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 307 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 11 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: Free Gemini creates a severe business model problem for OpenAI
“Guys, what they're selling as a computer is pretty much available for free. We can quibble on the margins, but the free version of Gemini is the number of people who are going to find the difference. So that is a big problem. That's not a little problem. That'…”
Jessica Lessin: Altman warned OpenAI staff 'vibes are going to be tough'
“We published a memo week or so ago, or details from a memo, quotes from a memo in which Sam Altman, ahead of the Gemini launch, but clearly when the team had been testing it, needed to rally his troops. And he said, the vibes are going to be tough out there. O…”
Lessin: OpenAI's Sora was a flash in the pan and is dead
“If anything, Sora, I think as we all called, was a flash in the pan and is dead.”
Jessica Lessin denies AI startups leak financial numbers to The Information
“I will say they don't give them to us. Like people always come up to me. They're like, oh, doing open AI's dirty work for them by publishing their numbers. I'm like, yeah, not really. But so VCs assume that these companies like beg us to do this. I can, I will…”
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…”
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: Sequoia previously passed on OpenAI before returning to invest
“You have investors like Sequoia, who sat out OpenAI rounds three cycles ago, and many other VCs, they're not alone, just saying OpenAI is no longer a venture returns business, who came in three weeks ago or three months ago.”
Jessica Lessin: Private markets will eventually stop giving free money to AI labs
“Every six months, OpenAI and Anthropic are just testing the private markets. And at some point, the answer will not come back as here's essentially all this free money”
Sam Lessin: Much of generative AI revenue is empty machine-to-machine noise
“I actually bet that like a lot of the use of, and this is why this is so scary from a revenue perspective, is like, with the machines talking to machines doing random things, there's just a lot of like, A lot of movement and no output right from a lot of what'…”
Dave Morin: OpenAI has no profit margin and is entirely underwater
“It's not currently working, right? Like the margin is, there's no margin. They're underwater. They have, you know, they're still funding the thing on large scale venture capital.”
Jessica Lessin: Satya Nadella will approve an OpenAI IPO at eleventh hour
“Satya will not want his investment that he has also invested a shit ton of infrastructure and supporting to go to zero. And he doesn't have to agree until the 11th hour, but that's like, he'll agree at the 11th hour.”
Jessica Lessin: OpenAI has a 90% chance of going public by 2027
“I will say I'm 40% 2026, but like 90% 2027. So I think there is a re reasonable chance next year, and like, I just think they're not gonna go a Stripe, a SpaceX, and all that kind of stuff. Like, they're just not. The body language is totally different.”
Britt Morin: AI monetization is heading toward commerce and affiliate models
“I truly think commerce and affiliate are really where this is all headed and open AI announced this week that it's like starting to create a new payment checkout system into the chat bot. And that basically merchants that fulfill the orders are going to have t…”
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.”
Jessica Lessin: OpenAI CFO stated advertising will become part of business model
“Their CFO is out there saying advertising is going to be a part of our business model publicly.”
Jessica Lessin: State attorneys general ruled OpenAI cannot become for-profit
“It still is a non-profit. The AGs of the world have decided they cannot become a for-profit, so.”
Lessin: OpenAI Is Cutting Prices to Directly Undercut Microsoft
“There are two ways if you're a business to get open AI. You can get them from Microsoft or you can get them from OpenAI. What's OpenAI doing? It's cutting the price to undercut Microsoft.”
Jessica Lessin: OpenAI and Anthropic will absolutely go public
“These will be public companies. Absolutely. And maybe sooner rather than later.”
Lessin: OpenAI Wants Microsoft Stake Cut From 49% to One-Third
“Open AI would like Microsoft to go down to a third. From, I guess, around 49%, or, and it just seems like this relationship has completely deteriorated”
Dave Morin: OpenAI will definitively not launch glasses or cameras
“I also think that OpenAI, I, I'll just say it on the record, I think that OpenAI will not launch a glasses-based vision, like, definitively they will not have cameras, they will not have glasses, like, That is a very diff, it's a very divergent worldview from …”
Lessin: OpenAI has a very low probability of succeeding at hardware
“They're like, they're going to do a hardware thing. Yeah, of course they're going to try. Hardware is so hard. You know what I mean? Like I put their probability of them succeeding at hardware so low.”
Dave Morin: Personality will be a moat in the LLM era
“I was saying that personality is going to be a moat in the LLM era.”
Dave Morin: OpenAI publicly indicated interest in buying Google's Chrome browser
“Like I found it really interesting that open AI was first to raise their hand this morning about
You know, hey, we'll buy Chrome.”
Morin: OpenAI acquiring Chrome would be the worst thing for the internet
“OpenAI buying Chrome would be the literal worst thing that could happen to the internet today.”
