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 384 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
Lessin: Meta flipped its Ray-Ban companion app into an AI chatbot
“What they did is they took the vision app, they renamed it, they threw a gatekeeper up and flipped it into the chat app. And then it also has the connected glasses in it as in the background.”
Brit Morin: Amazon made a last-minute bid to acquire TikTok
“But Amazon just put in a last minute bid.”
Brit Morin claims Pepsi recently acquired soda startup Poppi for $2 billion
“Pepsi just bought Poppy for two billion dollars.”
Dave Morin: Four Seasons plans to roll out Aescape massage robots
“Apparently Four Seasons is gonna roll it out.”
Brit Morin: Jack Dorsey Was One of 1,300 Cypherpunks in 1996
“He was one of the original, one of 1300 cypher funks in 1996.”
Lessin: Journalist Rob Guth ghostwrote Bill Gates' official memoir trilogy.
“I should shout out that my good friend, one of my mentors, Rob Guth, was the writer behind the book. So Bill has his name on it. Pretty sure Rob wrote the book, but that's the partnership there.”
Morin: Trump coin on Solana processed $40 billion in transactions
“The Trump coin, which was built on Solana was, you know, doing forty billion in transactions.”
Jessica Lessin: Circle wants to go public and still cannot
“Look, there's a big backlog of companies like Circle, You know, one of the more as established crypto companies that wants to go public and still can't.”
Morin: DeepSeek's paper unifies fine-tuning and optimization in one RL equation
“They do have this one part of one of the papers that talks about a unified paradigm around reinforcement learning, which is pretty cool. They've got a Very beautiful piece of math that kind of brings together all these different fine tuning and optimization te…”
Tech CEOs were seated directly behind Trump's family at the inauguration
“Behind President Trump's family was not his cabinet members or, you know, people who have served in his administrations in the past, but the CEO of every major large tech company, except Microsoft, which we could circle back to Bezos, Zuckerberg, Pichai, Elon.”
Jessica Lessin: The Information reported TikTok plans to pull US service
“The information reported last night that TikTok will pull it for US users if that day comes.”
Sam Lessin: NYC traffic is down roughly 7% under congestion pricing
“To be clear, it's, I think what I saw somewhere pass through some feed is like, it's something like down seven percent, but that seven percent is an enormous amount in terms of the marginal impact.”
Lessin: OpenAI's revenue will ultimately come mostly from businesses
“Like the bulk of OpenAI's revenue, I believe will ultimately like come from businesses”
Brit Morin: X's monthly active users and engagement declined in 2024
“I'm looking at the numbers and their monthly actives have actually declined this year as has the engagement rate.”
Lessin: Some leading AI companies are losing $5 billion annually
“Some of these things are losing five billion dollars a year.”
Lessin: OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar floated an advertising business model
“I mean, you even saw this week, we saw Sarah Fryer, the CFO of OpenAI be like, maybe we'll do ads. And then there was a big reaction to that, right?”
Brit Morin: The Sora AI leak provoked intense creator backlash
“Sora got leaked, and all these creators and sort of, like, film-adjacent creative people got a look at it and got super pissed.”
Jessica Lessin: Elon Musk and Larry Page had a tremendous falling out
“Elon and Larry were quite close for some time and have had a tremendous falling out.”
Lessin: Google says 25 percent of its new code is AI-generated
“Google had the headline that it, 25% of the code written at the company is originated with AI and then checked by people.”
Dave Morin: VC deals dropped significantly quarter-over-quarter in Q3 2024
“Yeah, I mean, we also had a report this last week that venture capital deals are down pretty dramatically quarter over quarter, so it's not exactly true.”
Brit Morin: Waymo is testing autonomous driving on Highway 101
“They're going to go on the highways soon. They're already testing on the one-on-one.”
Sam Lessin: San Francisco schools are adopting Waymo drop-off rules
“Well, but we do know, we know of some schools in San Francisco that now have Waymo drop-off roles for the kids.”
