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: Stripe has no interest in going public
“I would go super under on Stripe going out. Those guys are too smart. They have a totally different plan. They have no interest in the public market. And there's no point to them in going public. There's plenty of liquidity in their currency.”
Dave Morin claims Meta has absolutely no consumer AI product
“Meta has no AI product. There's literally no product. Like none of us on this, none of us here use a Meta AI product. Like they're, the product literally doesn't exist.”
Dave Morin: AI Researcher Defections Prove AGI Is Not Imminent
“These guys jumping ship proves it actually. Right? Like if they were so sure that they were on the path to AGI or super intelligence or whatever we're going to call it this week, they would have stayed with the team and the system that they were already workin…”
Sam Lessin predicts big tech wins AI by cash-hoarding elite researchers
“The big companies win, which has been my talk track on this forever, which is like, you know, again, it's like playing Warcraft, too. As long as your cash balance keeps going up, and even better, when you hire super fancy researchers, the market rewards you an…”
Sam Lessin: Tesla's trillion-dollar valuation is transparently ridiculous
“Like, the thing that's kind of wild to me though, and all this stuff is like, it's somehow still like trading as a trillion dollar company. Like, it's like, it's ridiculous, right? The whole thing, right? And like, it's transparently ridiculous.”
Britt Morin: Superintelligence is coming within five to seven years
“I mean, superintelligence is coming in the next five to seven years.”
Sam Lessin: Google and Meta will beat OpenAI using their cash engines
“And like, that's why I think ultimately, like, the people like Google and Facebook do win, because like, they have a money making machine that regenerates the money. And so the money is free for them. Whereas like, if you're open AI, and you have to raise it, …”
Dave Morin: Meta lacks a consumer AI product to compete with ChatGPT
“I think that's the real question here is that can they build a product that can compete? Cause right now they don't have one. And so they have to figure out how to use yesterday's ad dollars to fund the creation of a new product.”
Yakovenko: Crypto Will Cap Around 100M High-Spending Users, Not 8 Billion
“I think there is just a set of users that are kind of heavy users, and that might be a limited, that's not going to be eight billion people. I don't know how big that set is, but it could be like A hundred million. Right now, that sounds like a small fraction …”
Lessin: Knowledge workers unable to build AI applications are bad at jobs
“If you can't, like, build applications with AI to do your own job better, you just are not good at your job anymore.”
Sam Lessin predicts that 99% of resumes will be fake by 2028
“I bet it's going to be like 99%. That's how STEM works.”
Sam Lessin: AI will push society toward closed human-based networks
“You have to go back to human based networks, because you can't trust anything you see or anything you're sent from an unvalidated source, right? So you end up with a very Going back to a more structured society versus a more open society because of AI.”
Dave Morin: Meta has virtually shipped no AI products
“Meta's effectively not shipped good fundamental products, and they have not shipped, I mean, they virtually shipped no AI products.”
Lessin: AI drives margins to zero, threatening capitalism's structural profit model
“Capitalism tends towards efficiency, but that's the whole beauty of it, but like requires structural inefficiency to profit, right? If there's no structural inefficiency, there's no profit, right? Which is why people talk about how AI is communist and, you kno…”
OpenAI considered an antitrust complaint against Microsoft, WSJ reported
“The journal reported that OpenAI had considered an antitrust complaint against Microsoft.”
Morin: Data labeling has literally nothing to do with building AGI
“I mean, I get that it's like data quality in the age of LLMs is very valuable. But again, this has nothing to do with building AGI, like literally nothing.”
Morin: Early research proves synthetic data cannot effectively train AI models
“Yeah, I mean, that goes back to that first research paper that came out right after ChatGPT launched, which basically said you can't create Fake data for training models. It just doesn't work, and so there was, like, this very early paper that effectively told…”
Lessin: Generative AI Will Benefit OnlyFans Rather Than Disrupt It
“The other thing is people are short only fans because they have AI Google Gaga glasses on and they're like, this is going away because it's all wrong. Like that completely misunderstands. It's like literally the opposite. Like AI is amazing for only fans.”
Lessin: Sam Altman Sells Worldcoin as a Fix for His Fake Content
“Well, same moment, I think is thematically correct and just annoying, but like, I think it's like, it's one of those things where you're like, okay, I'm a simultaneously going to massively accelerate the problem of fake things on the internet. And then also at…”
Morin: US Officials Downloaded Founder's Phone to Scan for Anti-Trump Sentiment
“You and I both know that we had a founder Who's from Australia that went to renew his visa and had to plug his phone into a American computer with the I don't know which department, I guess it would be the state department. His phone, all the content in his ph…”
Lessin: Foundation AI models will not become good, sustainable businesses
“Like I've actually come out of this exercise more cynical even than I was a month ago. Right. Or even a few weeks ago that any of these are going to be good, sustainable businesses, despite the fact it's clearly going to be everywhere in the air.”
Lessin: Traditional SaaS business models are dead because of AI
“They're like, I totally buy the like SaaS is dead story.”
Lessin: AI is generally not a good seed investment opportunity
“I mean, that's obviously my pattern, which is, like, AI broadly is, like, not a good seed investment. It's an opportunity full stop, right?”
