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 158 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
Khosla: OpenAI executes better than Google despite Google's great tech
“I think OpenAI has been very good in execution, but Google has great technology and technologies. They just haven't been as crisp about their execution.”
Britt Morin: Chrome gives Google an AI agent advantage over OpenAI and Apple
“And I think that, like, plays to Google's advantage in the AI race that they have Chrome. Like, OpenAI doesn't have a browser that they can install this into, and Apple's certainly not, like, ahead in this race with Safari.”
Brit Morin: Google has an AI agent advantage because it owns Chrome
“Isn't the most amazing part about this and like why Google might actually win this race because they have Chrome, they have the browser and what this is, it's called project Mariner. It's a Chrome extension. So anytime you're browsing the web, you hit your Chr…”
Dave Morin: Gemini Deep Research is Google's first truly impressive Gemini product
“Gemini in deep research mode is really impressive. I actually think it's the first Gemini product that they've launched that just screams Google to me. It's really impressive what it does.”
Levie: FTC scrutiny is hyper-targeted at just four or five Big Tech firms
“I think if you look at the actual track record it, you know, this is probably, you know, unfortunately, a negative on, on the FTC environment, but it does seem hyper targeted at four or five companies. You know, Splunk was acquired for thirty billion dollars b…”
Sam Lessin: Most Google searches concentrate on a tiny set of things
“And also the reality is almost all Google searches are for like six things, right? Like the internet is actually much smaller. People's demands are much smaller than people think they are. The internet is very large, but the actual used internet is actually qu…”
Levie: Increased AI device activity will counteract ad inventory collapse
“And that's why I think it will counteract whatever your sort of 10 blue link shift is.”
Levie: Google is the most threatened Big Tech company by AI
“Google is, is in, you know, singularly the trickiest spot, I think of the big tech players. Cause you know, this is not particularly disruptive to Meta. It's basically all upside. It's all kind of like an adjacent side business to AWS and Amazon. It's all net …”
Brit Morin: Temu offers real competition to Amazon on price and search
“Is Timu popping up in your first Google search results above Amazon? Because it is for me, and they're undercutting Amazon's prices by so much. I think it's real competition.”
Lessin: Users will still choose Google even without pre-set defaults
“People are still gonna choose Google.”
Dave Morin: A Google breakup spurring 1,000 Perplexities benefits Silicon Valley
“I mean, not just it, but for the ecosystem, right? Like seeing some, seeing like 1000 perplexities bloom would be actually very good for Silicon Valley.”
Brit Morin: Apple and Google will win the consumer AI market
“I do buy that like anthropic or open AI might have a big play in the enterprise world, but for the consumer world of AI, those two have to be the winners.”
Morin: Google 20% projects required pitching to Page, Brin, and Schmidt
“When you pitched a 20% project, you had to pitch it to Larry, Sergey, and Eric. You had to go to, like, the exact meeting. Pitch the project and explain to them how you were going to also keep up your normal day job while doing the project.”
Britt Morin blames Google's AI Overview hallucinations on bad Reddit data
“I think Reddit is mostly to blame for this because there's so much content on Reddit. That's not valid. Google's clearly ingested this. And use the content to train its model. And like, that's, this is where a lot of these crazy answers are coming from.”
Brit Morin: Google and Apple will be last standing in AI race
“And for me, it got me to believe that Google and Apple, I continuously believe are going to be the last remaining horses in this race.”
Sam Lessin Claims YouTube Hides Functional Headcount in Other Google Divisions
“They must be hiding a bunch of headcount, like in other places, like in the ads teams or things like that off the books.”
Jessica Lessin: Counting Google Out in AI Race Was Always Ridiculous
“I mean, it was always ridiculous to count Google out in this. Like, of course, they're gonna build really interesting stuff.”
Jessica Lessin: Ruth Porat has systematically shut down Alphabet's Other Bets
“I mean, that, Ruth's track record to date has largely been pruning those. I mean, Larry created Alphabet. Because, you know, he wanted a way to retain all these great people who wanted to go off and do fun projects, like Andy Rubin, who didn't, you know, want …”
Morin: Google's Bard mobile interface is arguably the best AI search tool
“The interface is really nice. It's arguably the best AI search interface out there right now.”