Ben Lerer: Startups burning tens of billions rarely deliver strong VC returns
“Companies that, that choose to or need to raise tens of or potentially hundreds of billions of dollars generally don't produce great Venture returns. And so like on the margin, I don't like the profile of companies that have to burn 20 or 30 or 40 or 50 or a h…”
Lessin: Smart investors are desperately trying to sell OpenAI at $300 billion
“I know a lot of smart investors are desperately trying to sell at 300, right?”
Dave Morin: OpenAI can realistically be underwritten to a trillion-dollar valuation
“And so if you look at it like a five to seven year time horizon, can you see this becoming one of the, you know, trillion dollar big companies in Silicon Valley? I think you can actually underwrite that from a company perspective, right?”
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.”
Jessica Lessin: OpenAI's for-profit conversion will trigger a multi-year lawsuit
“And then they actually have to convert into a company cause guys, they're not a company. And then there's going to be a multi-year lawsuit over that fact.”
Jessica Lessin: OpenAI is projected to lose $44 billion through 2028
“They're only projected to lose forty four billion between. 2023 and 20 28, according to the information.”
Grok Built a Competitive Model for Barely Half of OpenAI's $20B Spend
“Twelve billion has gone into Grok, and OpenAI, you have to sort of discount the Microsoft dollars, because a lot of it's for compute, but an estimated twenty billion. Into open AI. So, you know, almost double what Grok has used to build a very similar, if not …”
SoftBank Will Drive One-Third of OpenAI's Revenue Growth This Year
“The information had an important story last week, which was inside OpenAI's revenue forecasts, and the biggest revelation is that SoftBank is expected to contribute a third of their revenue growth this year by paying them for their product.”
OpenAI Investors Can Demand Refunds if For-Profit Conversion Fails
“Their conversion is still in jeopardy, although to a for-profit, and I believe if it doesn't happen, the existing investors can ask for their money back. Not saying that they would, but I think they have the right to if it doesn't happen in two or so years.”
Dave Morin: 100k GPU Clusters Have Not Hit a Scaling Ceiling
“At a 100,000, we haven't hit that ceiling. And in fact, the user experience that they're delivering is on par, if not exceeding open AI.”
Sam Lessin: Generative AI collapses ad inventory rather than expanding it
“AI today, even if you're a really big bull and you think that Gemini and open AI is like better at answers is not actually going to expand inventory, right? If anything, it collapses inventory because you're doing fewer searches, right? It just gives you the a…”
Lessin: Launching an AI startup is a bad idea due to OpenAI
“I think the idea being that OpenAI has now swiped all these AI startups for sure, and being an AI startup is a bad idea, which has been my line for a while.”
Khosla: Apple Partnership Establishes OpenAI Leads LLM Competition
“Obviously from an open AI perspective, it clearly establishes where open AI is in the competition for the best LLMs.”
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…”
Sam Lessin: AI search collapses ad inventory by answering queries directly
“AI today, even if you're a really big bull and you think that Gemini and open AI is like better at answers is not actually going to expand inventory, right? If anything, it collapses inventory because you're doing fewer searches, right? It just gives you the a…”
Jessica Lessin: OpenAI and Google face slowdowns in AI model training
“The information has led the charge on reporting about how in particular OpenAI, but also Google now are reaching slowdowns in the rate of training their models.”
Dave Morin: Prohibitive API costs prevent consumer AI apps from emerging
“Right now you're seeing almost no consumer AI apps because it's so expensive to use the big models, right? Like if I were going to build a consumer AI app of any kind, call it, let's call it a social app of any kind. And I needed to call that API every single …”
Brit Morin: Seed investors said they would pass on OpenAI's round
“The last thing I'll say about this conversation we also had last night was that the Question was asked, like, would you have invested in OpenAI's hundred billion all around? And it was actually a resounding no. And like, you know, the tenor of these investors …”
Lessin: OpenAI's research origins gave startups cover to ignore scraping rules
“People like OpenAI stood on the grounds of, we're doing God's work, and we're an academic research thing, we're not a for-profit thing, and that gives us the license, because what we're doing is important, and because we aren't doing it for profit, to break a …”
Jessica Lessin: OpenAI is discussing converting to a B Corp
“I think it's very likely we've reported they're talking about converting to a B Corp, which is a company which would essentially completely liberate him from the nonprofit kind of overhang and the issues that had that board boot him.”
Khosla: OpenAI executes crisply, while Google has great technology but poor execution
“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.”
Khosla: Apple Partnership Validates OpenAI as the Best LLM
“Obviously from an open AI perspective, it clearly establishes where open AI is in the competition for the best LLMs. Obviously many people wanted that business. And many things were evaluated, and so it's really rewarding to see where Apple thinks the best AI …”