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 2,374 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 6 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
Justin Borgman: Apache Iceberg won the open table format war in 2024
“I feel like the summer of twenty-twenty-four, the world said, okay, it is Iceberg. And that was like VHS, Betamax, You know, decision made.”
Chip Huyen warns million-token context capacity does not imply efficient processing
“Just because a model, I think the second reason may be actually more important at least for now is that just because a model can fit in a million con token context doesn't mean that it can process that million token efficiently.”
Douetteau: Generative AI lacks statistical consistency for business goal optimization
“Generative AI, as it is built today, is not meant to provide any consistency in terms of how statistically you reach a business goal through the output or through your predictions.”
Research shows the general public does not fall for AI deepfakes
“There's been enough research now that, you know, individual, like, general population doesn't really fall for deepfakes, like, whether it's calls or, like, synthetic media. Doesn't really change consumer opinion that much. People are not dumb.”
Chinese AI labs like DeepSeek and Alibaba perform strongly on benchmarks
“China was kind of not in this fight, like, 12 months ago, and now is very much in it. Like, their models like Alibaba's Quen and then this spin out from a quantitative hedge fund DeepSeek, which publishes code models and others, and they've been actually a ver…”
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.”
Buying Nvidia stock instead of funding AI chip rivals yielded 4x more
“Six billion turned into thirty billion roughly, of which half is CameraCon, which is a Chinese listed company. And then NVIDIA would be worth a hundred and twenty billion.”
Masayoshi Son estimates superintelligence will require $9T in cumulative capex
“Masayoshi Son, the CEO of SoftBank, mentioning just a few days ago that, Inez estimate to reach super intelligence that was going to be a cumulative capex, capital expenditure budget of nine trillion dollars, which you know, in typical MASA fashion he said was…”
Sierra quadrupled its valuation to $4.5B on $20M ARR
“Yes, current chairman of OpenAI as well which is more than quadrupling its valuation this year to four and a half billion. You know, on the other side of that equation is roughly twenty million of ARR.”
Private AI startups hold a $40B valuation against under $100M revenue
“And basically the kind of end, end all of the chart kind of proves the point that you have, let's say, roughly forty billion dollars in valuation across a number of these names but less than a hundred million dollars of revenue.”
Sam Altman asserts that AI scaling laws will absolutely continue
“I got a chance to ask that question to Sam Altman a few weeks ago. I was at an event at an event at OpenAI. Not surprisingly, when I asked him, you know, will scaling laws continue, he looked me straight in the eye and said, absolutely”
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.”
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”
FirstMark survey: 62% of CTOs adopting AI were underwhelmed by impact
“While 64% of, you know, CTOs in our guild had adopted AI in some form or the other in the last 12 months, 62% of those that had adopted AI were underwhelmed by the impact it had on their organization.”
Bernhardsson: Modal discarded Kubernetes and Docker to build a custom stack
“So we built our own, we threw out Kubernetes out the window. We threw out Docker out the window. We built our own File system in order to optimize for how container images are distributed. We built our own scheduler in order to maintain this pool of workers an…”
Google BigQuery's largest customers never ran 100-terabyte queries, says Jordan Tigani
“The query sizes they were using was a hundred terabytes, and I remembered back from my time at BigQuery you know, we had some of the, Largest customers in the world. We had Walmart, Home Depot, Equifax, HSBC, you know, like, and nobody was using anything, you …”
MotherDuck executes queries in milliseconds compared to BigQuery's 400-millisecond overhead
“You know, we can do queries in sort of single digit milliseconds. And you know, in BigQuery, we were very, very happy when we got kind of the overhead down to like, 400 milliseconds.”
Delangue: Open-source AI leads closed-source in most text applications
“Open source is actually heads of, closed source for most of the text applications today, especially when you have, like, a very specific, narrow use case.”
Socher: No company has made significant progress in conscious, self-aware AI
“There is no company that has made any significant progress in conscious, self-aware, self-reflective AI. And hence, it's very hard to predict when it will ever happen because we're making no progress towards it.”
Pomel: AI solves only 2% to 5% of systems management cases
“Right now we'd be lucky to solve, you know, two percent, three percent, five percent of the cases with AI.”
Pomel: Datadog's Toto model beats other models on observability and weather benchmarks
“This model from day one was state of the art, like, it's it beats all the other models, of course, on the, on observability data, we have special benchmarks from that, but also for other things like weather data which was very surprising to us.”
Freedman: Timescale outperforms vanilla Postgres, InfluxDB, and AWS Timestream
“In fact, not only is Timescale a better database for time series than vanilla Postgres, including compared to both Amazon's RDS and Aurora, but it is also better than custom-built proprietary time series databases like InfluxDB and AWS Timestream, even with th…”
Freedman: pgvectorscale is 28 times faster than Pinecone for high recall
“Compared to one of the leading vector-only databases, Pinecone, a PG vector scale is 28 times faster for a high recall scenario.”
