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 36 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
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.”
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.”
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 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.”
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.”
Dave Morin: Twitter was originally built to update Facebook statuses
“Jack Dorsey and Ev Williams And BizStone were launch partners of the Facebook platform, and they built Twitter to update Facebook statuses.”
Jessica Lessin reports Meta's Manus acquisition was unwound after Chinese government intervention
“And of course they interfered and they did quick soon after in terms of sort of challenging the deal, calling back some of the key team to China. So they were in clear integration limbo, and now the deal is off, and they're sort of unwinding it, but.”
Morin: Top hyperscalers projected to spend $400B this year
“And the Meg seven, not Apple, but the rest of them met a Google, Amazon, et cetera, are projected to spend about four hundred billion this year.”
Lessin: OpenAI issued an internal panic memo over Meta poaching talent
“Then this memo came out of OpenAI saying, like, our house has been raided. We have to reconsider all these things. I also hear they have a week-long vacation this week, pre-planned at OpenAI.”
Lessin: Unlike AI, Facebook was massively profitable from its early days
“Facebook was massively profitable. From the early days, it was always almost zero cost from a user perspective. It was a great business from the very early days.”
Sam Lessin: Meta Engineered Smart Glasses to Brick If Recording LED Disabled
“They spent so much time trying to figure out how to engineer it so that it would brick it if you try to disable that LED for exactly that reason. Like it's a wild, the amount of engineering that went into that, like, make sure the LED cannot be disabled for ex…”
Brit Morin: Meta Sells Two Million Smart Glasses, Ramping to Ten Million
“News of the week also, and a tangent is that Meta has now sold two million smart glasses and they're ramping up their production to push ten million this year.”
Dave Morin: Meta needs 18% of Instagram to match Twitter's size
“All they need to do is convert, I guess, about 18% of Instagram to threads, and they'll have an app the size of Twitter.”
Lessin: Meta's Earnings Disappointment Caused by Legal and Severance Costs
“Meta reported earnings that were disappointing, but mostly because they spent a lot of money in lawsuits and laying people off severance, so.”
Morin: Meta's new glasses are still manufactured in Luxottica factories
“It's all Luxottica, right? Luxottica owns Ray-Ban. They just made their own label. Right? So it's all the same, same. It's just that they've got their own label now, but they're manufacturing it in the exact same factories.”
Lessin: Meta signaled more layoffs by admitting unknown optimal company size
“Meta had recent layoffs and came out and said, we can't confirm that there won't be more, and we don't actually know the optimal size of this company.”
Brit Morin: Apple design lead Alan Dye is leaving to join Meta
“Alan Dye, Apple's design lead. Is leaving the company and joining Meta.”
Lessin: Instagram will be the only Meta division working in-office full-time
“I think they'll be the only division.”
Sam Lessin: Facebook Sold Logged-Out Homepage Ads Pre-IPO to Boost Revenue
“I remember the era right, right before going public when Facebook was selling a logged out page to try to make money, so I don't want to be too high and mighty about that, but yes.”
Sam Lessin: Meta's New AR Glasses Feature Wristband Input and HUD
“It has a heads-up display that works, so you can, like, use apps inside the glasses, you know, you can you can text and, like, write messages using the screen and, like, the wristband in the headset.”
Sam Lessin: Meta added an OpenAI-sized market cap in five post-market minutes
“Meta just added an OpenAI in five minutes to their market cap after the market close, so I don't know how that's going to blow out for anyone.”
Lessin: Meta flipped its Ray-Ban companion app into an AI chatbot
“What they did is they took the vision app, they renamed it, they threw a gatekeeper up and flipped it into the chat app. And then it also has the connected glasses in it as in the background.”
Brit Morin: Meta and Google Are Both Attempting to Invest in EssilorLuxottica
“Meta trying to invest in Luxottica slash Supreme. And Google also trying, Google now trying to get on it too.”
Gil: Foundation model funding is mostly strategic hyperscalers, not VC
“Most of the money funding foundation models is strategic, right? Versus venture capital. Venture capital maybe funds things into the hundreds of millions, and then it gets handed off to Google and Amazon and Facebook and all the other folks to invest billions …”
Jessica Lessin: Google and Facebook Paid News Publishers, Then Stopped
“Quality news publishers learned that the hard way from Google and Facebook that paid them a bunch of money and stopped paying them. So that's one reason you don't do it is that the priorities of these platforms change and”
Brit Morin: Meta's settlement is structured over 10 years at $1.7B annually
“Also, it's over 10 years. So that it's like 1.7 billion a year, which is nothing.”
The Information: Meta Resumes Plans to Develop a Smartwatch
“Information reported today that Meta's smartwatch plans are back on, so we can do a wonderful poll about who is going to buy a Meta smartwatch, considering I still don't have any smartwatches.”
Brit Morin: Google and Meta dominate a $740 billion ad market
“I mean, it's literally like the global digital ad spend, Google and Meta dominate, right? And that's like a seven hundred and forty billion dollar market.”
Jessica Lessin: Meta CMO temporarily relocated to D.C. for antitrust trial testimony
“We published a story recently about that sort of got some documents on the number of hours all the meta executives are expected to testify in the upcoming trial, and the CMO is temporarily moving to DC because of it”
Brit Morin: YouTube's $50B revenue makes it bigger than Netflix's $37B
“Did you guys see that YouTube within Google's earnings is actually now is a fifty billion dollar revenue generating company, which if you don't count Meta as a media company makes YouTube kind of the number one and Netflix now is, is thirty seven billion at nu…”
Lessin: Meta shut down all of its expensive celebrity AI chatbots
“They also just shut down all their like super expensive celebrity bots. I think I read that in the information.”
Dave Morin: Facebook Platform Attracted Nearly One Million Developers in First Year
“Once we put the distribution incentive in place, suddenly, you know, we had close to, I think a million developers in one year.”