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
Sam Lessin says publishers are screwing up their OpenAI licensing deals
“All of these publishers are screwing up yet again with these open AI deals, right. Giving away all the value is information and it's very scarce.”
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.”
Lessin: Publisher lawsuits will not put OpenAI out of business
“Will it put OpenAI out of business? No, I don't think so, because like, They can fight these lawsuits. You know, there's not clear, like, other kind of regulatory stuff breathing down their neck”
Jessica Lessin: Publishers will accept low AI licensing payouts out of fear
“Like, they're all sitting here now saying, you know, do we take the relative pennies from OpenAI and Apple and everyone who wants to license our content? And I actually think, unfortunately, they are, because publishers are so scared about what any kind of dro…”
Sam Lessin: Giving proprietary data to OpenAI is a losing developer strategy
“The worst idea in the world, right. If you're a developer to say, Hey, maybe I have some proprietary data. I'm going to like stick it in to open AI or one of these platforms for what in return. And then by the way, I'm just giving them all the interaction data…”
Sam Lessin: Sam Altman emerged stronger from the failed OpenAI board coup
“Sam Altman is stronger as an executive having effectively left Rome and then having everyone vote him back in with their feet as employees and the board caving, right? He's now stronger than he's ever been as a leader because he basically is at the head of an …”
Lessin: Safest business outcome is Microsoft absorbing OpenAI's staff
“For the sake of business, it would be great if Microsoft just inherited the people that want to work on this stuff and they go into a normal business structure where they're a hundred billion dollar piece of a three trillion dollar company. That's the safest o…”
Lessin: LLMs are just 'Cloud 2.0' business tools, not AGI
“I think LLMs like the really cool, very obvious applications. There'll be a lot of money made. I don't think it's like the second coming of anything. I just think it's like, Cool business cloud, two point O stuff.”
Lessin: Microsoft, Amazon, and Google are the big winners of OpenAI drama
“I think the big winners on this are Microsoft, actually, despite the challenges of the eyes. It's Amazon. It's going to be Google.”
Lessin: OpenAI's nonprofit governing a for-profit was an intellectual disaster
“This idea of wrapping A for-profit and a non-profit where the non-profit is, like, beholden to no one and somewhat religious, and the for-profit sits inside that was, like, hilarious, and was clearly intellectually a disaster, but everyone kind of looked the o…”
Lessin: Altman pitched building AGI privately as a defense mechanism
“The story's become Ilya,
The fundamentalist versus Sam, the pragmatist who just wants to build a business, because the reality is Sam Altman, the founder, even as a, you know, private conference a year ago, not even a year ago, the story was not only is the o…”
Morin: Microsoft, Sequoia, and Thrive failed diligence on OpenAI's board
“I don't think a lot of people are recognizing like he like hit a Hail Mary and he was Screwed. And like, frankly, I'm surprised that Microsoft and Sequoia and Thrive, like didn't do more board diligence when they were investing all this money to figure out lik…”
Jessica Lessin: Big Tech agreed to alert government when training AI models
“Meanwhile, Secretary Raimondo is telling me that all the big tech companies, OpenAI, Meta, Google, and so forth, are cooperating, are, and down to the level of agreeing to tell the government when they're running their next model.”
Morin: OpenAI DevDay is the best launch since Facebook Platform
“But I think that you also have to give OpenAI serious credit for being in just absolute beast mode right now. Like this is one of, I think the most impressive developer platform launches. Since maybe Facebook platform, if I do say so myself.”
Sam Lessin: OpenAI's push for regulation is an incumbent lock-in trick
“I think it's, like, been a cute trick that a bunch of the incumbents to date, and then we'll call out OpenAI, for instance, has been saying, oh, we're the good guys, regulate AI, and you're like, yeah, like, of course, like, that trick is a little old, guys, r…”
Lessin: Microsoft Is Developing Cheaper In-House AI to Avoid OpenAI Costs
“So Microsoft, who's ten billion dollars into open AI, gave it exclusive access to their IP, has decided in part because it's too expensive to run, they're going to build a cheaper functional enough version to have to power some of these applications.”
Suds: Invest in whatever extends OpenAI and Anthropic revenue, avoid app layer
“My general working thesis was like, you should probably just invest in anything that Enables or extends like Anthropic and OpenAI's revenue. And then the hedge to that would be open source. So just go over there and the app layer stuff by and large do not enab…”
OpenAI's upcoming hardware device will not disrupt the iPhone
“And I don't think it's going to be disrupted by open AI's puck or whatever they're launching.”
OpenAI will never release a consumer hardware device
“I don't think there ever will be an open AI hardware device.”
OpenAI pushed out its head of revenue overseeing enterprise corporate business
“They pushed out their head of revenue, the woman who's doing the corporate business and just replaced her.”
Brit Morin: Anthropic and OpenAI valuations are unwarranted
“None of them are real companies that warrant the valuations they have.”
