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
Small, carefully structured data samples outperform large, sloppy data sets
“You're better off with small, carefully constructed, structured sample, rather than a large, sloppy sample.”
Katti: Many OpenAI chip team members previously designed Google TPUs
“They have, many, many of the team have designed TPU chips at Google in the past.”
Stripe partners with Google for direct checkout inside Gemini
“We recently partnered with Google. So merchants can sell right inside AI mode and the Gemini app. So, you know, maybe you shop at JD sports cause I was on the topic of running shoes or fanatics or quince. Those were all early adopters.”
Patel: AI model performance is a lagging indicator of prior hardware CapEx
“Ultimately the capex that Microsoft spent in 2024 for OpenAI is what results in 2025 for OpenAI or CoreWeaver or whoever is what results in their models being so good this year. Same with Anthropic and Amazon Google and their models now being so good now is th…”
Bourgeau: Google leadership's research background shields DeepMind from benchmark pressure
“There's actually very little of that. I think because all of the leadership has a research background that they're very much aware that yes, to some extent you can force and accelerate specific benchmarks and certain goals, but in the end, the progress and the…”
Canva is natively integrating Google's Veo 3 video model
“We are integrating VO three, which is Google's new amazing video generation model natively into Canva.”
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.”
Ramaswamy: Five nines availability in Google search ads was worth $100M
“Similarly, when I ran the search ads team, getting those five nines of availability actually meant a hundred million dollars more because that thing was running at such scale.”
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.”
Ex-Google engineers must realize marketing is war because nobody cares naturally
“I realized that marketing is war. You know, when you're at Google, you think, oh, well, you don't need to do marketing. Who needs to do marketing? But then you realize outside of Google is like, well, nobody cares about what you're doing. And you have to basic…”
Amazon spiked cloud CapEx 18 months before Google and Microsoft
“Amazon Spiked almost 18 months before Google and Microsoft did, so they must have seen some of these inference workloads coming.”
Google's generative search queries initially cost 10x more than standard queries
“Well, Google, when they initially released search, their generative search experience, the cost to serve a query was 10 X a standard one.”
Evans: Predictions that only tech giants had enough AI data were wrong
“And this is clearly what happened with the last wave of machine learning. There was a brief moment where people said it needs all this data. Only Google's got all the data. There's going to be, like, three people who've got enough data to do AI, and that turne…”
Only Foursquare and Google use human confirmation for location data
“What we think is unique other than basically Google in the world, which is human confirmation.”
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.”
Zhou: Editing search queries on Google is essentially prompt engineering
“I think Google is essentially prompt engineering. When you edit your query to get the results that you want, that's prompt engineering.”
Falcon: Modern generative AI would not exist without open-source research
“None of this wouldn't exist if Google hadn't put published transformers and put the paper out there, right? None of this would have existed if Ah, the attention stuff would have been out there if the Anno hadn't been created, if TensorFlow hadn't been created.”
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”
Fraser: Building custom data pipelines works best for large, stable internal sources
“If the data source is really large, it's something that's just yours, so Fivetran's never going to build a connector to it, and it's relatively stable, like it's not constantly changing configuration, then you can build your own data pipeline using the tools p…”
Tech giants like Google and Uber rely on home-rolled ML infrastructure
“Most of the tooling is kind of home rolled. Best practices haven't emerged yet. We're seeing a lot of, especially large companies, roll their entire own stacks. So Facebook has FB Learner, Google has TFX. Uber has Michelangelo. Airbnb has Big Head.”
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.”
Talend partnered with Google to transition Dataflow into Apache Beam
“We talked to Google, and they had open sourced a part of that, and said, would you be willing to make that an Apache project, and, you know, co-sponsor it with us, and so we can now jointly push this thing forward? And they said yes, and we did. And so that be…”
Three-site consensus replication yields 43% higher non-storage resource utilization
“It does require three copies, so you're using three times, ah, three X storage as opposed to two X. But you actually get 43% higher utilization On your actual, ah, you know, resources other than storage.”
