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 111 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 1 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
Srinivas: Google will lose its single search monopoly in the conversational era
“And in that era, I don't think Google is going to be the one single monopoly because they're already like far behind in this interface.”
Valuations for OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google are fairly conservative
“If you look at OpenAI, if you look at Anthropic, if you look at Google, those evaluations, those revenue numbers are actually fairly conservative.”
Mike Palmer: Google's Looker acquisition failed by locking out non-experts
“Google's experiment with Looker has failed, and with Looker, they built a LookML, which by the way, I would say back in 2017, it was probably the best product on the market, but they built a product for experts, and they ensured that it was going to be a produ…”
Srinivas: Google is making a mistake chasing OpenAI with Gemini
“Hence why, like, you know, I actually think Google is making a big mistake by trying to do whatever OpenAI is doing, right, like, going after them with the large, oh, I'm not, they're having GPT-IV, I'm going to turn Gemini.”
Cloud giants will turn backend open-source software into a corner case
“So I just think Amazon, Microsoft, and Google are, like, absolutely, like, moving far, far away from the pack in terms of their ability to create infrastructure software. So I feel like from now on it's like their game to write our databases and our message qu…”
Big tech companies will lose massive amounts of money on ML APIs
“I do not think that these numbers are going to be good for these machine learning APIs. And I think those bigger companies are going to lose a massive amount of money over the next several years.”
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 …”
Patel: Google has better pre-training than OpenAI or Anthropic, but worse RL
“Flip side, Google has a better pre-trained model than Anthropic or OpenAI, but their RL stack sucks.”
Bourgeau: Google and DeepMind are actively researching post-Transformer architectures
“I believe so. There's groups doing research on the model architecture side, for sure, within Google and within DeepMind”
Kaiser: Pre-training scaling laws still hold across OpenAI and Google
“What scaling clause says is that your loss will log linearly decrease with your compute. We totally see that and clearly Google sees that and all other labs.”
Gomez: Google failed to lean into language modeling early, unlike OpenAI
“To say they didn't lean hard enough into language modeling, like just pure Sequence modeling of text on the internet. That's, I think the accurate statement. That's what OpenAI did early and uniquely well.”
Ramaswamy: Google Gemini won't become a hit unless 10x better than ChatGPT
“They can't make Gemini into a consumer hit unless it's 10 times better than ChatGPT, and that's a really tall order.”
Over 25% of new code at Google is AI-generated
“Sundar Pashai said, you know, more than a quarter of all code written at Google is now generated by AI before it's reviewed and accepted by engineers”
Socher: Startups cannot be 10x better than Google on simple consumer search
“If you think about it from first principles, there is nothing you can do to be 10 X better.”
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…”
Turck says horizontal AI startups will struggle against reactive tech incumbents
“It seems that for stuff that's very horizontal startups are going to have a harder time building long lasting businesses because in this Cycle. They are facing a very different type of incumbents compared to prior platform shifts where you know, this time you'…”
Turck: Google invented the Transformer but is playing catch-up
“So in GPT, which stands for generative pre-trained transformers, the T is a transformer architecture that was actually Developed at Google, and the irony is that Google is playing catch-up to Microsoft and OpenAI right now because OpenAI accelerated the develo…”
Pinterest visual search beats Google and Bing in head-to-head tests
“You'll find that Pinterest is usually the one that comes out of top.”
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.”
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.”
Volpi: Google and Azure partner with OSS creators to counter AWS
“And then the other thing that you do As a business is you partner with Google and Azure who, because they're pretty far behind Amazon, they're more than happy to have the original item and to pay you something for the privilege of running your version.”
Cloud incumbents struggle against open-source startups under $100M revenue
“Listen, if you're in the first hundred million dollars Because of revenue, and you're the innovator, and you own the code, I think it's incredibly difficult for these larger incumbents, you know, Google, Amazon, and Microsoft to compete against with you. They …”
Ash Fontana: Search-as-a-service incumbents are AltaVista while Constructor.io is Google
“A lot of the, all the companies in the market today for search as a service are AltaVista, and constructor is Google.”
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.”
Falkowitz: Area 1 Security has captured the entire internet for security
“What we've been able to do is capture the entire Internet, right, in a way that maybe you would think Google or others do, right, and to do that for a very specific sort of security purpose.”
Clarifai does not view Google as a direct competitor
“So Google, we don't consider them a competitor. They have great research teams and really big research teams and great resources but they're working on their own problems. They have their own users, and they don't they don't really compete with us in terms of …”
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.”
Wilson: Google search holds an almost insurmountable data advantage
“I would even argue that Google benefits from network effects and the data that they have that, in their search business, I think, almost an insurmountable advantage because of the data asset that they have. And the network effects around that.”
Evans: Microsoft Bing will never catch up with Google in search
“Doesn't matter how much money and how hard Microsoft works, Bing will never catch up with Google.”
Douglas: Google LLM inference stack saved hundreds of millions in months
“This ended up saving several hundred million dollars, I think, like, even over the first six months”
Rauch: ChatGPT's UI simplicity gives it a fundamental advantage over Google
“If you look at ChatGPT, one fundamental advantage they have over Google is the simplicity of the UI.”
Gomez: Google quickly integrated Transformer architecture into Search and Translate
“No, they jumped all over it. So it went to production inside of search, inside of translate, like the existing product suite. And so they, to say that they didn't adopt the transformer architecture would not be correct.”
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.”
Google earns $1 to $2 every time a user searches 'auto insurance'
“You'll be shocked to know that there are queries that have 1502 thousand dollar RPMs, which means Google makes one or two dollars every time you or I, like, a user types the word auto insurance, words auto insurance into search.”
Google's $2.7B Character.AI deal was the largest acquihire ever
“And, you know, we also had the biggest acquihire of all time. So for those of you who don't know, 2.7 billion dollar acquihire by Google of the Character AI founders who, funny enough, were already at Google before they went to start Character AI.”
Big tech and AI companies are driving a U.S. nuclear revival
“But yeah, in 24, it turns out that big tech companies and AI companies are the ones driving this, Revival of nuclear power with, you know, Microsoft entering into a deal with Constellation to revive Three Mile Island, which was the site of the last nuclear acc…”
Kahn: Google search has degraded human memory retention
“I think it really is true that Google has hurt our memory. I think people memorize far less than they used to.”
Socher: Studies show developers using You.com are more efficient than on Google
“Yeah, we actually did some studies and developers who use you.com are way more efficient than developers who use Google.”
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.”
Dixon: Ten Google results act as a fault-tolerant UI for AI
“In some ways, you can think of Google results. They give you 10 results, right? They're sort of, you know, like in an ideal world, they give you one result, but they give you 10 results, because they let the human figure out the last 20%, right? So that's sort…”
Glaser: Recent public criticism of Google's internal culture is likely deserved
“The culture there that has taken some beatings recently, I think probably deservedly”
Hoffman: Google has location data on 70% of US mobile phones
“Companies like Google have great access to this data because they have 70% of the phones in the U.S. That they have data on, and probably even a higher percentage of phones worldwide that they get to see all this great location data on.”
Dauber: Google is the only tech giant successfully investing outside core business
“Google's the only company that seems to go out and invest in areas that have nothing to do fundamentally with their core business, and then do a good job of it.”
Google's Peter Norvig estimated strong AI is worth up to $2T annually
“I asked Peter Norvik, who at the time was director of research at Google I said, you know, how much money would it really be worth if you could have strong AI? And he wrote back about five minutes later, I'm suddenly a much louder, I think. And estimated somet…”