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 297 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
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…”
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…”
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…”
Patel: Large-scale protests against AI will occur within three months
“And this is just the beginning, so I think we'll see large-scale protests against AI in three months.”
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…”
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”
Vishria: AI will yield an oligopoly and multiple $100B specialized winners
“So it's just, it feels to me like we're gonna end up with an oligopoly Of winners, and there will be, I really believe they will be these, like, hundred billion dollar crazy smaller winners and so, like, that's, you know, that's, like, that just feels like tha…”
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…”
Wachen: Over $1B in AI Compute Revenue Generated Every Day
“Every day there's over a billion dollars of revenue in this category, and a lot of it's inference.”
Rao: Anthropic grew run-rate revenue from $9B to over $30B in four months
“We started the year with about nine billion dollars of run rate revenue, and we ended the quarter with, you know, north of thirty billion dollars of run rate revenue.”
Patel: AI can currently automate roughly 3% of BLS tasks
“The BLS has this entire Bureau of Labor Statistics has this entire, like, set of, like, 2000 tasks, And so he did that with AI, which ones can be done by AI, which ones cannot and grading them across a rubric, you know, about three percent are doable now with …”
Patel: Robotics few-shot learning breakthroughs will arrive in 6 to 18 months
“And so I think in the next six to 18 months, we'll start seeing real breakthroughs in robotics that enable few shot learning, i.e. There's a pre-trained robot model, and now there's a robot that you have hired or bought or whatever. You showed a few examples a…”
Carnell: Upcoming data will show GLP-1s protect against addictive behaviors
“In terms of the addiction data that'll start coming out over the next year or so, you would lose that benefit. Like you would lose the, essentially the free gift of protecting yourself from being addicted to drugs, alcohol, or gambling. And that comes from the…”
Levine: Physical Intelligence achieved robot dexterity without specialized techniques
“What was surprising is that we could also get these systems to perform very dexterous behaviors without really doing anything particularly special for that.”
Levine: Models generalize across robot embodiments without architecture changes
“Where we could get our models to work on all sorts of other robots, including robots with multi-fingered hands robots with different numbers of degrees of freedom, and obviously we needed to get data, and we needed to fine-tune the model, but the model itself …”
Sankar: Palantir had to sue the US Army to compete
“You know, we had to sue the army to compete at some point.”
Solar power purchase agreement costs are up over 50% since 2020 lows
“Meanwhile, you know, the cost of a PPA, a power purchase agreement, for solar is well off the lows. What kind of lows happened around twenty-twenty, and it's the cost, again, of delivered electrons from solar is, you know, probably 50% plus more expensive than…”
Classroom technology adoption increased over 20 years while outcomes declined
“We've adopted more and more technology in the classroom over that 20 years, and outcomes have gone down.”
Skin substitute manufacturers exploit a six-month federal reimbursement price loophole
“Right now, one of the big things is skin substitutes.
So if you get a burn, you need some type of new skin on there's regs about how those get reimbursed and
You know, the first six months whenever a product is released, they are, there's not history of to h…”
Behring: Bulk of 3G's RBI returns came from growth, not cost-cutting
“If you look at the amount of money we've made at RBI, and then you try to decompose that. Okay. How much Of it was because we did zero base budget successfully in a couple of instances. And how much of it is because we grew the businesses originally, we had 12…”
AI pre-training scaling laws will continue for at least one more generation
“And we now know they're going to continue for pre-training for at least one more generation, and we're very early in the two new scaling laws, you know, for post-training, mid-training, RLVR, whatever people want to call it, and then test time computed inferen…”
Anthropic is growing faster and burning dramatically less cash than OpenAI
“Anthropic is a good company. You know, they're burning dramatically less cash Then open AI and growing faster.”
George: Waymo surpassed Lyft in San Francisco Bay Area market share
“There are something like 50,000 Lyft drivers in the San Francisco Bay Area and Waymo overtook them in market share.”
Dan Wang: Chinese researchers produce an increasing share of top-cited science papers
“By most metrics that we can identify, Chinese scientists are producing better qualities of work, not just quantity. If we take a look at some of the most, the top one percent cited scientific papers, Chinese researchers are producing an increasing share of man…”
Wang: Majority of Disclosed Meta AI Lab Hires Attended Chinese Universities
“And at least from what we can tell in some of the publicly listed hires for Meta's super intelligence lab a substantial number of these really elite. I think there are 11 engineers who are publicly disclosed. Something like seven of them had gone to Chinese un…”
Patel: OpenAI ARR Will Reach $20 Billion by Year-End
“Your revenue is like fifteen billion ARR this month, maybe, right, on a run rate basis. It'll get to 20 by the end of the year pretty, pretty clearly. Maybe it's like 16 now, but how do you pay three hundred billion dollars of revenue?”
