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 711 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
Srinivas: Open-source AI models do not match closed-source model capabilities
“That needs the open source models or fine tuned versions of them to match the closed source, the closed ones. And That's not the case today.”
Biewald: Most enterprises have not deployed LLMs into production yet
“I think that LLMs in particular, we talk to a lot of the people and we don't see a ton of people getting them into production yet. And I think it's funny, like VCs are always surprised, like when we tell them that I think that I don't know. I'm bullish on LMS,…”
Ratner: Private data models will exceed closed models in specialized tasks
“Closed source models, like a GPT-IV, five, six, seven, whatever comes, are going to be very hard to match in terms of generalist capability for, say, consumer use cases that are reflected in the web data they're trained on and the flywheels that get powered by…”
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…”
Turck: Academia has completely lost the AI research battle to industry
“Academia as of now has just completely lost the battle. In AI research and development, the darker dots, and this is a long time scale at the bottom, show that in the early years of the current wave, a lot of the research came out of academia, but today it's p…”
Eifrem: Neo4j is frequently 1,000 times faster for connected data queries
“We've optimized every layer in the stack of the database architecture completely around connected data. We're not built on top of a different database or anything. It's a native architecture. And that means that if you want to query along how things are connec…”
MongoDB replaced six C-level executives in the three years post-IPO
“It's a, it's not a secret, but since we've gone public three and a half years ago, we've had six C-level changes, right?”
Stewart: Cockroach Labs adopted BSL, open-sourcing code after three years
“One of the big things we did is we did change our open source license. So it's still source available. It's still free, but we moved from Apache to a license called the business source license. Which is just like Apache, you can use the software, you can redis…”
Pesenti in 2020: 10x annual AI compute scaling is economically unsustainable
“So we're still pushing hard, but it's not going to be 10 X per year. It's just not sustainable.”
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…”
Volpi: AWS launched DocumentDB to bypass MongoDB's SSPL license
“Mongo took an interesting similar approach. They have something called SSPL. In that case, it says you can take it, but any software that you build around it to run it, you have to open source it. So Amazon will have to open source its entire software base use…”
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.”
Volpi: Employees write 95% of code in open source startups
“Nowadays, most of these open source companies, you know, 95% of the code is written by employees, and the five percent are like patches or connectors or something like that that the community is building.”
Reardon: CTRL-Labs captures single neuron signals without penetrating the skull
“This is a, Pretty significant breakthrough that we're able to get to single neurons without basically penetrating into your skull.”
Marcus: Teslas crashed into multiple emergency vehicles due to vision flaws
“It turns out that Teslas have a problem with stopped vehicles, mostly emergency vehicles, on the side of the road. So they have run into, in the last year, three fire trucks, a tow truck a police car, and so forth.”
Gourley: Information propagation in networks is central to Russian military strategy
“And it's important to know the context of where information came from, because as information is seeded into the networks, it starts to propagate, and this becomes key attack vectors that are actually unfolding, and if you listen to some of the major Russian g…”
DeepMind's reinforcement learning fails on minor visual changes while Vicarious succeeds
“So if you use, ah, if you compare, ah, Vicarious, ah, system with, ah, DeepMind system, ah, for example, if you change the brightness of the screen DeepMind system will stop playing, ah, because it will, ah, get confused, ah, and if you offset the paddle we ou…”
Dixon: Musicians will make money selling digital virtual goods
“And so I think you're going to see musicians who now make money by selling digital virtual goods as an example, which is not a model today, and that's like a very interesting new model as an example.”
Spotify listening data can accurately predict user personality traits
“We actually had some sort of collaborations with academic institutions, and, you know, we can actually pretty accurately predict people's personality just based on the data, right?”
IBM Watson's $60M MD Anderson oncology project was a complete failure
“Now several years later, and sixty million dollars down the drain, that initiative failed. It actually failed.”
Uber dropped Google Maps for Foursquare to power venue search
“If you use Uber and you say, like, I, you know, please pick me up at the, you know, Regency Cinema in Tribeca and take me to the Starbucks on 27th street, rather than typing addresses, That's all powered by Foursquare's global data set and they moved off Googl…”
Foursquare data showed women's foot traffic to Trump properties dropped 29%
“During the peak of the campaign, Women, women's foot traffic in blue states to Trump branded properties was down 29% year over year.”
AWS is nearly certain to reach $100B in annual revenue
“And I think it's a near certainty Amazon's gonna do a hundred billion in revenue in AWS.”
