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 91 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
Greenblatt: Broad AI access does not prevent misaligned power-seeking takeovers
“Giving broad access to AIs does not solve the problem of the AIs having drives of their own that are highly misaligned and the AIs being power seeking in various ways, or the AI is trying to take over which could happen, you know, Via various routes.”
Mark Zuckerberg's open-source vision underestimates transformative superintelligence
“When Mark thinks about super intelligence, he's not really imagining anything very concrete. He just means like an AI that's like a really awesome assistant that is in your smart glasses or whatever. And like, I'm just like, that's not really like what I mean …”
Evans: Meta and Google do not need standalone LLM monetization
“Because if you are Meta or Google, You've got this whole other highly profitable business, which now needs to have LLMs inside it, powering all sorts of capabilities and features, and you probably want them to be your LLMs rather than somebody else's. But you …”
Meta raises tens of billions in off-balance-sheet debt for data centers
“You have this, sort of, offloading of debt from big companies, for example, Meta, that raises tens of billions of dollars to fuel its data center ambitions, but that doesn't sit on Meta's balance sheet.”
Laskin: Reflection AI regularly beats OpenAI, Anthropic, and DeepMind for talent
“We win over candidates over OpenAI and Anthropic Meta, DeepMind regularly.”
Evans: Meta and AWS both benefit from AI becoming cheap commodity infrastructure
“In a sense, like, AWS and Meta are on the same page, and then Meta wants this to be cheap, generic commodity infrastructure that's sold at marginal cost, and they will differentiate on cool Facebooky stuff on top. Amazon want this to be cheap, generic commodit…”
Antitrust locks Big Tech out of M&A, empowering Snowflake and Databricks
“But you look at like Amazon, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, all are under an attack trust and basically impossible for them to acquire. So there's, you don't really have the big chip stacks at the table anymore, which means if you're an acquirer like Snowflake o…”
Ghodsi: Early Big Tech achieved AI breakthroughs using 1970s algorithms with massive data
“What they were doing is they were taking those algorithms from the seventies that do not work, but they were applying orders of magnitude, more data to it. So a lot of data on modern hardware, and they were getting superhuman results.”
95% of machine learning models at Google and Facebook are neural nets
“So if you look at a company like Google or Facebook, almost all of their models, like, 95% of their models are neural net based.”
Pesenti in 2020: Multi-million-dollar AI training runs are unsustainable for Facebook
“Where it becomes millions is when you do training runs. So some of the training runs in the most advanced system that it comes from our company or other companies out there are starting to be extremely expensive. Yeah. Like you can look at one run in the scale…”
Pesenti in 2020: Large neural chatbots are not ready for consumer products
“It's not ready for prime consumption, let's be clear. You know, like these bots have lots of interesting side effects. You know, you cannot really control what they're gonna say. But they are quite entertaining, quite engaging, and a lot more human-like than y…”
Pesenti: Deepfake detection will never be a solved problem
“It's never going to be a soft problem, right? So it's always going to be an arm race. I'm confident that we can actually identify part of it. I think we can act on it. We can label it in the case where it matters to users, but I'm also confident that it's goin…”
Pesenti: Self-supervised learning will supersede other AI techniques across fields
“Self-supervised learning is really showing promises everywhere, you know, so it's obviously that's the technique behind large language models, but our, you know, my team came up with new papers around vision. So we believe actually that these techniques will s…”
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.”
Dixon: Centralized platforms predictably turn hostile to third-party developers over time
“What tends to happen with these big platforms is they start off being very open to, kind of, third parties to startups. Like, if you look at Facebook early on, they embraced Zynga, and they embraced media companies and things like this, and then as they got bi…”
Top machine learning talent is heavily concentrated at Google and Facebook
“Almost all of the really smart machine learning people are in less than 10 companies in the world. They're actually in less than five, right? In fact, they're mostly all at Google and Facebook.”
Chung: Tech giants offer seven-figure salaries to undergraduate AI recruits
“If you go straight to academia and try to pull them out of, even if it's, you know, undergrad, they're getting seven figure offers from Google, Facebook to go work on, whether it's core, Deep learning tech, AI, or better ad targeting.”
Big tech companies, not startups, will drive machine learning innovations
“I think we're gonna probably be seeing innovations from those types of companies, ah, before startups.”
Public cloud does not make financial sense at Facebook scale
“So that's an excellent question, and, ah, there is definitely an, there, ah, you know, there is an inflection point where people, ah, think that, ah, the total cost of ownership, ah, you know, once you're, ah, so suppose you're a Facebook skill, right, of cour…”
Evans: Google and Meta delayed LLMs in 2022 due to high error rates
“This is why Google and Meta didn't launch their own LLMs in twenty-twenty-two when they had them as well, because they looked at them and said, well, they're wrong too much.”
Masad: Mark Zuckerberg is reversing identity-based hiring at Meta
“You see Zuck, you know sort of bringing fast Facebook back, or meta back to the hacker culture and reversing a lot of the sort of identity-based hiring and identity-based sort of promotions and all of that stuff.”
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…”
Consumers buy Meta smart glasses for audio, not for AI features
“There's like, people like the glasses because the music is great. Like the AI sucks, basically, as far as I can tell from people, but the music is great.”
