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 3,487 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 88 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: Software sales is ending and software companies no longer exist
“Like, I think we're just at the end of software sales, right? Is the way to think about it. And like, that means you focus on community, you focus on network effects. There are things that are valuable, but like, there's no such thing as a software company any…”
Dave Morin: AI will eliminate traditional user interfaces within five years
“Yeah, just what I'm saying is that like, if you're investing in something now or you're an entrepreneur starting something like you're what you're shooting a rocket that lands five years from now. Right. And so five years from now, like this is going to be cra…”
Lessin: China Instructed Tech Industry Not to Buy Nvidia H200 Chips
“Overnight breaking from the information China has said to its tech industry, no H 200. You may not buy H 200.”
Sam Lessin: If California wealth tax passes, Gavin Newsom cannot be President
“Even like, I think Gavin Newsom understands that it's a, it's also, by the way, terrible for his political career, because if this passes, he will never be president, which is clearly what he wants.”
Sam Lessin: Software is no longer a differentiator, just consumable media
“If you're a founder, software is no longer any sort of differentiator. Software is just like consumable. Like, it's just like, it's like a piece of media. Like, it's not like you can't build a software company.”
Sam Lessin predicts most will choose AI companions over real relationships
“Imagine in the near future, you can have an AI driven girlfriend, right? Boyfriend, companion, whatever. That is exactly what you want, but digital. Always available, says that it does all the things you want, like is like a perfect companion in every possible…”
Brit Morin: 85% of Grok Images Are Nude or Sex-Related
“Grok, no, Grok, the AI platform, not the one that offline was part of, who just raised more money, by the way. 85% of the images that it's producing right now are nude or sex related.”
Morin: Roblox is causing enormous damage to children worldwide
“Roblox, which I think is actually continuing to do enormous damage to children worldwide.”
Dave Morin predicts AI-generated UIs will threaten traditional SaaS business models
“And I think we're sort of rapidly moving towards a world where the UI, which largely was the entire business model of SAS for the last 10 years, most of SAS was like, I'm going to build this complex UX on top of a Postgres database, then I'm going to sell it t…”
Lessin: 50 percent chance Altman's Code Red memo is strategic misdirection
“I kind of think there's a 50% chance Sam Altman wrote that memo so people would not know their actual strategy.”
Lessin: Marc Benioff only cares about winning sales, not Salesforce product quality
“Well, one, I think Benioff loves sales. Like, he loves winning. He's just a winning, so like, he doesn't care what he sells. He doesn't care about the product quality. He just wants to win.”
Lessin predicts neither the US nor China will win the AI race
“It's also completely true that the U.S. And China are, one is not gonna best the other in this war. I just don't, I, there's just no doubt.”
Lessin: Elon Musk is our generation's greatest marketer, not a great technologist
“He, I've always said this, and I mean it derogatorily and also not, is like, he's not a great technologist. He is the greatest marketer of our generation, right?”
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…”
Sam Lessin: AI memory does not create real user lock-in
“I think when you get down to the practicality of how people use these things and their actual preferences or whatever, it just doesn't play out that way. It's not as much of a lock-in as you want it to be.”
Lessin predicts a winner-take-all AI lockout outcome will not happen
“Well then to the point is there's no lock-in, right? It's like, it's always, the only thing that changes it, which is, was the original pitch, was that we're so close to this, like, game over nuclear style outcome that someone will get to first, and then there…”
Sam Lessin: This year is make-or-break for OpenAI
“I honestly think this is going to be, this year is like an absolute make or break for if open AI is a thing or not is my view.”
Jessica Lessin: Consumer subscriptions won't be OpenAI's business
“Now open AI is getting big traction on the business side too, but consumer subscriptions are not going to be the business.”
Sam Lessin: ChatGPT will be a branding blip, not the Kleenex of AI
“I actually think there's a very strong argument you're making right now, which I agree with, that actually, like, ChatGPT will be, is not Kleenex. And like this will be a like branding blip in history.”
Sam Lessin: Negotiating term sheets in a sauna gives edge over founders
“I have negotiated one term sheet in a sauna with the founder. It's a great idea, because, especially if they're not used to the sauna, because you have the edge. You can just keep cranking it up.”
Lessin: Balaji's bottoms-up community journalism vision will fail over legal defense costs
“This is one of the really strong anti-substack theories, which is like, you can't as an individual support these lawsuits. Like you can't afford it. It's actually quite expensive to be in the news gathering. It isn't quite risky. And so if you're going to do i…”
Sam Lessin calls YC's product-market fit mantra an antiquated story
“You know, the YC story of all you need is product market fit and move on. I think it's just like a very antiquated story.”
