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 931 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
Mann: Anthropic models have exhibited power-seeking behaviors in lab experiments
“If the model is in a box trying to improve itself, then it could go completely off the rails and have these secret goals, like Resource accumulation and power seeking and resistance to shutdown that you really don't want in a very powerful model. And we've act…”
Pfeffer: Bill Gates stole the original code that built Microsoft
“People forget that Bill Gates stole the code on which Microsoft has built.”
Ries: Johnson & Johnson covered up asbestos in baby powder for growth
“Again, if you think I'm exaggerating, the product managers at Johnson & Johnson put asbestos in the baby powder. And covered it up because although they said their purpose, their mission statement was patient health, their actual mission had become growth opti…”
Lovable reached $200M ARR with a team of just 100 employees
“We're over two hundred million in AR. At this point, we're a hundred people large.”
Surge AI Surpassed $1B in Revenue With Under 100 Employees
“Yeah, so we hit over a billion of revenue last year with under a hundred people.”
Meta paid $14B for a 49% non-voting stake in Scale AI
“The transaction was Meta invested a little bit over fourteen billion dollars to get 49% of the company non-voting stock. Didn't take a new board seat.”
Rachitsky: X is making billions of dollars and becoming really profitable
“I just saw a story that they're, like, making billions of dollars. Like, he's actually turned it around. It's actually becoming a really profitable company.”
Mullenweg: Meta's Llama isn't truly open source due to user restrictions
“However, there's a clause in it that says, if you're above a certain threshold of monthly active users, I forget what it is, like, it's big, it's like seven hundred fifty million, so it's pretty high. You need a license from them. And so that does not give you…”
Mullenweg claims WP Engine broke WordPress undo feature to save money
“So to save money, they were actually turning off features like revisions. So a cool part about WordPress that actually one of my favorite features is every change to every single post or page is saved forever, just like Wikipedia. So if you make a mistake, you…”
Mullenweg clarifies he has always personally owned and controlled WordPress.org
“WordPress.org has always been me personally.”
Mullenweg details the complex commercial and non-commercial WordPress trademark licenses
“And so kind of the compromise is that the foundation would kind of, ah, own the trademark and license it out for non-commercial purposes. I had a license to run WordPress.org, you know, because obviously I need that, and then Automatic would retain the commerc…”
Mullenweg acknowledges judge reversed Advanced Custom Fields plugin repository takeover
“This is controversial and actually the, they actually got a preliminary injection. So the judge said reverse this. So this has all been reversed by the way.”
Agrawal fired Beykpour the night Twitter signed the Musk term sheet
“The day after we get home from the hospital, Parag called me and said that he was letting me go, and that he was taking the team in a different direction. And that night, Twitter signed a term sheet with Elon to sell the company.”
Smith: Google tracks post-click dwell time via Chrome and Android for ranking
“Google's tracking everyone through Chrome and Android, and they can actually see what happened after they left Google. And ultimately Google wants you to end your session or find the answer, find what you wanted on that page. So the more you click on, on our U…”
The majority of AI companion users are women in their 40s and 50s
“The majority of people using companion products are women that are in their forties and fifties, actually.”
The music industry will be bigger than ever thanks to generative AI
“And now that people are making music again, I think the music industry is going to be bigger than it's ever been.”
Netflix recently acquired Ben Affleck's AI post-production startup, Inner Positive
“So we recently acquired a company, Inner Positive, that was started by Ben Affleck, that built a set of models and capabilities that allow you, after you've shot something, to relight, reframe, reshoot, change dialogue in ways that are very impactful to get hi…”
Segal: AI impacts job sentiment three times more than manager effectiveness
“This finding, this insight around the impact of AI on your identity and on every single other variable around your job is about three times as large as those other effects. So this technology, this era that we're in is having an outlier level outsized impact o…”
Segal: Tech workers advise against junior talent entering industry due to AI
“And perhaps the most significant finding of them all is that people would not recommend junior people, early career people entering into the tech workforce at this moment, given what's happening with AI.”
Segal: No tech role currently has a positive career Net Promoter Score
“What you're seeing here.
Is that no one is a promoter of their role in tech right now.
Not even founders who are by far the happiest, happy-go-lucky people in, in tech right now.
Founders would not recommend their roles.
Neither would people in sales or go to …”
Segal: Tech workers fear overwork from AI far more than job loss
“Losing my job to AI is actually second to last on that list. And instead, what we saw rise up to the top is the expectation to do more for the same Pay.”
Pincus: OMGPOP built Draw Something by copying Words with Friends
“They said, we're going to take this proven game and do everything about it that in as perfect students of what is already working and viral on mobile, and they perfectly copied our turn-based system from Words with Friends, and they made a massive hit.”
Ries: Standard corporate charters legally bind boards to accept higher buyout offers
“According to the legal documents, you yourself signed your company's literal charter that you have right now, and this is not some hypothetical future thing you've already put in motion. A rule that says you have a fiduciary duty to say yes in this situation.”
Ries: Shareholder primacy is only 40 years old
“For the vast majority of the time, for hundreds of years, we have had joint stock corporations. Only the last 40 have we had this idea. Before the eighties, it was considered obvious. Our grandparents thought it was obvious. Our great grandparents thought it w…”
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.”
Ries: Only 20% of venture-backed founders remain CEO three years post-IPO
“According to Harvard Law School, among venture-backed companies that have the standard best practices set up that you got from your lawyer, ok? Only 20% of founders are still the CEO three years after going public.”
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.”
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.”
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: 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.”
Patel: AI will generate original insights absent from human knowledge
“We will have original insights generated that don't exist in the human corpus of knowledge. And we will have the physical world get augmented to language where capacity is augmented to humans.”
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.”
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.”
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…”
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.”
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: 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.”
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…”