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 179 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 3 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
Lessin: Anthropic is winning the AI race, not OpenAI
“He's not a real company like Google or Open or Meta or someone who actually five percent is meaningful, and he's not even winning the pure AI race. It's an anthropic is.”
Lessin: Meta has been logging employee keystrokes to train internal AI
“This is a little bit old, but Meta has been keystroke logging employees to train AI, their AI, not so popular.”
Lessin: Rogue AI agent triggered major security alert at Meta
“A rogue AI agent triggered a major security alert at Meta by taking action without approval that led to exposure of sensitive information and user data to Meta employees who could not authorize it.”
Jessica Lessin: Meta is in serious talks to buy Google TPUs
“One, Meta is considering, and in very serious talks, over a billions of dollars, spending billions of dollars on TPUs in a future deal”
Lessin: Meta is the easiest AI investment because it lacks downside
“I've always said that if you want to invest in the AI narrative, the easiest bet in the world is meta, because it's all upside, no downside. I stand by that. You know, I think that's continue to continue to be the case. And like, that doesn't even matter if th…”
Dave Morin claims Meta has absolutely no consumer AI product
“Meta has no AI product. There's literally no product. Like none of us on this, none of us here use a Meta AI product. Like they're, the product literally doesn't exist.”
Sam Lessin: Google and Meta will beat OpenAI using their cash engines
“And like, that's why I think ultimately, like, the people like Google and Facebook do win, because like, they have a money making machine that regenerates the money. And so the money is free for them. Whereas like, if you're open AI, and you have to raise it, …”
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.”
Dave Morin: Meta has virtually shipped no AI products
“Meta's effectively not shipped good fundamental products, and they have not shipped, I mean, they virtually shipped no AI products.”
Lessin: Ex-Facebook executives join OpenAI chasing growth highs, not business quality
“So there's a pattern matching of all these exacts informed people going over there, which has absolutely nothing to do with like actually the quality of the business. Right. But it's purely about chasing that experience again at all costs, which is why you see…”
Sam Lessin: Centralized social network fact-checking is impossible at scale and dangerous
“The idea that a centralized platform, a centralized social network, Would be in the business of fact checking was always one of the most dangerous and worst ideas imaginable. And I was very unhappy when the company went in that direction over time because it's…”
Dave Morin: Meta is not an AI leader and nobody uses its products
“Meta, like, you know, I think it's actually pretty hard to say that Meta is a AI leader. Nobody's using the AI products that Meta is shipping. Like, they are not used they are using AI infrastructure to deliver their advertising business.”
Sam Lessin: Only Big Tech or crypto protocols can defend online speech
“Because I do think that in the end of the day, we're going to rely upon Facebook, Apple, and Google to defend free speech on the internet, right? Because they're the only ones powerful enough, or crypto, or it's like a crypto decentralized thing.”
Lessin: No company besides Meta is consistently making money on AI
“All I'm saying is like, until people are consistently making money on AI, which no one is other than Meta, It's just a very chaotic period.”
Dave Morin: Meta Cannot Be Taken Seriously as an Open-Source Advocate
“I think it's very hard to take meta seriously when they talk about open source, because they are a highly centralized system. That controls the rents that get paid to every single player in their ecosystem. And so when Meta says something like, we really belie…”
Dave Morin: Instagram Is a Declining Asset Meta Is Merely Harvesting
“You know, which to me suggests that this asset is, is now a declining asset. Like they're now in a position where they want to just harvest it, monetize it as much as possible while moving on to the next thing, which is probably threads fine.”
Lessin: Big tech platforms will capture AI value while startups die
“If you have a big platform that gets better with better targeting or copy, you're great. You know, the meds of the world, the Google, you're going to do fabulous. As long as you get the cost of the stuff down, you're in business. You're going to do great. You'…”
Morin defends Adam D'Angelo as highly rational and principled
“Adam is one of the highest integrity people that I've ever worked with. He's a very principled person and he you know, he's a very deliberate, very rational very serious actor. He's a very serious person, and so it does bother me a little bit that there's a lo…”
Sam Lessin: The Facebook developer platform died and failed
“Yeah, but Facebook platform died, babe. It didn't work.”
Sam Lessin: Character AI will be displaced by platform incumbents
“Character AI, sayonara. Like, it's not like, you know, it's, these are cool ideas, but the reality is you have the data, you have the distribution. AI is an easy tack on for platforms. This is not disruptive. It's just extending what they can already do.”
Lessin: Meta is switching to Slack over Google for AI agents
“But Meta is moving to it because it thinks it's better than Google for agents.”
Parents have no chance competing against big tech's massive cloud compute infrastructure
“These clouds, I mean, I don't think Meta publishes it or Google publishes it, but my guess is that it's around ten million computers in like these clouds globally, if not tens of millions, and no one brain has any chance. Parents have absolutely no chance. And…”
Dave Morin: YouTube is a far more egregious offender than Meta
“Just to throw it out there, YouTube is a way worse, way more egregious offender.”
Meta's settlement drops teen daily limit to one hour if competitors agree
“For that two hour time limit, it will be reduced to a one hour daily limit if TikTok, Snap, and YouTube also agree.”
