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 24 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
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.”
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…”
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…”
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 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…”
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 …”
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 …”
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.”
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.”
Pesenti: Facebook uses embedding algorithms to automatically match misleading content
“And then when they fly content that should be at least, you know, shown as a misleading, then we have this very advanced similarity algorithm that kind of like look at an embedding of the of the content itself. Again, it can be the image itself or a multimodal…”
In 2014, Google generated $30 per user annually versus Facebook's $6
“Google makes about 30 bucks a year per user. Facebook is doing a little bit worse. They're at six dollars per user”
Zeghidour: Meta's LLaMA and DINO models were developed in Paris
“Lama was started in Paris. Dino, which is the most groundbreaking vision work from Facebook was developed in Paris.”
Patel: Meta operates two MTIA chip lines for recommendations and Gen AI
“Meta actually has two lines of AI chips. They're MTIA. There's a line that's focused on recommendation systems, and then there's a line that's focused on Gen AI.”
Benaich: Meta reported a 7% to 10% click-through gain on generative ads
“He gave some stats around how consumers click through at a higher rate, and it was material, it was like something in the range of seven to 10% click through improvement on generative ads.”
Van Luijt: OpenAI recommended Weaviate when deprecating its search endpoint
“OpenAI had a they had a search endpoint that they deprecated. This is pre-ChatGBT, so, but they, so they deprecated that search endpoint, And say, well, you know, you just can buy our embeddings. There are three ways that you can index them and search for them…”
Falcon: Lightning AI hired core Meta PyTorch leads
“We have an in-house PyTorch team, so we hired a lot of the core leads from Meta”
Pesenti: Facebook trains single XLM-R models across 100 languages simultaneously
“We try to learn a hundred languages at the same time in a single model using transformer architecture”
Mason: Link half-life is 2.8 hours on Twitter versus 3.1 on Facebook
“We found that for Twitter, it's short, it's 2.8 hours. For Facebook, it's a little longer, about 3.1 hours.”