Evans: Meta Quest 3 lacks traction with roughly 10M active users
“Meta has the Quest III, which is a perfectly good, credible consumer device. It does not have traction. Does not have a, it's probably got, I don't know, maybe ten million active users. Huge abandonment rate in the past. It's not really good for anything other…”
Falcon: Lightning AI rebuilt Meta's LLaMA from scratch under Apache 2.0
“So we took the Lama, like, paper and implemented from scratch completely in Apache two, and we open sourced it. So it's fully, fully usable for enterprises, but we also gave you the training code, not just inference, and we also gave you fine tuning methods as…”
Kambadur: Generative 3D AI tools will vastly accelerate building the metaverse
“That's kind of like how the metaverse is gonna happen. We're gonna be able to like walk around and generated three D worlds in VR, and they're all gonna be built Much more quickly than maybe we expected a few years ago.”
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.”
Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and OpenAI used Reddit data for AI models
“Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and OpenAI all used Reddit's data to train their conversational AI models.”
Pesenti in 2020: 9B parameter Blenderbot is the largest chat model
“It's the largest chat model out there. It's nine billion parameters.”
Pesenti: Facebook is going end-to-end all-in on PyTorch
“We're definitely going all in as PyTorch, you know, end to end. So I think initially when we launched the Onyx strategy, it was more like a multi-framework world. And we had actually two framework internally between PyTorch and Cafe Two, but we're still suppor…”
Pesenti: Inference remains Facebook's largest machine learning cost
“Actually, To be clear, the most costly thing we do in ML is still inference cost, because when you put a piece of content within Facebook, it's running hundreds of different ML based algorithm, and they all run on machine parallel, and it's using a huge number…”
Pesenti: Facebook employs 30,000 content moderators
“So we have actually 30,000 moderators that try to really understand if the content that's published on a platform satisfy our policy, but 30,000, given the number, the amount of content, and you're talking about billions of pieces of content every day is not e…”
Former Facebook CTO Jeff Rothschild called CockroachDB 'the one'
“Jeff had helped me turn down pretty much every database company that ever existed, and he said, this is the one. And, you know, if we were at Facebook, we could do it all over again. This is the product we wish we could use”
Marcus: Facebook M relies mostly on human operators rather than AI
“Facebook's new M service, which they have not rolled out at scale has humans on the back end. There's a little bit of AI in there, but it's mostly, ah, human beings, which is why they haven't rolled it out for a billion customers. They don't have enough human …”
Mashable content predictions compare favorably to Facebook despite lacking granular graph data
“And these results actually compare favorably with the results found by folks at Facebook, for example, who actually have all of the granular information that we don't have about the actual graph structure on which these cascades happen.”
LeCun predicted in 2014 that AI would mediate human social interactions
“And started thinking about the next 10 years. What are the next 10 years going to be for social interactions? And it's pretty obvious to a lot of people that a lot of our interactions you know, with our friends and a lot of interactions with the digital world …”
Facebook's infrastructure cost $1.20 per user annually versus $13 for Google
“It costs about buck 20 to run a user on Facebook for a year. That'll vary a little bit depending on which country you're in in the world. It costs 12 bucks, 13 dollars, for a user on Google.”
Rauch: Career alpha comes from choosing emergent tech over high-status trends
“Where I found the alpha in my life was in actually not immediately go to the thing that was like the obvious high reputation thing. When I started using JavaScript, it was considered to be toy programming language. And it couldn't be fast and it couldn't be co…”
Evans: Big Tech data center spending will exceed $300B this year
“Google, Meta AWS, not Amazon overall, AWS only, and Microsoft spent about two hundred twenty billion dollars building data centers last year, and will spend about 300, maybe over 300 this year, depending on where their numbers come out.”
Borgman: Facebook ran all data warehousing analytics on Presto
“It was really how Facebook was running all of their data warehousing analytics.”
Ben Rogojan: Non-Big Tech data engineers must manage their own pipeline tooling
“At Facebook, you essentially have your internal airflow that a different team runs, and you can just push files to it and it picks up the data pipelines, you know, automatically. Whereas in most other companies, you might be the person that has to even manage,…”
Ben Rogojan observed ML engineers at Facebook accessing data directly from warehouses
“Some companies do have maybe the ML engineers access data more directly from maybe the data warehouse, which was things I saw like at Facebook.”
Benaich: Meta's AI shift is one of public market's best ROI trades
“Yeah, I mean the, it's probably one of the best like ROI trades of like a public company in like a long time.”
Meta, Google, and Amazon on track for $200B in AI capex
“The three top companies, MetaGoogle and Amazon, are on track to invest two hundred billion in AI infrastructure this year.”
Azhar: AI adoption will lead traditional companies to operate like Amazon
“I suspect companies start to look a lot more like, or they'll behave more like Amazon does or more like, you know, Facebook when it was Facebook rather than Meta, which is that there's just lots of experimentation on the edges.”
DeepScribe grew from zero to $6M ARR purely through inbound marketing
“We bought AdWords on Facebook and Google and all of our traffic and all of our initial sales from I think zero to six million in ARR came from inbound.”
Housley: Core data engineering issues haven't changed in 20 years
“A lot of the core issues in data engineering actually haven't changed that much in 20 years, and so people got so excited about technology in the transition in the 2000, the internet bubble, rise of Google, the rise of Facebook, that they lost sight of that”