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 445 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…”
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.”
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…”
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: 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: 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.”
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…”
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…”
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.”
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: 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…”
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.”
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: 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 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…”
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: Viral water usage statistics overestimated data center consumption by 10,000x
“But an author made a mistake in a book. It overestimated the amount of water usage in data centers by 10,000 x. Not a little bit.”
Matt Smith: US built only one interstate gas pipeline in 10-12 years
“In the last 10 or 12 years, we've really built one interstate gas pipeline. That was Mountain Valley Pipeline connecting Appalachia to Mid-Atlantic.”
Wachen: Etched is the only startup building custom racks and chips
“We're actually, I think we're the only startup right now that's building its own rack as well as its own chips.”
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.”
DeepSeek Release Doubled Asian AWS GPU Rental Prices Due to Compute Demand
“And that was really strange because by Deep Seek Monday, it was super clear That this was going to be the most positive thing that had ever happened to compute demand. Prices in the AWS availability zones in Asia had already, like, doubled. You were seeing GPU…”
Baker: Tech relative valuations hit 10-year lows during recent drawdown
“I think on a relative basis, tech essentially got as cheap as it's been versus the rest of the market has at any point over the last 10 years.”
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: Sam Altman's residence was targeted with Molotov cocktails twice
“You look at the comments of news articles where Sam Altman had a Molotov cocktail thrown at his house twice in like two weeks.”
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 …”
China-Russia oil and gas trade remains overwhelmingly denominated in US dollars
“China's a big importer of Russian gas and oil.
It's kind of crazy to think about.
That trade is still denominated for a vast majority in the US dollar.”
Sankar: Europe Created Zero €100B+ Companies from Scratch in 50 Years
“Europe has created zero, zero companies worth more than a hundred billion euro from scratch in the last 50 years. It's almost, almost an astonishingly bad track record. We've created all of our trillion dollar companies from scratch in the last 50 years.”
Sankar: 50% of All Clinical Trial Drugs Are Created in China
“Wuxi went from being a cheap, you know, Basically a cheap pair of hands for pipetting contract research in the pharma industry to actually now 50% of all clinical trials are drugs that are created in China.”
Sankar: Apple Spent Equivalent of 2.5 Marshall Plans in China
“Apple has spent the equivalent on an inflation-adjusted basis in the last five years of two and a half Marshall plans building talent and capacity in China.”
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…”
Horowitz: Funded tech initiative reduced Las Vegas crime by over 50%
“Since we started the program, I think crime is down over 50% and then you know, shooting of suspects by police is down, like, close to 75%.”
Slack Revoked Glean’s API Access to Protect Its Own Platform Value
“Slack has done it most publicly. Slack is owned by Salesforce. They cut off access to Glean, where Glean can no longer access Slack data. And the reason is they don't want Glean to build on top of them. And then slowly suck out the value that Slack has.”
xAI will release the first frontier model trained on Nvidia Blackwell
“One, we will see the first models trained on Blackwell in early, I think the first Blackwell model will come from XAI. And the reason for that is just, it's a, According to Jensen, no one builds data centers faster than Elon.”
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…”