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 613 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 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
Gavin Newsom called for Harvard president's resignation over Trump deal
“Gavin Newsom just out of the blue, just like called for the resignation of the president of Harvard for doing like any deal with Donald Trump.”
Dave Morin: OpenAI was forced to extend its recent funding round
“We've got OpenAI having to do an extension of their round.”
Jessica Lessin: Anthropic reports 60% direct-sales gross margins heading toward 70%
“Anthropic recently said its gross profit margin from selling AI models and clawed directly to customers was 60% and moving towards 70, but this doesn't account for a lot of other shit.”
Yakovenko: Most meme coins launch on Solana, peaking over 100k daily
“At this point, most, but I think Ethereum has probably the most valuable ones, but by sheer number of launches per day, I think it's like, was peak over a 100,000 per day. I think it may be like 20 to 50,000 right now.”
Lessin: OpenAI issued an internal panic memo over Meta poaching talent
“Then this memo came out of OpenAI saying, like, our house has been raided. We have to reconsider all these things. I also hear they have a week-long vacation this week, pre-planned at OpenAI.”
Brit Morin: LinkedIn gets 11,000 applications per minute; 25% fake by 2028
“11,000 applications are Happening on LinkedIn every minute. And the estimate is that by 20, 28, one in four resumes is, is going to be fake.”
Jessica Lessin: Tesla's Austin robotaxis require safety drivers in passenger seats
“There is a safety driver in the passenger seat.”
Lessin: Scale AI competitors are already generating over $1 billion in revenue
“There are other people who do things that are very similar that do more than a billion.”
Lessin: Google is offering buyouts to its search and advertising employees
“Another big story we had this week that kind of went under the radar because there's so much news is that Google's offering buyouts to employees in search and ads.”
Sam Lessin: OnlyFans Is Up for Sale
“Nonetheless, OnlyFans, the story is up for sale and there's some really interesting stuff about it.”
Lessin: Apple Scrapped Satellite Internet Project to Protect Carrier Relations
“Our new, but was previously at the information reporter, Aaron Tilly, and one of our reporters out of Hong Kong, Wayne Ma, published this really interesting in-depth piece about Apple's ambitions in satellite internet, including a lot of details about Project …”
Morin: Hailey Bieber's Rhode sold to e.l.f. Cosmetics for $1B
“So Hailey Bieber's company just sold today to elf cosmetics for a billion dollars.”
Brit Morin: OpenAI acquired AI coding startup Windsurf for $3B
“Windsurf obviously got sold to OpenAI for three billion.”
Lessin: Courts Likely to Bar Apple-Google Search Deal in Current Form
“The courts are likely to say that the Apple Google search deal cannot continue in its current form for antitrust reasons.”
Lessin: Coatue launches $1B permanent capital fund with a $50K minimum
“Led by Philippe, they announced something that is, I think a bill, it's anchored with a billion dollars from Bezos and Michael Dell. But the premise is that they will accept investments for the relatively low capital amount of 50 K, which is traditionally a mu…”
Dave Morin: Seed to Series A Graduation Rate Down Over 25%
“If you look at the number of series A's graduating from the seed ecosystem, it's down like over 25% now.”
Jessica Lessin: Gemini's Daily Active Users Are Three Quarters of ChatGPT's
“I mean, if you look at daily actives, Gemini is about three quarters of ChatGPT at the moment.”
Lessin: Enterprises are pausing AI spend increases due to DeepSeek efficiency
“We've done a lot of reporting at the information about businesses that sort of say, you know, we're not increasing our spend right now because we're getting efficiency gains from deep seek and all these other models.”
Coles: X successfully operates on far less spending and fewer staff
“And the truth is that they have been able to run Twitter at much less than they were spending on it with far fewer employees. It's still up and running and it's become You know, the water cooler place again.”
Lessin: Unlike AI, Facebook was massively profitable from its early days
“Facebook was massively profitable. From the early days, it was always almost zero cost from a user perspective. It was a great business from the very early days.”
Jessica Lessin: OpenAI is on track to hit $12.7B in 2025 revenue
“I mean, we reported their revenue target this year is 12.7 billion up from four last year, and they're on track to hit it.”
Ben Smith: The Atlantic's Signal chat scoop will not win a Pulitzer
“No, and Pulitzer only goes to things that look like newspaper articles from the 19 seventies.”
Jessica Lessin: Amazon prices Trainium 2 chips at 75% discount to Nvidia
“We moved the company's stock price earlier in the week by reporting that Amazon was undercutting, trying to undercut NVIDIA's latest project products with their second generation Tranium chip. At 75% off.”
Lessin: Larry Page's Dynatomics Uses AI to Manufacture Flying Cars
“Larry's new company called Dynatomics, which is a very research focused effort to use AI to build flying cars as a first case for how you can go from models to manufacturing.”