Brit Morin: Mobile created companies like Uber, but no trillion-dollar companies
“Mobile was like the next wave. That produced companies like Uber with like a hundred and sixty billion dollars in value, but not like trillion dollar companies.”
Jessica Lessin: Instagram rolls out default-private teen accounts and AI verification
“Instagram has rolled out an array of new teen controls, probably the most significant of which is default setting teen apps to private, and some interesting approaches to age verification, including, I think, some AI”
Brit Morin: Amazon targets a 15% increase in individual contributors over managers
“And then the other change they're making is they're actually trying to increase the ratio of individual contributors to managers by 15% by the end of Q one, because they've gotten manager heavy.”
Jessica Lessin: The de minimis trade loophole exploited by Temu is closing
“The de minimis loophole that allowed Timu to ship such small orders to the U.S. Quite inexpensively without these extra tariffs or taxes or whatever they are, is going away”
Dave Morin: Acquired Live left Chase Center's arena mostly empty
“And I think it's interesting that the Chase Center was not even remotely full. Like, we had 6000 people or so that showed up. That's a place that can hold, what, 30, 40,000? And the, you know, the boxes were largely empty.”
Britt Morin: Most venture capitalists have never founded a company themselves
“Paul Graham does talk about the idea that a lot of founders are gaslit by their own VCs, right? And the problem with that is most VCs haven't been founders themselves.”
Brit Morin: Bridge rounds made up 42% of priced seed rounds in Q1 2024
“42% of all price seed rounds in Q one this year were bridge rounds.”
Brit Morin: Google's $20B search deal accounts for a quarter of Apple's services revenue
“Google paid Apple, twenty billion for the default search deal, and Apple's services division, which this revenue went into, generated eighty-five billion. So about a quarter of its services division is coming Directly from Google.”
Figma is valued at $12.5B with $700M in ARR
“Not made it through the twenty billion dollar Adobe acquisition is now being valued at 12 and a half. But from, you know, good firms, they have KOTU, General Catalyst, and their ARR's at seven hundred million now.”
Brit Morin: Hiring Olympians was Google's strategy back in the day
“This was the strategy at Google back in the day, too”
Brit Morin: AI drove four of the five biggest 1H tech acquisitions
“What are the top five biggest technology M&A deals in the U.S. From the first half of this year? And they range in value from seven billion to thirty-five billion. Four of the five are AI related deals.”
Morin: Apple's AI release lacks native access to local model APIs
“I was hoping actually that the Apple release would include Like native access to local APIs, but it doesn't which is unfortunate as I was like ready to write checks for social AI stuff”
Morin: Apple restricts developers from directly accessing its on-device AI models
“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 know, you can use t…”
Jessica Lessin: Humane will not sell for $1 billion
“I do not think it will sell for a billion dollars.”
Lessin: Truth Social heavily shorted with shares to borrow running out
“It was shorted so much that there was a danger of it going through the roof because there were out of shares.”
Jessica Lessin: Microsoft offered Sam Altman same deal as Inflection
“If Sam Altman hadn't gone back to OpenAI, this, he had a job offer to do exactly the same thing.”
Dave Morin notes the 2024 Super Bowl was the most-watched event since the moon landing
“The Super Bowl is the most watched live event since the moon landing.”
Julia Hartz notes over 75% of Gen Z report suffering from loneliness
“We also know that Gen Z is saying over 75% of them are saying they're suffering from loneliness.”
Brit Morin: Google shifted its focus to XR software in June 2023
“Google in June of twenty-twenty-three shifted the focus to XR software. So it's basically like creating Android for VR. And any hardware developers can incorporate XR into their own hardware as their own VR device.”
Morin: Meta Quest lacks Apple Vision Pro's advanced LiDAR mapping capabilities
“It can't do this. It doesn't have the same LiDAR capabilities, and nobody's talking about this.”
Sam Lessin: YouTube TV will surpass Dish subscribers by year-end
“YouTube will definitely have more subscribers than Dish by the next time we check in on this.”