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
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…”
Izmailov: Duration of tasks AI can robustly automate doubles every six months
“There is this famous meter plot, which shows how long of a task AI is capable of robustly automating, and it's been kind of consistently doubling at that time every half a year, I think and it's now in like some hours so maybe a couple hours.”
Kaiser: Translation industry grew and translators earn more post-Transformers
“The translation industry has grown considerably since then. It has not shrunk. There's more translations to be done. Translators are paid more.”
Corporate AI subscription retention rose from 50% to 80% since 2022
“Across a segment of 43,000 or so US customers, we work with ramp to show that retention of subscriptions on AI products across this customer set has really improved markedly since 2022. On 2022 is around the 50% after 12 months. And now in 25, it's hitting aro…”
Average corporate AI spend hits $500,000 and will reach $1M
“The total spend on AI products per customer kind of went up from 35,000 dollars or so maybe two years ago. Now it's around half a million dollars, and it's predicted to hit a million dollars next year.”
NVIDIA stock outperformed private AI chip startup investments 12x to 2x
“If you bought NVIDIA stock on the day of the announcement of all the, like, private rounds in these companies, what would the value of your stock be in NVIDIA versus these companies? And if I recall correctly, it's basically 12 X in NVIDIA versus two X in in t…”
NVIDIA's sovereign AI business generates around $20 billion in revenue
“Nvidia has even started marketing this as like a new kind of product line basically for its business that currently generates, I think, around twenty billion dollars worth so it's real money”
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.”
ProFluent developed the first AI language model-created CRISPR genome editor
“ProFluent, which is kind of leading the charge for these language models in protein design, developing the first, like CRISPR genome editor that an AI has created.”
Douglas: Cognition rebuilt Devin's architecture around Anthropic's highly useful Claude Sonnet
“The Cognition folks in Devon found the model so useful, they had to, like, rebuild their architecture around it.”
Turck: The Information reports Claude Code hit $400M ARR in six months
“There was an article in the information just a couple of days ago that was saying that Cloud Code, which really came out, what, at the end of February of this year, so five, six months ago, is already generating four hundred million in annualized revenue. That…”
Rauch: Multiple security incidents have already occurred with MCP servers
“In fact, there's already been quite a few incidents with MCP servers where depending on what chat message was sent, the MCP tool that was called was made to disbehave.”
Rauch: Vercel AI SDK is second largest AI module behind OpenAI
“It's the second largest AI module behind OpenAI.”
Canva established a $200 million fund to compensate AI training contributors
“We do have a creators fund I think it's two hundred million dollars and it's designed to reward creators.”
Dohmke: Most developers have adopted AI tools, unlike other knowledge workers
“Most developers have adopted some form of AI tooling into the workflow already, while other knowledge workers, other white collar workers are still early in that adoption journey.”
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.”
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.”
Amazon approached InfluxData for a partnership due to Timestream customer demand
“Last year we did a very unique deal with Amazon. Where they have Amazon's time stream, but their customers kept asking them for influx. And so they approached us.”
Chollet: MindAI dropped out of ARC Prize over open-source requirements
“They ended up dropping out because they did not want to open source their solution. And of course, that meant that they were not eligible for the prize.”
Gaurav Misra: TikTok's US growth was heavily fueled by Snap ads
“TikTok spread in the US mostly through Snapchat, and this is like not well known out there today, but a lot of it was they were spending a very, very large amount of money on advertising on Snap, right?”
Mike Murchison: LLM model costs plummeted 90% in 12 months
“And as you know, well, you know, we're seeing model costs plummet. They've plummeted 90% in the last 12 months.”
Masad: Mark Zuckerberg is reversing identity-based hiring at Meta
“You see Zuck, you know sort of bringing fast Facebook back, or meta back to the hacker culture and reversing a lot of the sort of identity-based hiring and identity-based sort of promotions and all of that stuff.”
Borgman: Presto is mostly Facebook internal, while Trino is the mainstream branch
“They started as identical copies, but the code bases have diverged quite a bit. And today Presto is really just used by Facebook. So it's sort of like their own private branch in a way used by a small number of people. And Trino has become the mainstream commu…”
AI inference costs plummeted from $60 to $0.06 per million tokens
“The most expensive models like a year ago to now, I don't know, the most expensive one is maybe like 600 dollars, sorry, 60 dollars per million tokens, and now the cheapest one is probably like 0.06 dollars per million tokens. Not the same level of intelligenc…”
Nvidia chips appear in 11x more AI research papers than all competitors
“If you sum all the papers that use NVIDIA chips versus all the papers that use TPUs, FPGAs, ASICs, Apple, Huawei, the sum of all NVIDIA papers versus the sum of everybody else, the delta is like 11 times.”
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…”
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.”
xAI built its Memphis Colossus data center in 122 days
“Colossus, which is based in Memphis, which by the way apparently was built in a 122 days. So the fastest you know, time ever to build a data center.”
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…”
AI startups reach $30M ARR five times faster than legacy SaaS
“The AI startups in the cohort that Stripe measured took 11 months to reach one million in ARR after their first sales on Stripe versus 15 for the previous generation of SaaS businesses, and then maybe more impressively, you know, scaling to more than thirty mi…”
AWS AI business is growing 3x faster than original AWS
“AWS's AI business is a multi-billion dollar revenue run rate business that continues to grow at a triple digit year over year percentage, and is growing more than three X faster at this stage of its evolution as AWS itself grew”
Bernhardsson: Nvidia H100 GPU prices are falling significantly
“For a while, like, each 100 prices were, like, almost, like, going up, and then they were kind of still for a while, and then now they're, like, actually going down quite a lot, like, you know, what I'm seeing in the market, right?”
AI optimism is 70% in China and India, 30% in US/UK
“Where 70% of people in China and India are optimistic. Only 30% optimistic about these topics in the UK and the US. They actually explicitly want to have less AI.”
Azhar: Mistral matched GPT-4 quality far more computationally efficiently than US firms
“Mistral, which is this Parisian company has been doing some, you know, remarkable things, had done a couple, two things that I thought were really interesting. One was that they were able to get close to GPT-IV quality much more computationally efficiently tha…”
Azhar: Iranian drones costing $20,000 require $1M missile interceptors to destroy
“A 20,000 dollar Iranian drone having to be shot down by a million dollar missile intercept.”
Dines: UiPath founder maintains a controlling stake in the company
“Even today I have a controlling stake in UiPath.”
Tunguz: ~$80B will be invested in AI venture capital in 2024
“I think there'll be something like eighty billion dollars invested in 2024 in AI.”
Marking up storage accounts for roughly 11% of Snowflake's revenue
“It's about 11% of Snowflake's revenue is marking up storage.”
VAST Data reached a $9 billion valuation by consistently tripling growth
“The fact that we're worth nine billion dollars now, which is staggering, is because we keep tripling.”
A large cohort of internet users has replaced search engines with ChatGPT
“There's a whole cohort of humans that have already largely replaced a very, very large proportion of their traditional search behavior on search engines from looking through these search engine results pages to just trusting the answers that that come out of C…”
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.”
Kanjun Qiu: Language models trained without code perform poorly at reasoning
“Some companies have tried training language models with no code because they're like, oh, the product we're building, we don't need code. You know, it's a therapist or it's a question answering thing and we don't need code. So we should take code out of our tr…”
Shah: Operating a voice LLM costs roughly 18 cents per hour
“A large language model speaking at a hundred words per minute will cost somewhere around 18 cents an hour. Okay. So the LLM plus what's the ASR cost, the automatic speech recognition cost, the text-to-speech cost, the TTS cost. We kind of put it all in there. …”