Wins from top unicorns will overwhelm broader ecosystem losses
“The overwhelming positives of a few of the companies in this unicorn ecosystem will overwhelm the losses”
JPMorgan is avoiding blockchain and digital currency, unlike Goldman Sachs
“When you compare that, for instance, to JP Morgan, you don't, you see JP Morgan has sort of avoided the digital currency space, right? They're not doing anything in blockchain or Bitcoin you know, like Goldman is, right?”
Muglia: Dynamic compute scaling is impossible with Amazon Redshift
“In fact, it's possible to change the size dynamically on the fly based on the kinds of queries you're running. And none of that is possible with a traditional data warehouse running on premises or even a traditional data warehouse like Redshift running within,…”
Majority of big data market spend will go to applications, not platforms
“The lion's share of the money spent in the market Is going to be for apps, not for the platform.”
Gourley: Algorithms can briefly wipe $1 trillion from financial markets
“Sometimes the algorithms get together and decide collectively to wipe about a trillion dollars of market capitalization off the global financial markets only to return it about 15 minutes later with nothing really happening in the world around that.”
Mike Flowers predicts future NYC mayors must burn money to rebuild silos
“The data silos thing, that's busted. So somebody's literally going to have to throw money away to reverse that. Reverse the fact that the fire department knows what the buildings department knows, what the finance department knows, et cetera. So I don't see th…”
Merriman: JSON document models will emerge as the standard NoSQL data model
“My belief, which is opinion, is that in, in the end of these NoSQL data models, that the document-oriented model will be the one that kind of converges on for standard, and specifically JSON style, or JSON based.”
Socher: Profluent closed multi-billion dollar contracts with Eli Lilly
“They've now closed, like, multi-billion dollar contracts with Eli Lilly at Profil and his company because they've created new kinds of proteins that are, for instance, even better than CRISPR-Cas-Nine and at gene editing and being even more specific and target…”
Wolf: Frontier AI Training Has Shifted From RLHF to Pure RL
“What we know though, is we moved from this pure, like human data, you know, that was first just pre-training on human data and then also aligning with like human preferences that was called RLHF, where we had a lot of human in the loop and human data. To like …”
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…”
Long-haul trucking represents only a minority of commercial fleet vehicles
“On the trucking side, it's also important to realize, like, there's long haul trucking and kind of, like, moving stuff from point A to point B. That tends to be a minority fraction of what the commercial vehicles on the road are doing. Most of the commercial v…”
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…”
Stripe's Shared Payment Token works across competing processors like Adyen
“Shared payment token is a new payments primitive that is wallet agnostic, and by the way, also payment processor agnostic. You can pass it over to Addian or whoever else you have. It doesn't have to be processed on Stripe.”
NVIDIA pre-trained Nemotron Ultra and Super natively using 4-bit floating point
“NemoTron Ultra and Super, ah, were pre-trained using four-bit arithmetic. We pre-trained those in MVFP four”
Catanzaro: Nemotron 3's Latent MoE quadruples experts for same inference cost
“Latent MOE is a specific innovation that we have in NemoTron three family. And what it does is actually reduces the amount of communication that has to be sent through NVLink during MOE computations by basically down projecting it. So, you know, every token pr…”
Balaban: Most neocloud competitors cannot launch online clusters over 32 GPUs
“Most of the other NeoClouds either don't have the ability to launch a cluster from their website or max out, I'll say, 32 GPUs.”
Balaban: Practically no new US data centers use evaporative cooling
“Practically no new builds in the United States are using evaporative cooling for doing the, these closed loop direct to chip liquid cooling systems.”
Balaban: Gigawatt AI clusters require up to $45B for servers alone
“If you were to talk about the capital stack, let's say you can go back down to power generation, two to three million dollars a megawatt, two to three billion dollars a gigawatt for a power plant. The data center is between 10 and fifteen billion dollars a gig…”
ChatGPT disproved an Erdős conjecture using cross-disciplinary mathematical reasoning
“The big result was that this conjecture of this lower bound for the number of pairs that you can make is, is false. Not only is it false, it was false due to a really interesting connection to another field of mathematics.”
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%.”
Anthropic's Claude Code uses custom harness tools over model-level RL tools
“It doesn't actually use the tools that are RL into the model. So like anthropic models have some like file editing tools. They have a completely different set of tools in, in the actual harness.”
AxiomProver has solved four research-level open mathematical problems
“Recently, I think like a couple of weeks ago, we just announced that action prover solved these four research level open problems.”
Patel: Nvidia is backstopping CoreWeave's land and power capital needs
“NVIDIA invested two billion in CoreWeave, but what's more important is that that's like sort of just like the sticker. What's really relevant is NVIDIA is going to work with CoreWeave to acquire and backstop and all these things, the land, the power, the energ…”