Patel: AI Models Will Monetize by Taking a Cut on User Purchases
“The models are going to purchase for you, right? They're going to do actions for you and the model, and then the company that does those actions for you, the model that will be able to take some sort of take rate, right? Even if it's like .1%, even if it's one…”
Patel: Human-Level Engineering AI Represents $2 Trillion in Value
“If I could have an intelligence as smart as a Google senior engineer, that's two trillion dollars of software value, right? Because that's how much I pay, the world pays to software engineers today.”
Patel: ERCOT and PJM are instituting rules to cut data center power
“So this has happened in Texas, ERCOT, and it's happening in PJM which is the main, you know, the sort of northeast kind of area-ish. These two grids are putting these, like, rules where, hey, we're gonna actually say, hey, big loads, we can tell you, 24 hours …”
Patel: ByteDance Is Second or Third Largest GPU User Globally
“They have ByteDance, who's, I think, the third largest user of GPUs in the world after OpenAI, and You know, probably Meta, although ByteDance may be bigger than Meta, the third largest user of GPUs in the world, or second maybe, even ByteDance is.”
Patel: Blackwell manufacturing challenges slowed AI data center deployments
“Nvidia created Blackwell, they had a ton of manufacturing problems and challenges with it for their supply chain balance sheets went up for, you know, various companies in the supply chain are building servers and stuff, because they're trying to figure it out…”
Patel: xAI Will Build Biggest Data Center but Trail Big Tech Compute
“XAI can get to the next stage of compute. They won't have more compute than OpenAI. They won't have more compute than any individual company at Google, Meta, et cetera, but they will have the biggest individual data center”
Liemandt: Alpha will launch a homeschool product delivering 2x learning next year
“And so I believe next year we will have a homeschool version that somebody will be able to buy. The kids can be able to sit down and deliver two X in two hours for sure.”
Liemandt: AI-native companies will dwarf historical SaaS valuations
“AI native companies are going to be worth more than any SAS company ever has been.”
Bertolini: 20% of Aetna's lowest-paid employee families relied on food stamps
“I want to know who these people are. I want to know what their life's like, how much they make, and it was about 12 bucks an hour, and they were, 81% were women, 20% of the kids were on foods, the families were on food stamps, 25% of the kids were on Medicaid …”
Milgram: 2025 Business Bankruptcies Will Remain High or Increase
“Based on the data we see to date and the bankruptcies that we've already seen in 2025, we would expect 2025 to show persistent and possibly higher number of business bankruptcy filings.”
Becker: TSA mandated physical escorting and heavy ID rechecks for Clear
“They put in some physical escorting policies so that a clear employee who verified you had a stand with you, which created all sorts of challenges. All of your team members are standing in line. Also, they wanted to recheck At a extremely high level identity d…”
Gurley: IPO underpricing and fees create a 33% cost of capital
“I had my friend Jay Ritter rerun the data. Is there, you know, up like 25, 26% underpricing. You add in the seven percent fee, and you're like a 33% cost of capital.”
Gurley: Capital-intensive hard tech historically yields poor venture returns
“You could study it like mathematically and it hasn't been a great place for returns. And you could look at, you know, there was a massive amount of venture capital put into solar. 1520 years ago, and it didn't work.”
Gurley predicts 4-5 consumer AI companion startups will emerge within a year
“It's not That difficult for me to imagine exactly what played out in her, which was an unbelievable movie for its time, by the way. But like, I think that will happen. Like, I would be shocked if you don't see four or five companies pop up in the next year.”
Spotify paid out 70% of revenue and remained unprofitable for 15 years
“This year, Is sort of the first year of profitability for Spotify since its founding. People say that, you know, there's a lot of talk about Spotify sharing enough of the revenue. You know, we share about 70%, but the truth is the other 30% we haven't kept. We…”
Sosin: Every competitor attempting to copy Carvana's vertically integrated model failed
“Everyone who's tried to build this business besides Carvana has failed, and that's why It's taken Carvana, you know, over 10 years and ten billion dollars to get, you know, where it is.”
Blackstone's $450B Credit Fund Gets First Call Over Wall Street Banks
“Easy to look at it now. They have a four hundred fifty billion dollar credit fund. I was having dinner with the heads of one of the banks in New York, and we were talking about Blackstone and I, and Steve in particular, and I said, would you have ever thought …”
Kushner: Trump presidency will likely reduce Iran's oil sales
“And with Trump coming in, there's a super high probability that their ability to sell oil in the future is going to go down.”
Nvidia's Peak FLOPs Are Impossible to Hit Due to Power Throttling
“That operation runs at, you know, 70, 80% of peak utilization, and it's limited not by software, but by power. The way NVIDIA quotes peak flops is a little optimistic. You never hit that because of power throttling”