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 1,995 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 5 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
Ries: All major AI labs are Public Benefit Corporations
“Most of the best companies today are using this structure. Like all the major AI labs are incorporated as BBC's Anthropic most famously of all.”
Rachitsky: Anthropic is the fastest-growing company in history
“Anthropic being the fastest growing company of all time, just like absurd, breaking all records is a public benefits corporation should make you feel okay about doing this.”
Ries: Anthropic rejected a $200M military defense contract
“They turned down a two hundred million dollar contract and bore the wrath of the world's largest army and government.”
Spiegel: Snapchat+ hitting a $1B run rate got Meta's attention
“Yeah, I think, you know, we just hit twenty-five million subscribers on Snapchat Plus, more than a billion revenue run rate, so it was, I think, probably enough to get Meta's attention that it's a good time to copy.”
Anthropic surpassed $19B in revenue by the end of February 2026
“The nineteen billion number you quoted is from the end of Feb, so that is also out of date.”
Claude automated growth experiments win at the rate of junior PMs
“It's delivering results, right? Like, and it's like, you can push it, press play with it. And it's like, it ultimately prints money where I'd say that the win rate is like, I would expect a senior PM to do better. Like I would say like, this is like a junior P…”
Anthropic built a chatbot before ChatGPT but withheld it over safety
“Anthropic had a version of Claude. We had a chatbot before ChatGPT was launched, and we had ultimately chosen not to launch it for safety reasons. I think the team didn't want to kick off Effectively like an AI global arms race”
Willison: StrongDM implemented a policy where engineers never read code
“The next rule though is nobody reads the code and this is the thing which StrongDM started doing back in, I think it was August last year. They said, okay, we're not going to read the code.”
Willison: Pelican SVG quality strongly correlates with general LLM capability
“There appears to be a very strong correlation between how good their drawing of a pelican riding a bicycle is and how good they are at everything else. And nobody can explain to me why that is. But as I started looking at these things, I realized, wow, The bet…”
Rachitsky: OpenClaw is the fastest-growing open-source project in history
“It's the fastest growing open source project in history. If you look at the chart, it's just like absurd, like more than Linux.”
Younis: Every car company is developing a Tesla FSD rival
“I think generally speaking, every, every single car company on the planet right now is working on a product. That's like a Tesla FSD product. Every single car company there without exception.”
Younis: About a quarter of Huawei employees belong to Communist Party
“The couple 100,000 people that work at Huawei, about a quarter of them are members of the Communist Party.”
Patel: AI is running out of publicly available human-generated training data
“Like so far we've trained these models with, you know human generated data publicly available on the internet, but we are running out of human generated data publicly available on the internet to train the models.”
Cherny: IDEs might not be needed for software engineering by end-of-2025
“And my prediction back in May of 2025 was, by the end of the year, you might not need an IDE to code anymore, and we're gonna start to see engineers not doing this.”
HubSpot saw 100% attrition on hires from Google, Microsoft, and Salesforce
“Like we hired so many people from Salesforce and Google, Microsoft, like a hundred percent, you know, attrition rate on all those folks.”
Virtually zero founder-CEOs Brian Halligan coaches maintain a work-life balance
“I don't know any of the founders I work with that have work-life balance. By the way, this is not something I recommend. I didn't have it. I don't think my co-founder Dharmesh had it. None of the CEO, the only CEO I know And he's unusual in this way is Kareem …”
Wu: OpenAI engineers using Codex open 70% more PRs
“So they're actually opening 70% more PRs and than the engineers who aren't using Codex as much and the gap is widening.”
At least half of S&P 500 companies have employees using Lovable
“There's, I'd say at least, to best of my knowledge, at least half of S&P. 500 companies have people working in them that are using Lovable to some extent, right?”
Andreessen: Linus Torvalds conceded AI codes better than top programmers
“The AI coding thing, you know, really hit critical mass and the world's best programmers, right? Including like Linus Torvalds, you know, for the first time over the holiday break, basically said, yeah, AI is now coding better than we can.”
Rachitsky: Jason Lemkin replaced a 10-person sales team with 20 AI agents
“I just had Jason Lemkin on the podcast. He's very smart on sales, go to market, run Saster, and he replaced his whole sales team with agents. He had 10 salespeople. Now he has 1.2 and 20 agents.”
Lemkin: Over 50% of prospects are actively buying in AI software categories
“In many categories, we're north of 50% in market.”
Schulhoff: Attackers hijacked Claude Code to carry out a cyber attack
“This group was able to hijack Claude Code into performing a cyber attack, basically.”
Schulhoff: Attacking AI agents is easier than eliciting CBRN info
“We've actually just run a bunch of agentic AI red teaming competitions, and we found that it's actually easier to attack agents and trick them into doing bad things than it is to do, like, seaburn elicitation.”