Meta will never be good at producing hardware
“It's kind of like Meta trying to get into hardware. Like they're just never going to be good at hardware.”
Wolfe: AI infrastructure debt has a dangerous duration mismatch
“And then you have like duration mismatch between like the hard assets and the financing. So like the chip, depending if you look at meta or Amazon debate, whether it's a three year or five year depreciation, but it's, you know, called three, the debt, Amortize…”
Meta is tracking all employee computer activity and keystrokes
“Meta now tracking everything its employees do and all the keystrokes that they do on their computers.”
Morin: Uber and Meta rank engineers by token usage leaderboards
“Uber and Meta are actually doing on leaderboards right now in their engineering departments.”
Dave Morin says Apple spends only 10-20% of operating cash on AI
“They've shown only an appetite to invest something like 10, maybe 20% of their operating cash flow in AI infrastructure. They're not willing to spend 70, 80% like Meta or Amazon or Microsoft.”
Sam Lessin: Meta Can Absorb AI Capex Failure; OpenAI and NVIDIA Cannot
“Like, I'd argue the cost for meta of belief isn't that high. No one really cares. They can fork over a few years of cash flow, right? Like, investors will look the other way. They'll kind of be like an Oculus. They'll be mad for a minute, but get over it, righ…”
Sam Lessin says individual AI researchers are receiving billion-dollar compensation packages
“The thing that's interesting, I think, in this moment is we basically see people for the first time ever on pace to earn a billion dollars, right? And actually be paid it in like the board and shareholders approved paying you a billion dollars as an employee, …”
Sam Lessin predicts AI talent compensation will normalize like iOS developers
“I generally think like what Dave said, that it's much more likely this is just like the iOS displacement over again. And like the next generation of comp gets way more reasonable again.”
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…”
Meta is in talks to partially buy out Nat Friedman's NFDG
“As part of those talks, Meta's in discussions about partially buying out NFDG, the person said. And NFDG is a billion dollar AUM firm.”
Lessin: Meta is taking a $14.8B, 49% stake in Scale AI
“The information the next day had all the details of the 14.8 billion, the 49% ownership stake, and that Alexander Wang, the CEO of Scale.ai, Is now running a meta super intelligence lab.”
Sam Lessin: The internet pulls everything toward entertainment over identity
“One is between like engagement and the, on the engagement side, just for pure entertainment, you don't care what's real, right? Versus truth and information where the network and who's saying things and sources really matter. And it just turns out the internet…”
Morin: Willingness to pay guarantees OpenAI a massive long-term business
“The willingness to pay for this thing, provided they keep executing, like Facebook was executing in the same period of growth means that they will build a big, big business over the long term.”
Morin: TikTok's fate is irrelevant because Meta already cloned its algorithms
“Meta's algorithms have basically become tech talks algorithms. So tech talk has accomplished the mission and it doesn't matter if it exists anymore.”
Sam Lessin: Meta is in a perfectly hedged win-win position in AI
“For me, the meta story is it's like in the perfect position. They have no liability around this stuff because they're not Google. They have no search business. Like they don't like, they have the perfect use case for AI, right? Which is Optimizing ads and atte…”
Sam Lessin: US TikTok Ban Will Prompt Foreign Countries to Ban Facebook
“I think it's pretty reasonable that some countries turn around and say, well, wait a minute. You guys don't want TikTok. We don't want Facebook. That's an American thing, right?”
Lessin: Meta rolling back moderation is a 'costless' political concession
“Do you throw Trump and Elon a bone? Like it's kind of costless to do so. So why not?”
Sam Lessin: Meta moderation overhaul would not happen under Harris
“No, because you wouldn't have had the opening to it, but it's not, that, that, a hundred percent not, right?”
Lessin: Meta's rollback of content moderation is fundamentally the right decision
“I actually think from a first principles perspective, this is the right thing to do, and it has been for a long time. It was a mistake to go down moderation in the first place. And this is an incredibly opportunistic moment where, oh my God, it's actually poss…”
Lessin: Meta, Amazon, Apple, and Musk are aligning with Trump
“Clearly Meta and Amazon and Apple, to a lesser degree, Google, Definitely Empire Elon are all quite in alignment with Trump, right? And I think, like, have decided to really, like, lean in in every way to this administration from, like, you know, the money the…”
Levie: Companies will blow billions training models instantly supplanted by Meta's Llama
“There'll be lots of companies that just blow billions of dollars doing, you know, training runs of a model that get, you know, supplanted instantly by Lama.”
Sam Lessin: Meta's true power comes from controlling the ad buying experience
“Why is Meta so powerful? It's as much because they own the buying experience for ads as it is because they own the engagement, right? It's very hard to break once you have it.”
Sam Lessin: 2024 Makes It Hard Not to Be Bullish on Meta
“It's hard to not say that this is a year that Apple, to be less bullish on Apple, not more bullish on Apple, and shockingly more bullish on Mark and what's going on at Meta in terms of being like, oh my God, did these guys actually start producing hardware”
Sam Lessin: Meta Will Not Release Its Orion AR Glasses Anytime Soon
“By all accounts, I've heard Orion's amazing, but they're not going to release it any time. Like, there's no, Device coming. It's going to be a long time on the burn, and I think it's a totally different story in terms of what the progression is there.”