Sam Lessin: OpenAI's Sora is not going to work
“That, like, that was, like I mean, I understand it's still probably number one in the free app store or something, but, like, it's not gonna work.”
Morin: Roblox does not take child safety seriously
“And I just don't think they take kids safety seriously.”
Sam Lessin: US AI data center boom mirrors China's housing bubble
“This is our, from my perspective, the cynical take, which I think there's some validity to, is really what we're doing is the exact equivalent of the Chinese housing bubble, just our version of it, right? Which is like the Chinese needed to keep their economy …”
Sam Lessin: Capital invested in AI infrastructure will struggle to see long-term returns
“If the markets are ultimately rational, it's very hard to see how capital gets rewarded on this long term.”
Sam Lessin: Selling proprietary data to LLM providers for pennies is stupid
“All of the people who are, you know, some version of like, how do I sell data or give data or give context to chat GPT and get paid cents on the dollar are stupid, right? And like, it should be exactly the way around, which is you just use them as commodity ar…”
Sam Lessin: Current LLM applications are not viable standalone businesses
“Like when you back it all out, you're like, none of these are actually good businesses. They're kind of like product and growth shims towards something, but no one can really tell you what that something exactly is, right? Or how it's going to work as a busine…”
Sam Lessin: The narrative of scaling LLMs with more compute is dead
“Like, I don't think anyone thinks that just expanding LLMs and the current technology was just like, there was an era of people were just like, just throw two orders of magnitude, more compute at it, and the game is over. And like, I just, I think that narrati…”
Lessin: Musk and Altman clash because they share the exact same skillset
“There's no one who can raise, who can do it on the scale of Elon and Sam right now, or at least demonstrating it. And so I think that's actually the real point of threat or the reason that there's probably so much animosity is like, look, they're just too simi…”
Lessin: Nobody in tech believes LLMs have long-term defensibility
“I don't think anyone currently believes there's any sort of like long-term defensible important thing specifically around LLMs.”
Lessin: Only government intervention can stop Musk controlling planetary communications
“The only thing that will prevent Elon from controlling all of planetary communications is the government.”
Lessin: Washington won't break up Big Tech because they're trading partners
“They're not going to break up the big tech companies because like, that's like the whole point is like they're trading partners of the big tech companies. They want to see them Win, in a lot of ways, on a global basis”
Sam Lessin: Garry Tan Warned YC Founders Against Slow's Etiquette School
“Gary Tan, who runs YC, is a response to this, which is, PSA, do not attend SLO's Etiquette School”
Lessin: Jony Ive and Sam Altman's secret hardware device will fail
“That's definitely what's gonna happen.”
Lessin: OpenAI pushes 'Apple is doomed' narrative to raise $1 trillion
“You know, it is very easy for the people who need to raise a trillion dollars, by the way, so they need to have a narrative of why Apple is doomed, aka OpenAI, right?”
Lessin: Incubator methods trap founders into a decade working on disliked problems
“There are all these smart people in teams that like follow this like incubatory, listen to your customer, customer research, like iterate, solve a problem for demo day. And what they don't realize is they're signing themselves up for like a decade of working o…”
Vinod Khosla: The majority of current AI venture investing will fail
“Bottom line, bargain hunting will be a poor bet in AI, but firms putting money to work who invest in all high valuations indiscriminately will do poorly, and that is the majority of the investing that is happening.”
Lessin: Bankers should price IPOs on memetic hype, not fundamental value
“The problem is bankers are still just pricing based on what things are worth when they should be pricing based on, like, mimetic warfare and, like, community shit to get the bump and let the degens pay the price, right, for their silliness.”
Dave Morin: Private companies should be required to IPO at $10B or $100B valuation
“There should be actually a threshold at which you're required to go public. And it, I mean, it seems like a hundred billion dollar valuation is a reasonable take on that. Ten billion might even be reasonable, but it's just a little bit I think unfortunate that…”
Lessin: AI is an adversarial war consuming resources with no net value
“The entire thing with AI is it's a great way to sink money and power and compute into a war with itself that produces no value.”
Jessica Lessin: Bret Taylor's AGI optimism is just OpenAI fiduciary duty
“This is the part of the conversation where he does his fiduciary duty as the board chair of open AI. That's what that sentence is, right?”