Schulhoff: Claude's CBRN safeguards can still be bypassed in under an hour
“That being said, if you look at, like, anthropics constitutional classifiers, it's much more difficult to get, like, CBRN information out of clawed models than it used to be. But humans can still do it in, let's say, like, under an hour and automated systems c…”
Lovable's paid retention matches established B2B SaaS benchmarks
“However, what I can say, it's on par with benchmarks of other B to B SaaS products that I've ever worked at. And I worked with Miro, Dropbox, SurveyMonkey, Netlify Amplitude and others.”
Verna: AI software companies operate closer to 40% gross margins, not 80%
“To find an AI company with 80, 90% margin profile is absolutely impossible. Let's be real. We're all sitting somewhere in the 40% or so, which is a lot smaller.”
Cohen: Third-party AI tools never work off the shelf at enterprise scale
“So you can't just go and bring a third party tool. And have it work on the LinkedIn stack. In fact, that's one of our biggest learnings. It never works. Never works.”
Li: World Labs created the first generative model outputting genuine 3D worlds
“We've spent a year and plus Building the world's first generative model that can output genuinely three D worlds.”
Li: World Labs runs real-time 3D video generation on a single H100
“Just a couple of weeks ago, we rolled out the world's first real-time demoable real-time video generation on a single H 100 GPU.”
Abel: Most enterprise clients cite Gemini and Copilot over Anthropic
“Most enterprises I'm talking to mention Gemini. Yeah, or Microsoft Copilot. So I don't hear much about Anthropic, to be honest.”
Abel: AI outbound sales tools all pull from identical contact databases
“And the thing about AI tools is they're all pulling from the same databases. So I'm like, I want to email someone not in the database that's getting hit by a million folks.”
Block engineers using AI agent Goose report saving 8-10 hours weekly
“But even now we find engineering teams that are very, very AI forward that you're using goose every day are reporting about eight to 10 hours saved per week.”
Huyen: A randomized engineering trial found top performers gained most from Cursor
“He was like, okay, here's more like currently like best performing, average performing, and lowest performing. And then there's a randomized trial. So like they give like half of each group, like access to like cursor. And then he was noticed like over time, I…”
Stein: AI expands overall search queries without hurting core Google Search
“And what we're finding is that AI is expansionary. And so there's actually just more and more questions being asked and curiosity that can be fulfilled now with AI. And so that's where you get the growth. And so all like the core Google search isn't really cha…”
80% of Scale AI's expert labelers hold degrees; 15% have PhDs
“80% of the people that we have in our expert network have a bachelor's degree or grader, which is very contrary to some of the positioning that's out there and some of the understanding of this industry. About 15% have a PhD that's grader.”
Mercor scaled from $1M to $400M revenue run rate in 16 months
“We grew from one to four hundred million in revenue run rate in 16 months, and it's been an extraordinary journey and super exciting.”
Foody: Some Fortune 500s fear evaluating AI automation in their businesses
“There are certain enterprises we talk to that are almost like fearful, not wanting to engage, not wanting to, you know, eval their businesses because that'll provide the evidence that their value chain is being automated. And there's others that, I mean, liter…”
Smith: Early-stage startups can rank in AEO immediately through citations
“That's not the case for answer engine optimization because you can get mentioned by a citation tomorrow and start showing up immediately. You can have a Reddit thread. You can have a YouTube video. You can be mentioned on a blog, like a, you know, a brand new …”
Smith: Google VP confirmed publisher referral traffic is up slightly
“Google published something recently. Their VP of search explicitly said, I looked at our, the traffic that we're sending to publishers and it is not down. It's up slightly. So it is not true that Google search is going down.”
Smith: Only 10 to 12% of Google and ChatGPT results are AI-generated
“It was around 10 to 12% of content in Google search and in ChatGPT are AI generated. 90% or not.”
Smith: There is more AI-generated content online than human-created content
“We found that there's more AI generated content on the internet than human generated content. So back to the common crawl study, we looked at a 100,000 different URLs over the past five years. And then you can see this curve where AI generated is now higher th…”
Horowitz: Some a16z companies grew from $0 to $800M in one year
“We have companies That, you know, went from zero to eight hundred million in a year, and that kind of thing, and so it's not a, I would say there's a basis for the prices going up, first of all.”
Horowitz: Competing in AI foundation models requires raising at least $2B
“So in order to compete in foundational model world, our basic rule of thumb is you have to be able to, you know, without much product progress phrase, at least two billion dollars, because that's basically what it can cost you to train something that gets you …”
Horowitz estimates OpenAI commands 80% of total AI industry revenue
“Open AI is probably 80% of the revenue in AI or something like that now.”
Liu: Viral 'Airtable is dead' tweet used completely false revenue metrics
“Basically none of it was true. And I mean, the surprising thing to me was how viral this tweet went when, frankly, like I actually looked back at this person's other tweets. I think they worked at CB insights. And the irony is like the whole point of that busi…”
A leading AI data competitor spends tens of millions monthly on ads
“One of the leading players has like, they have like 200 recruiters. It's like unsustainable. There are like 200 people on LinkedIn sending individual messages to acquire these people because there's no brand, there's no trust. They spend, you know, they're spe…”