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 1,065 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
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.”
Bordes: 2016 image recognition AI uses Yann LeCun's 1993 neural architecture
“This is exactly the same architecture of what's being used right now.”
Instacart projects reaching profitability and positive cash flow by late 2017
“And in the next 12 months, we're gonna be a profitable company, cash flow positive.”
MongoDB's AGPL license prevented AWS from offering it as a managed service
“It's an open source license, it's a free software foundation approved license, but it's the AGPL, and the AGPL gives us a little bit more advantage than other players, so Amazon can't quite do the same thing that they can with, ah, MySQL as they can with, so t…”
Amazon Web Services holds about 90% market share
“You have a company that's gonna, ah, it's on its path to be, and it is, about a 90% market share player.”
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”
Skonnard: Adaptive learning bet can grow Pluralsight to $10B-$20B
“That's our big bet for the future that will, Take Pluralsight from being a billion dollar company to a 10, twenty billion dollar company, is if that actually works.”
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,…”
Bisignano: Science has not truly sequenced the entire human genome
“We actually haven't truly sequenced the whole human genome just because there's so much variation that we can't capture yet.”
Gutman: 74% of nighttime ER visits are unnecessary
“74% of people that go to ERs at night don't need to be there.”
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.”
eHarmony couples had nearly half the divorce rate of offline couples
“The couples that met on eHarmony also had a low divorce rate, so nearly half of what the marriages that met actually offline.”
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: Parallel Bio secured FDA approval to skip certain animal trials
“That company alone has already gotten FDA approval to skip certain animal trials.”
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…”
5 million Americans now make a living running solo companies
“And now there's, in America alone, five million people making their living running solo companies. Not like, oh, I just said I was a solopreneur. Like, literally, that is my income supporting my family. And there are hundreds of thousands that are clearing a m…”
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…”
Prince: More money goes to music creation per GDP today than ever in history
“We can quibble about are the right people getting the money or not, but there's more money going into music creation today on, on, on per capita per GDP. Than any time in human history by far.”
Prince: Cloudflare re-issued a years-old Nvidia press release and stock doubled
“And hilariously, like two or three years later in 2024, we, and you can look this up, we actually issued the exact same press release, just changed the date, and our stock doubled.”
Prince: Spotify paid out ~$12B last year, exceeding music industry market cap 22 years ago
“Spotify last year sent something like 12 billion dollars Out to music creators. That's more than the entire music industry's market cap was. 22 years ago, which is extraordinary.”
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.”
Dubois: Models like Kimi and DeepSeek use ~1M RL data points
“Now when you look at reinforcement learning from models like Kimi or from DeepSeq models, it seems that they are closer to one million data points.”
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: The US has not built wholesale new power capacity in 50 years
“America's not built power for 50 years really, right? It's like converted from coal to gas and like things like this, but like really just have not built wholesale new power on a large scale.”
Patel: Over 99% of OpenAI's spend is likely compute
“99 plus percent of their spend at the company is probably just compute.”
Patel: Microsoft Nebius NJ data center didn't drive power price hikes
“That data center has nothing to do with power prices going up. It's super storm standee, like five years ago, knocking or whatever, how many years ago, knocking down the state's electrical infrastructure and then the, then improving all these improvements. And…”
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…”
Patel: TSMC is actively manufacturing chips in Arizona for Nvidia, Apple, and AMD
“TSMC is literally making chips for NVIDIA and Apple and AMD and others in Arizona today, right?”
Patel: Meta's Louisiana data center will reach 4 to 5 gigawatts
“Meta's data center in Louisiana is getting protested because the water It's gonna be the largest data center in the world. It's gonna be like four or five gigawatts, at least announced so far.”
50 RLVR steps boosted Qwen 3 MATH-500 score from 15% to 50%
“I took the Quinn three model as part of my book, the reasoning from scratch book. And I trained it just for 50 steps with RLVR, and it goes from 15%, so one five percent accuracy on math 500 to 50% on math 500.”
Transformer remains state of the art for LLM performance
“I would say right now, yes, because it's still the state of the art. So there is nothing really better in terms of state of the art performance, getting better quality results.”
Major AI firm will launch a frontier text diffusion model in 2026
“I think one company will launch a big diffusion model this year.”
DeepSeek-R1 cost roughly $300,000 to train, 10x cheaper than DeepSeek-V3
“Deep seek version three, they had like a five million dollar price tag on that given the, I think two dollars per GPU, they assume whether that's a correct assumption or not it's a different question, but if you compare it relative to the cost of R one, I thin…”