Chris Dixon meets weekly with three teams leaving Google or Facebook
“I have three of these meetings a week where it's team coming out of Google or Facebook or someplace like that”
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.…”
Hoffman: TensorFlow is one of the top 10 innovations of the past decade
“In my opinion, it's one of the top 10 innovations in, in the last 10 years.”
Hoffman: Internal data represents under 0.01% of global data for most companies
“Most companies out there, their own data represents, like, point oh one percent of the world. It's, unless you're Google, Facebook, Amazon, Tencent, a couple of others, you have a very small sliver of what's happening in the world.”
Hoffman: Google ML engineers spend 95% of their time building models
“As a machine learning engineer, now you can spend 95% of your time predicting the future, which is what you want to do as a machine learning engineer.”
Hoffman: Data overhead is the core struggle for non-big-tech AI companies
“So this is the course, the core struggle for almost every single company, except for maybe Google, Facebook, Amazon, Tencent, that has to deal with all these types of issues.”
Big tech uses AI and machine learning as its next feature war
“And three, and this is a belief of me that could be wrong, is that actually the big tech firms, Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and all the others, they're using AI and machine learning as their next feature war.”
Weiss: Slack search lacks a head query distribution across teams
“When you think about it broken out by team there's no head, right? Like, if you append kind of team equals Slack or team equals first mark, you know, there is no head of that query stream across all teams. Whereas Google, on the other hand, you know, they have…”
Weiss: Continuously relearning web data for search is brittle
“Relearning all this information from the web over and over again actually turned out to be quite brittle, and a lot of this information is actually quite evergreen.”
Weiss: Surfacing individual experts satisfies 80% of workplace search needs
“Unlike Google, if you give someone as a result, an individual person often that can be 80% of what someone's actually looking for.”
Flomenberg: Competing directly against Google in AI is a terrible strategy
“Competing with Google is, is a terrible idea.”
Srivas: Startups should avoid emulating Google or Facebook engineering infrastructure
“Technology wise, they are more advanced, but there's only one Google and one Facebook, right, and everybody else is not like that, so don't try to do that. I mean, as a startup, that's very extreme.”
Flatiron raised $138M from Google, its largest healthcare deal
“We, we've raised about a hundred and thirty eight million dollars from Google. We're their largest healthcare investment to date.”
LeCun: Facebook stole Word2Vec creator Tomasz Mikolov from Google
“I should mention that Tomasz Mikolov now works at Facebook AI Research. I stole him from Google.”
LeCun turned down Larry Page's offer to direct Google's research lab
“And they offered me the job, and I turned it down.”
Tan: Google generates $55B annually due to its search data lead
“They make fifty-five billion dollars a year, because they have so much data by being the number one search engine.”
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”
Tasso Argyros's Stanford advisor was the first investor in Google
“My advisor at Stanford was the first investor at Google, right?”
Fernandez: Data startups can out-recruit tech giants by providing unique data
“Yeah, I think the diversity of skill set is critical, and the good news is if you're doing interesting things with data I know at least for us, like, I feel we have a shot at anybody, whether they're at Facebook or Google or doing, you know, wherever they're d…”
Zeghidour: Most of Google's audio AI models were built in Paris and Zurich
“A lot of the current audio generative models of Google, a global company, obviously were developed between Paris and Zurich. Actually most of it.”
Łukasz Kaiser says Ray Kurzweil was his first manager at Google
“I came to Ray Kurzweil's group. He was my first manager.”
Ramaswamy: Google's ad spam team had over 150 people when he left
“I had entire teams devoted. It's called an ad spam team. Like when I left, I think they had more than a 150 people.”
ZoomInfo selected Anthropic over OpenAI and Google for call summarization
“We are using Anthropic, we are using OpenAI, we are using Google, but for that one, we released Anthropic.”
Moody's Analytics partnered with Google to extract data from unstructured financial statements
“We have another partnership with Google where we're, ah, leveraging, we're working together to leverage the NAI to, ah, be able to extract more information from financial statements. Ah, financial statements, not the ones that are, you know, published at the 1…”