Britt Morin: Discord will pursue an IPO in 2025
“Discord is now going to go out for an IPO this year.”
Dave Morin: Figure AI's valuation increased 15x in one year
“I believe it's called figure AI and these guys are up, you know, 15 X in a year.”
Britt Morin: Roughly 40% of people expect to stop using Google
“It's something like 40% of people think they're going to stop using Google the next two years.”
DOGE Didn't Overhaul Treasury, Just Filled Existing Tags, Says Lessin
“What they had done is they hadn't overhauled the treasury system for payments. They had convinced the treasury to actually fill in the tags for the payments it was already making. There were already forms in the fields that they were not filling out. So basica…”
Jelly Jelly Token Hit $200M Market Cap in Six Hours, Says Lessin
“We launched Jelly Jelly, right? Which as pod listeners remember, went in six hours from zero to like over a two hundred million dollar market cap on half a billion in volume, which was all these crazy people playing this game.”
Sam Lessin: Meta Engineered Smart Glasses to Brick If Recording LED Disabled
“They spent so much time trying to figure out how to engineer it so that it would brick it if you try to disable that LED for exactly that reason. Like it's a wild, the amount of engineering that went into that, like, make sure the LED cannot be disabled for ex…”
Dave Morin: OpenAI Study Shows LLMs Complete Only ~40% of Upwork Tasks
“OpenAI put out a new study about software engineering tasks and whether or not LLMs can pick up random software engineering tasks off Upwork, and what percentage of them can they complete? And it's only something like 40%, and crucially, LLMs can fix bugs, but…”
Brit Morin: Meta Sells Two Million Smart Glasses, Ramping to Ten Million
“News of the week also, and a tangent is that Meta has now sold two million smart glasses and they're ramping up their production to push ten million this year.”
Lessin: OpenAI's board decided to reject Musk's $97B bid
“What we did also break was that the board had decided to reject the offer.”
Lessin: The TikTok deal will resemble an expanded Project Texas, not a sale.
“Yeah, but I don't think it'll be a straight sale. I think it will be something that kind of resembles this Project Texas data deal they did with Oracle, but more than that”
Jessica Lessin: Federal payments to Politico were subscriptions, not subsidies or grants
“One of these payments was to Politico, the news organization, and so instantly the narrative was that the government was subsidizing, giving grants, giving money, to Politico... So what it was, Dave, is that this agency bought a product from Politico through t…”
Morin: DOGE will release a metrics dashboard to the public
“At least what I'm reading from what's going on, it's that they're going in there to get metrics implemented into a dashboard that at some point they're going to show to the American people. And so you will get the transparency.”
Sam Lessin: There Is Zero Percent Chance MrBeast Buys TikTok
“Oh, I was short that. There's a zero percent chance.”
Dave Morin: DOJ artificially narrowed Apple smartphone market to claim a monopoly
“You can't claim that I just on one simple piece of data, which is that Apple doesn't even have a monopoly position in the smartphone market. You know, and like the lawsuit had to reduce the scope of the smartphone market to like just the expensive part of the …”
Dave Morin: Apple denies developers direct access to on-device models
“At the same time, the one thing that I was disappointed about is that you cannot access these local models directly. It's something that a lot of folks aren't talking about. They've put a pretty intense wrapper around it, at least on the developer front. You k…”
Rauch: Copilot gave Microsoft conviction in OpenAI after broader bets
“I was interviewing Nat Freeman today for our internal Vercel podcast today, and he was talking about how much conviction Microsoft got into OpenAI because of the effectiveness of Copilot. Like when Satya saw Copilot, when they were doing the initial iterations…”
Sam Lessin: Sam Altman claimed AGI was 14 months away in 2023
“I mean, I, you know, you have people like Sam Altman on stage, you know, what now, 18 months ago saying we were 14 months from AGI and all the jobs were over, right?”
Dave Morin: College football and basketball teams will go private in 2025
“2025 will be the year that we see college football and basketball teams going private.”
Brit Morin: Waymo holds 22 percent of SF rides, surpassing Lyft
“Now Waymo has 22% market share of all taxi journeys in San Francisco, which exceeds the human driver company, or sorry, the human driver company Lyft was the headline.”
Lessin claims OpenAI is actively working on developing a web browser
“OpenAI is working on developing a browser”
Morin: Voice AI will reliably book restaurant reservations within five years
“Five years from now, you will, Sam.”
Vascellaro: Annual greenlit TV shows fell from 650 to roughly half
“There was 650 TV shows that were greenlit last year, and now there's maybe half.”
Brit Morin: Martha Stewart Pioneered Modern Content-to-Commerce, Unlike Oprah
“Oprah and Martha were in a similar cohort, but Martha did products. Oprah never did products. And so Martha went from content to commerce. And I think that was like one of the first content to commerce brands of the modern generation.”