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.

clear all ✕

why aren't all 17 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

Insight
Delangue: Collective open source can outperform tech giants like Google and Facebook
“We believe that actually if all the other companies than Facebook, Google, Apple, Amazon are actually all contributing to the same open source technology, they can actually end up with something way better than each one of these guys could build.”
Clement Delangue Jan 22, 2020 ▶ 22:04 NLP—The Most Important Field of ML // Clement Delangue, Hugging Face (FirstMark's Data Driven NYC)
Assertion Supported
Patel: TSMC is actively manufacturing chips in Arizona for Nvidia, Apple, and AMD
“TSMC is literally making chips for NVIDIA and Apple and AMD and others in Arizona today, right?”
Dylan Patel Feb 5, 2026 ▶ 43:15 Dylan Patel: NVIDIA's New Moat & Why China is "Semiconductor Pilled”
Opinion
Evans: Apple's AI writing tools are just better spellcheck
“They have the writing tools, so you can select a bunch of text and hit proofread. And it, it's like spellcheck. Or you can summarize it, or you can select some text and turn it into a table. It's useful. It's a feature. It's just a feature. It's like spellchec…”
Benedict Evans May 22, 2025 ▶ 34:50 AI Eats the World: Benedict Evans on What Really Matters Now
Assertion Supported
Borgman: Presto is mostly Facebook internal, while Trino is the mainstream branch
“They started as identical copies, but the code bases have diverged quite a bit. And today Presto is really just used by Facebook. So it's sort of like their own private branch in a way used by a small number of people. And Trino has become the mainstream commu…”
Justin Borgman Jan 30, 2025 ▶ 13:00 Trino, Iceberg and the Battle for the Lakehouse | Justin Borgman, CEO, Starburst
Assertion Supported
Nvidia chips appear in 11x more AI research papers than all competitors
“If you sum all the papers that use NVIDIA chips versus all the papers that use TPUs, FPGAs, ASICs, Apple, Huawei, the sum of all NVIDIA papers versus the sum of everybody else, the delta is like 11 times.”
Nathan Benaich Nov 14, 2024 ▶ 43:56 State of AI 2024: Frontier Models, AI Geopolitics, Robotics | Nathan Benaich, Air Street Capital
Opinion
Azhar: Meta is the weakest of the major big tech companies
“And what's true for Facebook, which is the weakest of the big tech companies is As true for Apple and Google and everyone else.”
Azeem Azhar Mar 8, 2022 ▶ 11:57 Fireside Chat - Azeem Azhar (Author, The Exponential Age) with Matt Turck (Partner, FirstMark)
Assertion Supported
Apple used Foursquare data to improve international maps after botched rollout
“Apple had a few problems with their map rollout, as you may have heard. And so you know, they came to us to try to improve the map data set around the world outside the U.S.”
Jeff Glueck Mar 24, 2017 ▶ 5:03 Location Intelligence // Jeff Glueck, Foursquare (FirstMark's Data Driven)
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Evans: Apple has user interest graph data but refuses to use it
“Apple also in principle has an interest graph. It just refuses to use it.”
Benedict Evans May 22, 2025 ▶ 54:17 AI Eats the World: Benedict Evans on What Really Matters Now
Disclosure
Datadog rejects Apple-style secret product development
“We don't do it like Apple, like we don't disappear in a basement for three years and then, you know, ship a fully formed product that takes the world by storm. Instead, from the earliest days, like we work with design partners, we work with customers, and we t…”
Olivier Pomel Sep 27, 2024 ▶ 20:19 AI at Datadog: Monitoring machines in the age of LLMs | Olivier Pomel, CEO of Datadog
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Sapoznik: John Doerr introduced ASAPP to Tim Cook in 12 minutes
“And I asked John Dole, do you think you can help me with someone at Apple? Cause there's this Apple, but he's like, what do you need? Can you drop me a note? And then, 12 minutes later, I had an introduction to Tim Cook saying, can you help this kid with like …”
Gustavo Sapoznik Dec 13, 2023 ▶ 31:02 AI vs. Call Centers: ASAPP CEO Gustavo Sapoznik on the Future of Customer Service
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Delangue: Over 1,000 companies including Apple and Bing use Hugging Face
“And we have more than a thousand companies using our library from medium-sized one, like Monzo, for example, the banking one, to really large ones like Bing or Apple.”
Clement Delangue Jan 22, 2020 ▶ 1:17 NLP—The Most Important Field of ML // Clement Delangue, Hugging Face (FirstMark's Data Driven NYC)
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Bloch: Apple, Amazon, and Google will likely compete in personal health
“And plus, you have Apple, Amazon, and Google that are very likely to be in this market and probably compete directly here.”
Allon Bloch Jan 16, 2019 ▶ 17:29 Building An Info Layer for Personal Health // Allon Bloch, K Health (FirstMark's Data Driven NYC)
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Dixon: Non-tech giants will find speech recognition AI very tough
“I think for some applications, like speech, you know speech is going to be, I think, very tough for non, you know, I mean, like Google and Amazon with their, you know, with their, and Apple with their phones and the, you know, the Alexa's and things like that.…”
Chris Dixon Jun 8, 2018 ▶ 9:29 Fireside Chat: Chris Dixon, General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz (FirstMark's Data Driven)
Assertion Partly supported
Glueck: Foursquare outpredicted Wall Street on iPhone 6s launch sales
“When we predicted Apple the first weekend of sales for the iPhone six S, and at the time Wall Street consensus was you know, around 11 to twelve million units the first weekend, and we said it would be 13 to 14, and they came out over 13.”
Jeff Glueck Mar 24, 2017 ▶ 17:10 Location Intelligence // Jeff Glueck, Foursquare (FirstMark's Data Driven)
Assertion Partly supported
LeCun: Apple, Android, and Microsoft mobile speech recognition use deep learning
“So probably many of you know that most You know, mobile speech recognition application search and stuff like that uses deep learning for the last two years. This is both for, you know, Apple, Android, Microsoft. All of those applications use deep learning for …”
Yann LeCun Dec 18, 2014 ▶ 15:27 Yann Lecun, Facebook // Artificial Intelligence // Data Driven #32 (Hosted by FirstMark Capital)
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Laplanche: Lending Club detects higher mobile loan fraud on Android than Apple
“We've seen a higher fraud rate in terms of mobile OS with Android than Apple.”
Renaud Laplanche May 29, 2014 ▶ 11:13 Renaud Laplanche, Lending Club // Data Driven #27 // May 2014 (Hosted by FirstMark Capital)
Assertion Not publicly verifiable
Kirill Sheynkman: Apple uses GridGain for supply chain analytics
“Apple uses them to supply chain analytics.”
Kirill Sheynkman Dec 5, 2013 ▶ 5:28 Kirill Sheynkman, RTP Ventures // Data Driven #3 // Feb 2012 (Interviewed by Matt Turck)
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