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 21 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

Assertion Supported
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”
Aman Kabeer Nov 8, 2024 ▶ 26:28 Superintelligence, Bubbles And Big Bets: AI Investing in 2024 | Matt Turck & Aman Kabeer, FirstMark
Assertion Supported
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…”
Matt Turck Mar 23, 2023 ▶ 13:51 The 2023 MAD (Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence & Data) Landscape
Assertion Supported
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.”
Mike Volpi Nov 13, 2019 ▶ 11:22 Fireside Chat: Mike Volpi, General Partner, Index Ventures (FirstMark's Data Driven NYC)
Assertion Supported
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.”
Aidan Gomez Jun 5, 2025 ▶ 11:35 Inside the Paper That Changed AI Forever - Cohere CEO Aidan Gomez on 2025 Agents
Assertion Supported
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.”
Benedict Evans May 22, 2025 ▶ 38:52 AI Eats the World: Benedict Evans on What Really Matters Now
Assertion Supported
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.”
Aman Kabeer Nov 8, 2024 ▶ 3:28 Superintelligence, Bubbles And Big Bets: AI Investing in 2024 | Matt Turck & Aman Kabeer, FirstMark
Assertion Supported
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…”
Matt Turck Nov 8, 2024 ▶ 6:26 Superintelligence, Bubbles And Big Bets: AI Investing in 2024 | Matt Turck & Aman Kabeer, FirstMark
Assertion Supported
Bloom: 95% of production machine learning code is just glue code
“Algorithms are important, but 95% of all machine learning code in production is actually just glue code. It's connecting all of these different pieces together.”
Josh Bloom Nov 23, 2015 ▶ 11:55 Machine Learning in Production with Josh Bloom, Co-founder Wise.io
Assertion Supported
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.”
Sachin Katti Jul 16, 2026 ▶ 34:51 OpenAI’s Compute Chief: We Can’t Build Fast Enough | Sachin Katti
Assertion Supported
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.”
Benedict Evans May 22, 2025 ▶ 40:35 AI Eats the World: Benedict Evans on What Really Matters Now
Assertion Supported
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.”
Tomasz Tunguz May 16, 2024 ▶ 30:23 AI, Data and Blockchain: a VC perspective | Tomasz Tunguz, Founder of Theory Ventures
Assertion Supported
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…”
Benedict Evans Apr 10, 2024 ▶ 14:31 Is AI a platform shift or a paradigm shift? With Benedict Evans
Assertion Supported
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.”
Jason Tan May 27, 2014 ▶ 13:19 Jason Tan, Sift Science // Data Driven #26 // April 2014 (Hosted by FirstMark Capital)
Assertion Supported
Tasso Argyros's Stanford advisor was the first investor in Google
“My advisor at Stanford was the first investor at Google, right?”
Tasso Argyros Mar 3, 2014 ▶ 18:52 Tasso Argyros, Aster Data // Data Driven NYC 24 // February 2014 (Hosted by FirstMark Capital)
Assertion Supported
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.”
Neil Zeghidour Feb 19, 2026 ▶ 1:18:40 Voice AI’s Big Moment: Top Researcher on Why Everything Is Changing (Neil Zeghidour, Gradium AI)
Assertion Supported
Google-built Kubernetes is the standard across all cloud vendors
“Kubernetes clearly which was built by Google, is the standard now for doing this”
Amr Awadallah Feb 20, 2020 ▶ 23:01 How to Resurrect Innovation in the Enterprise // Amr Awadallah, Google (FirstMark's Data Driven NYC)
Assertion Supported
Delangue: Google called transformer adoption one of its biggest changes ever
“Google did a lot of PR a few months ago saying that moving to these new transformer models has been one of the most impactful changes that they'done over the last five years, if not since the beginning of Google.”
Clement Delangue Jan 22, 2020 ▶ 11:44 NLP—The Most Important Field of ML // Clement Delangue, Hugging Face (FirstMark's Data Driven NYC)
Assertion Supported
Google runs AdWords across five data centers to guarantee fault tolerance
“This isn't just sort of a, you know, a random example. This is how Google runs their AdWords system. With five data centers, and the reason is that you can actually have a planned maintenance on a data center, and actually have an unplanned, ah, outage on anot…”
Spencer Kimball Oct 17, 2018 ▶ 10:38 Ultra-Resilient SQL for Global Business // Spencer Kimball, Cockroach (FirstMark's Data Driven NYC)
Assertion Supported
Microsoft, Google, and IBM build computational services on Jupyter
“Many, many companies are actually building on top of this platform, ah, to build out, ah, computational services, including Microsoft, Google, IBM, Continuum analytics and more.”
Jason Grout Feb 3, 2017 ▶ 10:24 Project Jupyter // Jason Grout & Sylvain Corlay, Bloomberg (FirstMark's Data Driven)
Assertion Supported
Google and Bing source their drug knowledge panels from FDA and HHS
“If you use a major search platform Google, or Bing, or others, and I guess a major search platform and you put in a drug name you'll see in the knowledge box, or knowledge panel, or something like that, you'll see a bunch of information, and sourced will be th…”
Nick Sinai Oct 16, 2014 ▶ 13:03 Nick Sinai, White House Deputy CTO // Data Driven #30 // Oct 2014 (Hosted by FirstMark Capital)
Assertion Supported
Google Spanner provides ACID transactions and SQL semantics
“Well, Spanner is Google's relational database. It has asset semantics and SQL, sorry, asset transactions and SQL semantics.”
Daniel Chia Feb 25, 2019 ▶ 1:29 Dynamic Range Sharding with Spanner // Daniel Chia, Google Spanner (FirstMark's Data Driven NYC)
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