Stanford: Apple and Google block independent developers from accessing Wi-Fi location
“Apple and Google or Android have both locks Wi-Fi location. You cannot access it as a developer.”
Sam Lessin: Big tech companies create subsidiary units to hoard executive talent
“It's the OG of if you're really, really, really rich company, first of all, you don't want to put your talent back out into the world. You want to hoard your talent. And then two, it's much more pleasant because they built teams, there's loyalties or whatever …”
Jessica Lessin: Demis Hassabis proposed 30-day government review for frontier AI
“What Demis, the AI leader, Google, Sabis, proposed was, like, It was this idea that there should be a separate government body that reviews frontier models basically for 30 days prior to their release.”
Google announces over 900M active Gemini users
“I think they said they have over nine hundred million active users using Gemini.”
Lessin: Anthropic and OpenAI Tokens Cost Five Times More Than Google's
“Wildly expensive, right? Like compared to- Five X. Five X Google.”
Brit Morin claims DeepMind is creating and backing multi-billion dollar companies
“Multi-billion dollar companies being created and invested in by DeepMind.”
Dave Morin predicts insane returns for Google from SpaceX and Anthropic investments
“Even just the returns that they're going to see from their SpaceX and Anthropic investment is insane.”
Sam Lessin: Google Added $270B in Market Cap Post-Antitrust Decision
“I mean, the stock is up, what, 10% on this news, which is on a 2.7 trillion dollar, it's like two hundred seventy billion dollars. So what's amazing is that basically it's added half an open AI because of open AI.”
Lessin: Outlook for Publishers Dependent on Google Traffic Will Get Far Worse
“But yeah, if you put all your eggs in the Google traffic basket, the game's been over forever, and it's about to get a lot worse.”
Lessin: Top editors-in-chief are panicking over Google AI traffic drops
“You know, my publisher group chats, half the content is, what's happening to your Google traffic today? Has there been an algo change? These are editors in chief of the largest publications of the world.”
Morin: Google launched Offerwall to help publishers monetize lost search traffic
“Google, in an attempt to make publishers more happy because all of their traffic has dropped, especially with Gemini now rolling out on top of search results, launched a new product this week to help publishers monetize. Did you see this? It's called Offerwall…”
Lessin: Apple won't acquire Anthropic because of Amazon and Google's stakes
“The problem is Anthropik's biggest investors are Amazon and Google, so that's why it's probably not gonna happen.”
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.”
Rauch: Google estimates there are four million React engineers globally
“For what we do, which is react, which is like the front end. There's four million is the best estimate we get from Google and for creating interfaces, which is very much like a design thing.”
Lessin: Google says 25 percent of its new code is AI-generated
“Google had the headline that it, 25% of the code written at the company is originated with AI and then checked by people.”
Brit Morin: I don't trust Google's Gemini AI model "at all anymore"
“I don't even trust Gemini at all anymore.”
Brit Morin: Google's $20B search deal accounts for a quarter of Apple's services revenue
“Google paid Apple, twenty billion for the default search deal, and Apple's services division, which this revenue went into, generated eighty-five billion. So about a quarter of its services division is coming Directly from Google.”
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.”
Brit Morin: Hiring Olympians was Google's strategy back in the day
“This was the strategy at Google back in the day, 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”
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.”
Lessin: AI fair use lawsuits will take a decade to resolve
“There are court cases that will take a decade, unfortunately, and they're saying it's fair use, which is a part of copyright law when you're taking copyright content and then just paraphrasing or taking out a sentence or two.”
Morin is extra long on Google in the AI race
“I think as everyone that listens knows, I'm extra long on Google in the AI race for a lot of reasons, but I'm also, I'm not short Apple.”
Brit Morin: Google shifted its focus to XR software in June 2023
“Google in June of twenty-twenty-three shifted the focus to XR software. So it's basically like creating Android for VR. And any hardware developers can incorporate XR into their own hardware as their own VR device.”
Dave Morin: Useful AI query boxes pose an existential crisis for Google
“Their entire advertising model is based on that people are telling them their exact intent. And so if you're, if that is being threatened by another box somewhere that is, you know, becoming more useful for answering the same questions, then it's a, it's like …”