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 993 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
Cloudflare laid off over 20% of staff to cut middle management
“We laid off more than 20% of our team and not because the business was struggling, but, and not because they weren't great team members. But we just need fewer middle managers.”
US could use cyber sabotage to slow Chinese AI progress
“Plan B is the branch where we try to, where the U.S. Tries to slow down China. Where the most obvious mechanisms would be things like export controls, but potentially they could get more escalatory than that. Meaning sabotage. Yeah, sabotage like, yeah, like c…”
Tworek: OpenAI team was initially underwhelmed by pre-trained GPT-4
“When we trained GPT-IV, we were pretty underwhelmed internally, and then there was a lot of moments, oh, we trained this small, we spent a lot of money on it, and it's kind of like, you know, pretty dumb, at least, like, you know, we have GPT-IV, GPT-III alrea…”
Srinivas: Perplexity will not crawl websites that block web crawlers
“Yeah, I mean, like, if they don't want to be crawled, we shouldn't crawl them. You know, that's just being how the internet has worked. Like, you know, people have the robots, the text file, and like, you know, if they don't let you do it, then you should just…”
Wolf: OpenAI Admitted Model Evaluation Caused Hugging Face Cyber Incident
“And then about a week later, OpenAI contacted us and tell us that this was much likely something that happened as part of one of their model development or evaluation, basically.”
Feldman: Cerebras signed an OpenAI compute deal worth over $20 billion
“Remember, we did a huge deal. This is probably the largest deals in Silicon Valley history north of twenty billion dollars.”
Feldman: Cerebras signed a 760-megawatt multi-year compute deal with OpenAI
“The deal is 760 megawatts, 250 megawatts in 26 on a multi-year lease. An additional 250 megawatts in 27, on a multi-year lease, and an additional in 28, a multi-year lease.”
Katti: OpenAI must build its own compute infrastructure alongside partners
“I think what's becoming clear is to build the kind of compute we need and at this scale we have to not just rely on getting compute from our partners. We increasingly have to take a much more active role in building and getting that compute that we need.”
Katti: OpenAI commits to not taking existing power from local grids
“Whenever we build a data center anywhere, we make it a hard commitment that we are not taking power away from the grid. In fact, we are investing in the grid to generate new power so that we can consume it for data centers.”
Kolter no longer writes code manually, relying entirely on AI agents
“I don't write code anymore. I do all my work now, and I do lots of, you know, I still do some research, right? It's entirely telling Codex what to do.”
Axiom Math aims to solve a Fields Medal shortlist-worthy problem using AI
“I think that we really want Accent Prover to be able to solve one long-standing problem in mathematics that you can objectively, objectively say, even though if it's an AI, you know, or double-blind, whatever, that will be in the shortlist.”
Mistral CTO focuses on enterprise deployment over gigawatt-scale compute capacity
“I deeply believe that with the capabilities that we have today in the models, there is so much to be unlocked in enterprise that I don't think my main focus today would be into going into the gigawatts of power.”
LeCroix: Mistral AI Has a Dedicated Robotics Division for Defense Partners
“It's something that we work on. Yes, we have a robotics division that works with these partners.”
Patel: SemiAnalysis advised a client on buying and restarting a coal plant
“Have clients would like, had a client buy a coal plant. And we were advising them on the transaction based on, they just like showed up and they're like, yeah, we want to buy power assets.”
Ai2 to release open-source coding agent with 100x cheaper training
“We will have a major release of an open source coding agent that has a couple of key features. For one, training is a hundred times cheaper. You need to generate synthetic data and you need to train on it. And so we have a method that's a hundred roughly a hun…”
Douglas: Anthropic's ethos is that scaling current techniques achieves AGI
“Like really for the last five or six years, Anthropics ethos has been scaling compute with broadly the current set of techniques is like AGI is tractable within those bounds.”
Crespo: Pigment aims to build a $100B+ to $200B+ business
“We have a very, very large ambition with Romain. We want to build a, You know, a hundred billion dollar business, if not more two hundred billion, if we can, or even more.”
Pedregal: Granola is a Trojan horse to aggregate user context
“And in a way the product we have today is, is a Trojan horse to collect a lot of your context so that you can then use all the information in that context to do future work.”
Cherny: Anthropic builds minimal product interfaces to keep up with model evolution
“The way we think about it is the model is evolving so quickly that we build a minimal possible product to keep up with it.”
Cherny: I use both Claude Code and Cursor every day
“I personally use a lot of these products and you know, I use quad code every day, but I also use cursor every day and I use other products every day.”
Gomez: Synthetic data makes up the majority of Cohere's training data
“Synthetic data is incredibly effective. It's now the majority of the data that we train on for creating something like command A.”