Dave Morin: Real-time streaming AI voice will supersede meeting transcripts
“I don't think that's actually how the future looks. I think the future looks much more real time and that you're just gonna be like streaming, you know, in and out of these things in real time. And they'll like tell you things and it's gonna look much more lik…”
Sam Lessin: Jony Ive's brand makes his OpenAI acquisition effectively free
“The Johnny Ive acquisition thing, especially if it just turns out to be an Alexa, is like particularly interesting for this, because it was one step along that line of like, oh, I'm buying, I'm gonna pay a ton of money for Johnny Ive, because it will make rais…”
Anthropic Stole OpenAI's Original Fear-Based Fundraising Strategy
“Anthropic stole the fear message from them. Like, they out, Anthropic outfeared them, which was originally OpenAI's strategy.”
Lessin: OpenAI won Elon Musk lawsuit because jury ruled he filed late
“We should mention, everyone knows, that OpenAI won a decisive victory in their Elon Musk trial. That came down to the jury deciding Elon was too late to file this lawsuit.”
Dave Morin: Enterprise Teams Contradict AI Labs' Two-Year AGI Timelines
“The entire message is that AI is so good. It's going to AGI and take care of itself. And if that's true, then starting a deployment company is the worst idea you could possibly have because it will be deploying itself In two years.”
Dave Morin: Microsoft's OpenAI bet was a great trade, not product strategy
“This was a great financial strategy for Microsoft. It wasn't a great product strategy. They like executed a massive trade. The trade looks like it's working out, but the product outcome that they wanted or that they perhaps needed hasn't materialized”
Brit Morin: Sam Altman offers enterprises two free months of Codex tokens
“Sam Altman today tweeted that enterprises who want to move to Codex can get their first two months of tokens free.”
Morin: OpenAI Engineers Contribute as OpenClaw Maintainers
“They have actually a couple of people contributing from the open AI engineering team have been contributing as open source maintainers. Obviously Peter is the largest contributor and he technically works at open AI.”
Lessin: OpenAI and Anthropic represent half of major cloud deal backlogs
“And then we charted of the, we just had earnings, of the backlogs in deals for Microsoft, Oracle, Google, and Amazon, what percentage are OpenAI's commitment and Anthropi's commitment? It's together, they're about half, ok?”
Sam Lessin predicts The New York Times' lawsuit against OpenAI will fail
“That lawsuit, I just can't imagine that OpenAI, the cat's out of the bag. It's just not going to happen, that that, that lawsuit will be successful.”
Lessin: Musk vs. OpenAI trial scheduled to start Monday over for-profit conversion
“This upcoming Monday is scheduled to be the start of the Elon Musk vs. OpenAI trial. The central question of which was, did OpenAI have the right to convert from a nonprofit to a for-profit, and what should Elon be compensated as well, having been one of the b…”
Lessin: Rights holders would have blocked OpenAI's scraping if for-profit plans were known
“I think almost every rights holder, right, would have said no effing way if it had been transparent what they were going to do, and they were going to become a for-profit, whereas everyone kind of was like, okay, and looked the other way.”
Jessica Lessin: OpenAI raised $3B from retail investors in latest round
“OpenAI's Monster Fundraising, complete with three billion dollars in raises from retail investors.”
Lessin: OpenAI is pivoting to enterprise and coding, cutting side quests
“Following the information's reporting about the code red
Several months ago in terms of competing with then Gemini, they're sort of entering this another strategic review period where they're going to focus on enterprise and coding and get rid of what they cal…”
Sam Lessin: OpenAI is the most distracted company in history
“This is honestly the most distracted company in the history of the world.”
Dave Morin: Winning enterprise healthcare matters more to OpenAI than Google
“I think it matters more to OpenAI to get that enterprise business than it does to Google.”
Lessin: The Information broke that Amazon may invest $10B in OpenAI
“Did you guys see, by the way, the information breaking this week that Amazon is in talks to invest ten billion dollars in OpenAI?”
Lessin: OpenAI is currently overvalued, but will not go to zero
“Well, I guess I'd short it beyond, like, to some degree, you know, below its current valuation. Yes. But I would not, it's not going to zero. It's not going to zero.”
Jessica Lessin: ChatGPT's memory feature is a liability
“I also think the chat GPT memory is a liability.”
Lessin: Heavy ChatGPT users cost OpenAI more in compute than subscriptions pay
“To be clear, you actually cost Sam Altman money. You didn't pay Sam Altman.”
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.”
Jessica Lessin says Apple and Google partnered for Gemini to power Siri
“Google and Apple are doing a Siri deal, so Siri is going to be powered by Gemini, essentially, until, until Apple, quote, figures it out, but it, there seems to be this pattern here of Apple realizing Google is, is pretty good at this stuff, and they'll be pre…”
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 …”