Dave Morin: Search is dying as query volumes drop 45% to 50%
“I think it's okay to actually say search is dying. I've seen enough data in the last two or three weeks that suggests this is the case that it's actually, I mean, we're not talking about little two percent dips. We're talking about 45, 50% dips. Like these are…”
Dave Morin: The S&P 500 outperforms almost all venture capital funds
“If you've got an incremental dollar, putting it into the S into an S and P 500 index fund for the most part performs better than almost all of the venture capital asset class.”
Sam Lessin: AI will be sprinkled everywhere and not disrupt tech broadly
“I honestly think what we're going to ultimately find is AI just gets sprinkled in everything. It's not that disruptive to the overall system.”
Lessin: Mira Murati Seeks Board Votes Equal to All Others Plus One
“Here's how Mira says she's doing it in her company, according to conversations with investors. She is seeking The number of board votes that is equal to every other board member plus one.”
Jessica Lessin: Publishers must build AI tools and never license proprietary data
“Publishers have to build it themselves, and in no way, shape, or form should be turning that data over.”
Sam Lessin: Digital entertainment economy will collapse to zero value under AI
“The entertainment economy has got to go to zero, right? It's just an AI jerk off feed. It's going to be highly personalized, like whatever, like there's going to be no, there's no, there's, it's not like, I can't, I just don't imagine a world where there's any…”
Sam Lessin: Tesla is an overpriced option on robotics and self-driving
“All Tesla is, is a very overpriced option on, like, robotic infinity self-driving robots, right?”
Coles says Elon Musk is the wrong person to lead government cuts
“Putting him in charge of just cutting everything willy nilly, even if there are many places in government, which I think a lot of people would agree need to be cut. And certainly there have been people advocating, you know, getting into the deep bureaucracy. W…”
Coles says Musk plans to leave Washington role in 2-3 months
“Well, what he said was that he was planning to leave in two to In two to three months, his work would be done.”
Coles: Cozying up to Trump does not protect tech CEOs
“Cozying up to him doesn't appear to save you from anything. If anything, it actually makes them think you're weak.”
Coles: Howard Lutnick told people he hired and directs Elon Musk
“But we have a very good story in it this week about Howard Lutnick telling people that in fact, he hired Elon and he told Elon what to do.”
Coles: Netflix and Spotify insiders say Meghan Markle avoids real work
“At least the feedback I heard from people at Netflix and certainly at Spotify was that she sort of pretends to do this, but actually she's not really interested in the work of it.”
Sam Lessin: Masayoshi Son's OpenAI investment is the signal to sell
“When Masa buys, you sell the fuck out, right? And like, this would be the moment.”
Lessin: The X and xAI merger mimics the AOL Time Warner deal
“It's basically AOL Time Warner. If Time Warner had a shitload of debt and like the upshot is, is like the cheap money right now is for the AI thing.”
Lessin: AI startups buying physical assets with cheap capital will end terribly
“And so because they have cheap money, they're buying all these like real assets with super cheap money. And That's gonna work out terribly for most investors.”
Lessin: Ex-Facebook executives join OpenAI chasing growth highs, not business quality
“So there's a pattern matching of all these exacts informed people going over there, which has absolutely nothing to do with like actually the quality of the business. Right. But it's purely about chasing that experience again at all costs, which is why you see…”
Morin: ChatGPT's defensible moat will be user memory and personal data
“The thing that ChatGPT is becoming and continues to get better at is memory. And just like we've seen at Apple, Dropbox, like many places where data is a moat, like...”
Sam Lessin: OpenAI will not become one of tech's pantheon companies
“I wouldn't be surprised if the number go up, get to run up higher, but I don't think it's fundamentally going to like be in the pantheon of important companies.”
Sam Lessin: ChatGPT is easily replaceable by four identical alternatives
“If it went away tomorrow, there's like four others that are basically the same thing.”
Lessin: The generative AI infrastructure boom is ZIRP's final gasp
“This is like the last death knell of Zerp where people are like, fuck, we need to stuff a bunch of cash somewhere. Right. Ideally with downside protection, which is nice because we're buying like fucking real estate and servers and power.”
Brit Morin: Deel espionage was coordinated via Telegram with 'The Watchman'
“Also, they had a telegram channel where they were discussing the payments, and.
Wait, who was?
Okay, it's Keith, it's the spy.
How much did they pay for the telegram, Brett?
I know, telegram, not signal.
It's the spy, it's the CEO, and then there's a third per…”
Jessica Lessin: Elon Musk backed Trump partly over Tesla's struggles in China
“If we unwind the clock and ask ourselves why Elon Musk decided to endorse and help elect Donald Trump, I actually think the fate of Tesla in China was a not insignificant part of the equation, and what was happening at the time was the Chinese government hadn'…”
Sam Lessin: Startups built using automated AI generator tools lack enterprise value
“What's certainly not valuable is the company you can make with a company making company making machine.”
Sam Lessin: Getting humans to Mars during Trump's administration is impossible
“Everyone, you know, you're up there applauding like this, like window, we're going to get to Mars in Trump's administration. And it's absolute horseshit. Like we, like there aren't even window launch windows open for that to happen.”