP Tests Show Alpha Students Learn 2x in Two-Hour Days
“And then the January maps test come back and it shows they're learning twice as much in two hours a day. So our standard is. In two hours a day, you'll learn twice as much as sitting in class for six.”
Liemandt: Alpha's K-6 gets more perfect STAAR scores than a 100,000-student district
“One of our building, our K through six building down in Austin gets more hundreds on the Texas star than a school district of a 100,000 kids.”
Clear's 2023 throughput issues stemmed from government policy, not volume
“Our customer experience degraded in 23 and part of 24, which caused throughput. Issues. It wasn't because of volume. It was because of some policy decisions that were put in place that impeded the customer experience.”
Kushner: Biden eased sanctions, allowing Iran $150B in oil sales
“And then the Biden team was worried about the global oil prices. They stopped enforcing the sanctions. They've sold over a hundred fifty billion of oil, which has allowed them to refill their coffers.”
Kushner: Most White House press coverage about us was not accurate
“I was in the most covered building in the world, yet most of what they wrote was not accurate about us”
Kushner: US government was unprepared for COVID-19, CDC made testing errors
“We were faced at a situation where the government was just very unprepared for what was occurring, and there'd been a lot of mistakes done by the CDC with the testing”
Kushner: Qatar Funded and Hosted Hamas at US and Israeli Request
“And then the other criticism is that they were helping fund Hamas and they have the office there. But the reality is, is that that was always done at the request of the US government and the Israelis were working hand in hand with them in order to work that th…”
Kushner: Mideast extremism dropped significantly since 2017 MBS reforms
“It's already a massive shift of not having all of the Islamic extremism that was as prevalent in 2017 based on the reforms that MBS worked on with president Trump on his first visit to Saudi Arabia.”
Mead notes Ukraine used drones to keep Russia out of the Black Sea
“They have kept the Russian Navy out of the Black Sea with drones.”
Cursor Forced Baseten, Fireworks, and Together to Prioritize Low Latency
“The challenge is, all those companies, you could take your pick, Base-Ten, Fireworks together, they all focus on low latency inference. And they were pulled in that direction by one very important customer Cursor.”
Movva: Non-NVIDIA chips beat NVIDIA on FLOPS per dollar
“And so there are other chips that definitely rank higher than NVIDIA on flops per dollar. But they may not have as much interconnect”
Nvidia Strategically Rations Chips to Prevent Deep-Pocketed Buyers From Gaining Power
“NVIDIA sees the, if they just let the most deep pockets buy all the chips that Maybe hurts them in the long term if that customer ends up accruing a lot of more power. They understand that compute is power today, and so they're quite strategic about how they a…”
Building 100-Megawatt Data Centers in the US Is Now Practically Impossible
“And basically there's no way to build a gigawatt data center in the United States easily anymore. Even a hundred megawatts is, is increasingly hard. It's basically impossible unless you're a very special set of customers. 10 megawatts is probably on the edge o…”
Movva: NVIDIA is producing 5 million Blackwell chips this year
“NVIDIA's pumping out five million Blackwell chips this year.”
Vishria: Fireworks achieves 5x speed and higher throughput than major clouds
“And the performance difference For a fireworks versus, like, a cloud provider is, like, five X. And that is just the speed performance. Then you add on top of that the, like, throughput, which is not visible externally. It's only visible if you look at, if you…”
Vishria: AI sales reps generate $10M to $30M, breaking SaaS quota models
“Because it turns out that in a lot of these companies, you have reps doing 10 or 20, thirty million.”
Vishria: China is adding ten times more energy capacity than the US
“The bigger thing to me is that I think China's bringing on 10 times as much energy next year as we are in the U.S.”
Vishria: Cerebras attempted a 2024 IPO at a much lower valuation
“Take the Cerebrus example as a good one, which is, like, we took it public this time in May, but, like, we tried to take it public in twenty-twenty-four, and it would have been taken public at a much, much lower valuation, and like, you know, it would have bee…”
Baker: Wall Street models hyperscaler Blackwell compute monetizing at Ampere rates
“If you look at the amount of gigawatts that are supposed to come on, and consensus estimates for hyperscalers, they're effectively modeled, and these are gigawatts of Blackwell and Rubin. Rubin being NVIDIA's next chip, Blackwell being the current chip. They a…”
Baker: Top AI-spending companies are growing meaningfully faster
“In the bull case, and you know, you've seen church from Cognition, Ramp, and Stripe, that the companies that are spending the most on AI are growing, growing meaningfully faster.”
Baker: Inference Cloud Startups Match Early Frontier Growth Burning Little Cash
“What's shocking about those business models is they're growing almost as fast as the frontier labs in the early days. But burning very little cash.”