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.
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Sam Lessin: ChatGPT will be a branding blip, not the Kleenex of AI
“I actually think there's a very strong argument you're making right now, which I agree with, that actually, like, ChatGPT will be, is not Kleenex. And like this will be a like branding blip in history.”
Sam Lessin: Selling proprietary data to LLM providers for pennies is stupid
“All of the people who are, you know, some version of like, how do I sell data or give data or give context to chat GPT and get paid cents on the dollar are stupid, right? And like, it should be exactly the way around, which is you just use them as commodity ar…”
Dave Morin: Meta lacks a consumer AI product to compete with ChatGPT
“I think that's the real question here is that can they build a product that can compete? Cause right now they don't have one. And so they have to figure out how to use yesterday's ad dollars to fund the creation of a new product.”
Morin: Early research proves synthetic data cannot effectively train AI models
“Yeah, I mean, that goes back to that first research paper that came out right after ChatGPT launched, which basically said you can't create Fake data for training models. It just doesn't work, and so there was, like, this very early paper that effectively told…”
Lessin: Foundation AI models will not become good, sustainable businesses
“Like I've actually come out of this exercise more cynical even than I was a month ago. Right. Or even a few weeks ago that any of these are going to be good, sustainable businesses, despite the fact it's clearly going to be everywhere in the air.”
Jessica Lessin: Publishers must build AI tools and never license proprietary data
“Publishers have to build it themselves, and in no way, shape, or form should be turning that data over.”
Morin: ChatGPT's defensible moat will be user memory and personal data
“The thing that ChatGPT is becoming and continues to get better at is memory. And just like we've seen at Apple, Dropbox, like many places where data is a moat, like...”
Sam Lessin: ChatGPT is easily replaceable by four identical alternatives
“If it went away tomorrow, there's like four others that are basically the same thing.”
OpenAI's Consumer Push Killed Its Ability to Sell AI Fear
“The problem that OpenAI created for themselves is they went so broad and have so many partners that they lost their ability to be pure scare narrative. Because they have all these other, including consumer relationships where the fear thing is to their negativ…”
Morin: ChatGPT has not topped 800M users and growth is declining
“ChatGPT itself still isn't beyond eight hundred million people, and it's declining in growth right now.”
Jessica Lessin reports OpenAI recently missed internal revenue targets for ChatGPT
“They added the information that, which is pertinent, which would certainly be newsworthy on its own, that they have also missed revenue targets for ChatGPT recently, although we don't know by how much and we already knew that they missed the user targets, but …”
Dave Morin: OpenAI's obvious social play was group chat, not Sora
“I always assumed that one day I would wake up and I would open ChatGPT and it would ask me to upload my contacts and then I would be able to use ChatGPT with my friends, right? Like the four of us could use ChatGPT and have ChatGPT in the middle of the convers…”
Lessin: AI excitement saved TikTok and protected Google from antitrust scrutiny
“They kept Chrome and Google, they saved TikTok. There's, like, six things that because there's, like, this wave of anticipation and hope and excitement around this stuff, These other conversations just get people just move on.”
Sam Lessin: AI's future is a cast of characters, not one assistant
“Again, I just think the future, honestly, is you have to model these things like a cast of characters, not a single person that is your confidant. And like, they're just a bunch of friends. There's gonna be more of them. And like, Grok is your Republican frien…”
Dave Morin: OpenAI and Anthropic must eventually adopt advertising business models
“ChatGPT, you know, ChatGPT, by the way, like, and Anthropic, like, they're making a lot of money, but they're not making enough money to fund the capital that they're raising. And so they have to turn to advertising sooner or later.”
Dave Morin: ChatGPT's daily time spent is nearing Instagram's
“I saw a chart last week that ChatGPT is now nearing Instagram's daily time spent.”
Sam Lessin: Advertising profits come from demand creation, not search fulfillment
“The money is made on the like, oh shit, you want some like, you convincing someone they want something. Right? Putting something they didn't know they want in front of them, right? And so I think this is, like, the big thing is, like, I'm not saying these thin…”
Dave Morin: ChatGPT is the most important product on Earth
“It is the most important product on the Planet right now.”
Dave Morin: Startup developers overwhelmingly choose OpenAI's API over Anthropic
“All the developers that, you know, are, we're looking at investing in you, you're seeing it as the API that everybody's using. People talk about using the other ones, but, you know, despite Anthropic maybe having better software engineering models or Elon buil…”
Jessica Lessin: ChatGPT Is Basically Useless Because It Is Delusional
“This is my whole thing that like chat GPT is basically useless because it's so delusional.”
Dave Morin: One Billion People Are Currently Using ChatGPT
“There are a billion people today using chat GPT.”
Brit Morin: Google Gemini takes two to three times longer than ChatGPT
“No, it takes two to three acts as long to get me an answer, and I'm sitting there waiting, whereas GPT is much more quick.”
Jessica Lessin: ChatGPT's memory feature is a liability
“I also think the chat GPT memory is a liability.”
