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 41 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
Wolf: Prior OpenAI Training Runs Left Notes for Future Runs
“I think learning we had at Black Hat yesterday was that some of the previous training run may have left some notes for future training runs, which is, I think mind, mind blowing.”
Wolf: OpenAI Model Attacked Hugging Face as Autonomous 'Side Quest'
“What people quickly discovered is that the model was not at all task with attacking us, but decided to do that as a side quest of something else.”
Socher: Chinese open source companies distilled knowledge from OpenAI and Anthropic models
“The few large closed labs, Anthropic and OpenAI, took almost everything they could from the open internet trained a model, but then the Chinese open source companies basically siphoned a lot of that knowledge out of those closed source models by distilling it.”
Evans: OpenAI has 900M weekly active users, but only 5% pay
“You've got nine hundred million weekly active users, but most of them are not using it every day and can't think of anything to do with it. And only five percent of them are paying for it.”
Patel: OpenAI's next model will outperform Opus 4.5 around February-March
“OpenAI's new model, I think, will be better than Opus 4.5, and it's coming, like, somewhat soon in March-ish timeframe, maybe February, March-ish, but”
Howard: OpenAI is shutting down GPT-4.5
“I think they're shutting down that product or they've shut down that product, if I understand correctly.”
OpenAI retains 80% of corporate AI model spending, per Ramp data
“Really, like, when you sum the makers of all these models that are getting used, it's still, like, 80% OpenAI. Like, that hasn't changed, so it doesn't look like, fragmentation to me, it looks like domination.”
OpenAI's funding deal was priced at 13.5x forward revenue
“The multiple on the deal on a forward revenue basis was 13.5 X.”
Nussbaum: Nomic Embed is first open long-context embedder beating OpenAI Ada
“So we're launching Gnomec Embed is the first open source reproducible long context text embedder that beats OpenAI ADA as well.”
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…”
Trojanowski: DeepSeek-R1 succeeded by scaling outcome supervision over process supervision
“If you look, you know, if you fast forward a bit and you look at the, like the DeepSeq R-one paper where they effectively laid out, you know, what I think all the labs were doing at that time, or at least OpenAI was doing in terms of you know, RLVR reasoning f…”
Katti: Skilled labor shortages will become an increasing bottleneck for AI expansion
“No, I think there is definitely a shortage of electricians, plumbers, all kinds of trades, you name it. So anything we can do to train more folks to be able to do those, there are very well-paying jobs that a lot of us, all of the hyperscalers, all of the labs…”
Evans: Submitting 1,000 prompts placed ChatGPT users in top 20%
“Turns out that if you did a thousand posts, if you did a thousand prompts last year, you're in the top 20%.”
Patel: Over 99% of OpenAI's spend is likely compute
“99 plus percent of their spend at the company is probably just compute.”
OpenAI holds AMD stock warrants tied to a $600 share price
“There's like another financial sweetener in the deal where OpenAI has warrants in AMD if the stock price hits 600.”
Rauch: Vercel AI SDK is second largest AI module behind OpenAI
“It's the second largest AI module behind OpenAI.”
OpenAI's $6.6B round required a $250M minimum ticket
“In the OpenAI round that we're talking about, you know, the 6.6 billion dollar round. The minimum ticket size was two hundred and fifty million.”
OpenAI's $6.6B round was the largest VC round ever
“We just had the biggest venture capital round of all time with OpenAI, which raised 6.6 billion at one hundred and fifty seven billion post-money valuation.”
Safe Superintelligence raised a $1B seed round pre-product
“There's also kind of the biggest seed round ever, right, that we saw. Safe superintelligence helmed by Former OpenAI chief scientist and co-founder Ilya Sutskover raising roughly a billion dollars in cash at a five billion dollar valuation pre-basically anythi…”
Delangue: OpenAI uses open source and is a Hugging Face customer
“As a matter of fact, open AI is using open source as a customer of Fergingface”
Mistral and Poolside funding is a trickle compared to OpenAI, says Polu
“It's already awesome that Mistral was able to raise that much, that Toolside is able to raise that much, but it's a trickle compared to what Open Air is raising, compared to what Anthropik is raising.”
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.”
Katti: OpenAI's Abilene data center is operational and training latest models
“It's up and running. It's being used for training the last two models more actually.”
OpenAI taped out its custom Jalapeño chip in just nine months
“Yes, it was incredibly quick. Nine months is very, very fast.”
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.”
Katti: Turbine and transformer manufacturers face multi-year lead times to expand capacity
“Those industries have historically have not added much capacity for the last decade or so ago, and they've suddenly experienced a demand shock. And it takes years before you can add capacity to produce more turbines and transformers.”
Prince: OpenAI is a major Cloudflare customer powering its mobile app
“OpenAI is, you know, big customer of ours you know, all their mobile app is built, you know, on, on, on us.”
Kaiser: Reinforcement learning causes AI models to self-correct mistakes
“Even for math and coding, you start seeing that the models start correcting their own mistakes, right? Earlier, if the model made a mistake, it generally just tell you what it did and insist that the mistake was right or something like that. With the thinking,…”
OpenAI and DeepMind achieved Math Olympiad gold medals
“And, you know, we saw gold medals on the International Math Olympiad by a couple of labs, including OpenAI and DeepMind.”
Evans: OpenAI lacks visibility into user search, purchases, and social media activity
“Back to open AI, they've got a partial view on you, but like, they don't know what you've bought. They don't know what you've searched for. They don't know where you go. They don't know what Instagram you look at and what TikTok you look at and what YouTube yo…”
Nvidia released an AI model that outperformed GPT-4
“Just a couple of weeks ago, Nvidia announced that In addition to having the best chips, they just released a model that was actually better than GPT-IV.”
Srinivas: Jasper and Copy.ai initially generated more revenue than OpenAI
“News started spreading that there were companies like Jasper and copy.ai that started making more money than even OpenAI at the time.”
Katti: OpenAI sources compute from all major cloud hyperscalers
“We have compute from, effectively, many sources. So, Microsoft, obviously, is a big partner, important partner. We also have compute, as we have announced, from AWS, Ion Google. So, we have compute from all of the hyperscalers, effectively.”
Tworek: OpenAI placed second in AtCoder behind a former employee
“We did also like IOI, International Olympic Informatics earlier this year, and Adcoder Heuristics competition as well, where we went second, we, behind a single human that is also a Polish person that used to be employed by OpenAI some time ago.”
Lin Qiao: OpenAI switched completely from TensorFlow to PyTorch
“OpenAI switched to use PyTorch fully.”
GPT-4 price per token dropped roughly 90% in one year
“The, I think the price per token of GPT-IV dropped something like 90%. Over the last year”
OpenAI inference pricing drops 160x between model generations
“If you look at the pricing page for, like, OpenAI, and you look at the 4.5 turbo, and the cost per inference, and compare it to the next most recent model, there's a 160 X difference in pricing.”
Traynor: GPT-4 crossed the hallucination threshold required for customer support bots
“So Finn's built on GPT-IV, by the way, we've, we tried, we wanted to build on a three, 3.5, but it didn't, it's still, I remember back when we used to talk about hallucinations, like four was the sort of the perceptual change for us in terms of trust and relia…”
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…”
Kambadur: OpenAI sought top 10th percentile doctors and lawyers as data annotators
“Their model itself has gotten so good that they now need, like, extreme experts to be able to train the model, so we saw an ad for their annotators, which are the people who, like, help give feedback to the model, and they asked for, like, top 10 percentile ch…”