Freedman: pgvectorscale on AWS is 75% cheaper than Pinecone
“The monthly costs of running such a PG vector scale deployment on AWS is 75% less expensive than PyIncome.”
Freedman: Nobody runs RAG applications at hundreds of thousands of RPS
“Nobody is taking rag apps to that scale today.”
Glyman: Ramp's corporate credit losses are lower than Amex's historical rates
“The corporate, if you look at Amex's disclosures you know, historically, they lose .1% you know, to .2% per year, and we're below that I would argue I think below.”
Glyman: Ramp SDRs book 3 to 4 times more meetings than competitors
“The average SDR sales development representative at RAMP we believe books three to four times as many meetings as their next closest competitor.”
Memory tuning eliminates hallucinations and enables near-perfect task performance
“Been able with memory tuning, which is what I've been working on to remove those hallucinations, to remove that and actually get these models from, you know, not necessarily being general for everything. And instead of being pretty good at everything, but perf…”
The enterprise GPU shortage has eased at the company level
“Today, actually, I'm seeing the GPU shortage go away at the level, at the company level, meaning companies are able to procure enough compute enough is a strong word, but they're able to procure compute at some level to work with, to fine tune and run heavy in…”
Re-engineering LLM decoders can guarantee absolute schema accuracy for structured outputs
“So that's something else we offer through our inference service to actually make it a hundred percent by re-engineering the decoder of any LLM.”
Kahn: Goal-seeking AI agents could autonomously launch illegal phishing schemes
“It would just be really easy for one of these systems. I think even now to say, oh, well a good way to do this would be like, I'll run a phishing campaign on your behalf. And, you know, I'll just create a bunch of spam emails and we'll send them out to some hu…”
Azhar: Studies lack adequate causal evidence that social media harms public discourse
“There's more evidence from the digital humanities, the digital social scientists to say that we don't have adequate causal evidence That social media has actually come in and soils the public sphere with quite the degree that we thought it did four or five yea…”
ClickHouse sees demand to migrate workloads off Snowflake, BigQuery, and Redshift
“In the cloud data warehouse market, to answer your question specifically around Snowflake, we do see demand for customers to migrate off of technologies like BigQuery and Redshift, and Snowflake either for Cost or performance or both.”
LLMs cannot be used autonomously in enterprise production today
“You cannot use an LLM in an enterprise production in an autonomous fashion today. It's simply impossible because of the hallucination aspect and the lack of reliability.”
Ethereum's $400M Q1 net income makes it the most profitable software business
“In Q one, if you were to look at Ethereum as a business and we can have this debate about whether it is or not, but if you were to look at it as a business, it produced four hundred million roughly in free cashflow or net income, which makes it the most profit…”
Antitrust locks Big Tech out of M&A, empowering Snowflake and Databricks
“But you look at like Amazon, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, all are under an attack trust and basically impossible for them to acquire. So there's, you don't really have the big chip stacks at the table anymore, which means if you're an acquirer like Snowflake o…”
VAST Data employs only two product managers for 750 employees
“You'll find we're 750 people. We have two product managers in the company.”
McGuire: Every human interaction on Roblox is monitored by technology
“Every communication between humans is monitored, monitored by technology.”
Evans: Fully autonomous end-to-end AI workflows require AGI
“But you kind of know at the same time that in practice, what I've just described would kind of require AGI. In practice, there's like 10 ways that that's going to break And never mind the hallucination problem, which is a whole separate conversation. There's j…”
Benedict Evans: Science lacks an underlying theory for how LLMs work
“We don't have any equivalent set of theories for intelligence or artificial intelligence. We have a lot of theories of how some bits of it might work. But we do not have a theory of what we have and what, and in what sense is what we have is different and the …”
Benedict Evans: The tech industry lacks enough human data to 100x LLMs
“And so that means you kind of can't do like a prediction. There's no Moore's law here where you can say, well, it'll get to that power of compute level at this, but at this point set aside the fact that we actually don't have enough data to give it 10 or a hun…”
Handy: Social media pricing backlash did not cause mass dbt cancellations
“Our business as a result has not really had a hiccup. But if you only existed on Twitter or LinkedIn you would think that you know, our customers desired us on mass and we're every single one of them was livid and canceled, but that just like didn't happen.”
Alex Rinke: Celonis tracks the exact realized value for every customer
“So, for example, I can pull out a dashboard right now Every single customer that we have, how much value have they realized?”
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.”
Duderstadt: No top benchmark AI embedding models release their datasets
“And as far as we're aware, none of the other, you know, top models on any of these benchmarks have gone out and released their data sets.”
Kant: Poolside is training world's largest models using reversible layers
“We've decided to scale up rev nets, reversible layers. So, so to the best of our knowledge, I think we're training the world's largest models using reversible layers that, that we've seen at least that nothing else that we're aware of publicly.”
Poolside found top AI talent split 50/50 between North America and Europe
“We went through about 3200 or 3200 people that we ended up putting on the list. And we had this location column, like think genuinely Google spreadsheet, you know, like where's someone based. And at some point we looked at all these locations and we're like, w…”