Morin: Shocking Meta did not introduce AI group chats before OpenAI
“And I kind of look at this and I'm like, I think I said this on a previous pod that like this was by far the most obvious thing to do in social with AI. And it's like absolutely shocking to me that Meta did not do this first because it's like really, really ob…”
Sam Lessin: OpenAI is trying everything because they don't know what works
“We're like, we don't actually know what's going to work. We're going to do literally everything and like something will work, right? That's kind of feels like the arrow we're in on the chat GPT open AI side for me.”
Dave Morin: OpenAI's Atlas browser adds little value over a separate window
“I can't describe to you what the use case is of how the browser works. Other than that, it shows you ChatGPT in the window to the right, and then you can click like a single button to summarize an article. But all that does is pull the current URL into it. It …”
Brit Morin: OpenAI's Atlas browser delivers a far worse ChatGPT experience
“I signed in with my OpenAI account, obviously, and then I started using it like I would have used ChatGPT in my Google Chrome browser, and it was hallucinating way more. It didn't have like a lot of memory stored about all the things I had talked to it about. …”
Lessin: Sam Altman says OpenAI is calibrating ChatGPT to allow erotica
“The other news was that ChatGPT is gonna work to more personalize this so that it can Add more or enable more erotica for its adult users. So I think Altman was actually saying they had gone too far in weeding out some content and that they're, you know, just …”
Dave Morin: Kids will access harmful AI models regardless of guardrails
“Kids are gonna get access to this stuff. Just like, you know, everyone, our generation, parents tried, tried, tried to keep pouring away from them, but that didn't work. Right? Like the kids are gonna get the bad stuff no matter what we do.”
Sam Lessin: ChatGPT Is Useful But Not Worth Half a Trillion Dollars
“Not worth half a trillion dollars, but useful.”
Morin: ChatGPT consistently outperforms Google Gemini on general contextual queries
“I've actually tried, I tried what you just described this week several times where I asked the same question to both. And ChatGPT always answers better in context, like in a way that makes me feel like the work is better than what Gemini answers for me. Not in…”
Jessica Lessin: Gemini's Daily Active Users Are Three Quarters of ChatGPT's
“I mean, if you look at daily actives, Gemini is about three quarters of ChatGPT at the moment.”
Brit Morin: Users will pay more for ChatGPT as features expand
“I think there's elasticity in like the pricing mechanisms that they offer right now, where as there are more product features and tools to be had, which I don't think it's just going to be like this format forever. I will probably pay more as both a consumer a…”
Morin: ChatGPT is a new computer platform comparable to the iPhone
“ChatGPT is an iPhone. It's not the chat. Like you're buying a computer.”
Sam Lessin: AI tools like ChatGPT are actually built for old people
“We're building for old people.
Like, all this shit is made, you made this point, Jess, about how all the sixty-year-olds, like, love ChatGPT.
They think it's, like, the coolest thing they've ever seen.”
Lessin: AI chatbot summaries will not kill The Information's business
“Texting a chat bot for a piece of information, like, it's not, I mean, That is not going to kill our business. If we continue to do that well, we're going to have an amazing business and it's much, much deeper than that.”
Brit Morin: Consumer boycott and ChatGPT uninstalls will reverse long term
“I could see this reversing. I don't think this is long term.”
Brit Morin: Users will adopt a unified cross-platform AI agent in 2026
“And similarly, I think each of us is going to have like one primary agent That's not just like your open chat GPT. It's connected into more than one platform. So into like Amazon and GPT and your health data and something that is your primary agent. That start…”
Dave Morin predicts raw AI output will define the 2020s visual aesthetic
“It's kind of like when you look at nineties albums, they all look like nineties grunge. Like that's what the 20 twenties is going to look like in the future.”
Market leaders eventually subsume early entrants' product lanes
“I actually think this is your, this is actually a classic technology cycle story around when a new technology cycle starts. There are a bunch of different players in the market, and one of them will kind of choose a product lane that the other one that is the …”
Jessica Lessin: Gemini has 35M daily and 350M monthly active users
“Gemini has thirty-five million daily actives. I think ChatGPT has five hundred million monthlies, and actually Gemini is three hundred and fifty million monthly, so that's not that.”
Dave Morin predicts OpenAI will launch messaging and consumer products next
“OpenAI with ChatGPT has become the consumer interface. I think they also said that they've just reached a billion users within the last Two or three weeks. And so, you know, we should expect them to behave like a billion user consumer internet company at this …”
Britt Morin ditches Google for Perplexity and ChatGPT
“And you know how pro Google I am. I've like moved to perplexity or GPT. It's like I had a, there's a switching cost to this and like, I get that they're training it and trying to make it better, but it's really frustrating when they're just.”
Morin: Only about 5% of ChatGPT users had used GPT-4
“Like the most interesting stat that I saw this week was that it was something like five percent of people that have interacted with chat GPT have used GPT for.”
Dave Morin: Backchannel reports show AI chatbot engagement is down significantly
“There was a report today that the chat GPT usage or engagement is down quite a bit, which we've been hearing in the back channels, not just about GPT, but many of the other AI chatbots.”
Morin: OpenAI hired Charles Porch from Instagram to court creators
“Charles was hired at OpenAI from Instagram to like help build creator sort of love for OpenAI products, ChatGPT.”