Mike Palmer requires all Sigma Computing employees to work in-office
“Even in face masks, I required everybody to come back to the office and I still require that today. Which is its own conversation, but I'm not a believer in remote work”
Snap A/B tests showed TikTok ads initially had no effect on Snapchat engagement
“We ran A-B tests actually Within the advertising groups to see like, oh, like let's segment some users out, not show them TikTok ads, see if they behave differently in the long run, right? In terms of engagement on Snapchat and stuff like that. And there was n…”
Replit treats manual code editing as a disengagement metric like Tesla
“Our view and the way we track our metrics now is that when you go into the editor and code, it's almost like the Tesla disengage.”
Pomel: Datadog historically avoided 'AI' terminology, viewing it as 'bullshit words'
“For the longest time in the history of the company, we've been careful about using the words AI. We thought they were, you know, bullshit words mostly.”
In mid-2023, multi-billion dollar companies could not obtain AWS GPU nodes
“Last year was, at this time, was absolutely insane. That's why we threw up our own cloud, because there was just like, large companies with multi-billion revenue numbers could not get a node from AWS, despite their accounts being tens of millions or hundreds o…”
Benedict Evans still hasn't found a daily use case for ChatGPT
“In my actual job, I can't work out something that I would actually use ChatGPT for.”
Poolside built custom distributed LLM training framework from scratch
“We didn't take Megatron or DeepSpeed or kind of the big open source frameworks for training large language models. As our base, we built our own from scratch and we built our own distributed training for our pre-training stage.”
DeepScribe sees more impact fine-tuning in-house LLMs than GPT-4
“So with GPT-IV, to be honest, we haven't gotten the impact we'd like in terms of fine-tuning. Where we've seen the most impact is with our own in-house LLM.”
Lamini's hosted service ran exclusively on AMD GPUs for a year
“The Lamini hosted service over the past year has been running on AMD GPUs only. We haven't been running on NVIDIA chips.”
Riparbelli: Synthesia aims to eventually replace physical video production
“We are building technology to eventually replace the entire physical production process.”
Sternberg: Notion to launch first AI-enabled project management experience soon
“We are excited about some major improvements and kind of an all, a much more cohesive experience around how you manage projects in Notion. And some of that's going to be coming very soon. And it's going to be very much, I would argue, the first AI-enabled expe…”
Falcon: Lightning AI will not offer hosted model APIs
“But no, we're not gonna be offering like services and APIs and all of that. And really that's so that we can have the same incentives as the open source community.”
ADP aims to measure and reveal AI bias rather than eliminate it
“And what we said was, is that we don't believe that bias doesn't exist. In fact, we believe it does exist. And so our role isn't to mitigate all bias, but our role is to at least measure it, understand it, and express it, and make sure that people understand i…”
Craib: Numerai's goal is to monopolize data and money, then decentralize it
“Numeri's mission is to kind of monopolize intelligence and monopolize data, and then monopolize money, and then decentralize the monopoly.”
Ghodsi: Databricks open-sources products only after achieving product-market fit
“So our secret sauce is look at an enterprise problem, figure out what that is, understand it deeply by being really customer obsessed, bring the problem back, have the innovators, the PhDs that know how to solve these problems. Solve the problem. Iterate quick…”
a16z operates without a head of diversity or diversity program
“But we don't have a head of diversity. We don't have program. We just have, like, criteria that's wide, where we can see talent that we ourselves might not have.”
Horowitz: a16z employees who publicly trash startups on Twitter are fired
“One of the things I tell everybody at New Employee Orientation is if you get on Twitter, like some VCs, and start shitting all over somebody's company, you know, saying, oh, they'll never make any money, that's a dumb idea, I can't believe they called it bodeg…”
Walle: Unacast rejects location data requests for political campaigns
“And we have, ah, we have kind of a lot of cases that we don't do. For instance, political campaigns.”
Thomas Reardon wants to replace keyboards with thought-speed neural text input
“What I want to do is get rid of the 19th century keyboard entirely and allow you to effectively sort of text, if you will, at the level of your cognitive capacity.”
a16z requires positive second-derivative growth, as linear growth fails
“We're absolutely concerned with the second derivative. It has to be positive, right? Linear growth, by the way, doesn't seem to work.”
Bloomreach Employs Zero Dedicated Data Scientists
“Yeah, so first of all, we don't have any data scientists. We only have engineers who understand data science.”
IA Ventures requires every prospective investment to have multi-billion-dollar potential
“Each of us make two to three investments in a given year. Every investment that we are making, we think has the potential to be a multi-billion dollar outcome. Every single one. That, that is the bar.”
Ehrenberg: IA Ventures flatly refuses to invest in crypto or tokens
“We will not do anything in crypto or tokens.”
AXA augments point-of-sale customer data with external sources for predictive underwriting
“Our actuary, ah, efforts and our predictive underwriting efforts have really started to take advantage of the information that we're collecting at the point of sale, augmenting it with additional information that's accessible maybe through prescription databas…”