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
Lessin: No company besides Meta is consistently making money on AI
“All I'm saying is like, until people are consistently making money on AI, which no one is other than Meta, It's just a very chaotic period.”
Sam Lessin: Nvidia Creates Little Real Value Powering Redundant AI Cycles
“Nvidia is a three trillion dollar company selling a machine that takes meaning and generates a bunch of noise around it, and then flips around and compresses back the noise to the meaning, and like, what have you done, right? Like, you've created no value, rig…”
Sam Lessin: Selling Proprietary AI Foundation Models Won't Be Profitable Long-Term
“So if you're slightly better at X, fine. You can make a tiny bit of money for six months being slightly better at X. There's just no way there's actually money in that business long-term.”
Dave Morin: Meta Cannot Be Taken Seriously as an Open-Source Advocate
“I think it's very hard to take meta seriously when they talk about open source, because they are a highly centralized system. That controls the rents that get paid to every single player in their ecosystem. And so when Meta says something like, we really belie…”
Sam Lessin: AUM is for losers, DPI is for winners
“AUM is a game of politics for losers. DPI is the game of winners. That's how it works. So you can coast by being a political AUM person for a while, but you have nothing to be proud of because all you are is a salesman of stories versus someone who delivers re…”
Morin: The Biden administration became extremely anti-technology
“Somewhere along the way, the Biden administration became extremely anti-technology.”
Sam Lessin: The 2024 Presidential Race Is Effectively Over for Democrats
“I just feel like this is over, right? Which I know is not what you're supposed to say, and, like, that helps purpose with town out and the whole nine yards, but, like, you know, Trump just had, like, one of the all-time ten-day periods ever, right?”
Sam Lessin: Musk uses robotics narrative to justify Tesla's high stock premium
“And then the Elon thing, I think, is a little bit, it's all that plus a special case, which is like, he needs a thing which isn't an incredibly competitive market to support the type of premium his stock is getting.”
Dave Morin: Culture has staged a wholesale rejection of VR headsets
“Like, I also think that there was a wholesale rejection, like a wholesale cultural rejection of this entire idea. Like, I think that people experience both the meta quest and the vision pro and they were just like, Hard no. I do not want this. Like, this is no…”
Lessin: The AI Wave Will Sink $1 Trillion to Create $300 Billion
“The cost is going to be a trillion dollars of capital sunk to create that three hundred billion dollars.”
Lessin: An AI market crash is almost inevitable
“There's almost an inevitable crash, even if you do believe that eventually value gets created.”
Gil: VCs Push Struggling Founders to Grind Because They Are Free Options
“Investors have a strong incentive for you to keep going because you're just an option once they put money in. And so if they get 50 cents on the dollar, they don't care, and they'd rather you just keep trying because you're just a free option. They already hav…”
Lessin: Seed Stage VCs Are Paid Unbelievably Well to Do Almost Nothing
“My view is seed investors get paid unbelievably well to do almost nothing. And like the trade is we get paid incredibly well when it works, but we lose money constantly. And like, that's completely fine.”
Gil: Data Linking Social Media to Teen Mental Health Issues Is Weak
“I think I tend to look at data for these sorts of things. And I think the data on a lot of these topics is pretty weak.”
Dave Morin: Social media causes irreparable harm to an entire generation
“I think the data is abundantly clear. The science is, like, pretty hard. It's like really good science, and the science says that I think we're doing irreparable harm to an entire generation, and that it's a national mental health emergency, and that we have t…”
Lessin: AI Girlfriends Will Replace Dating Apps and Destroy Human Relationships
“Like, wait until, like, a generation of men, it's not porn and Tinder, it's just, like, your perfect AI girlfriend companion, and, like, you destroy human relationships.”
Lessin: Technology Has No Value, Only Customers and Profits Do
“If you think about what companies are valuable, the technology is not valuable. The customers are valuable. The revenue, the profit is valuable.”
Khosla: Startups should ignore compute costs; AI software optimizations become worthless
“And my advice to all our startups is ignore the cost of compute. Because any assumption you make, any dollar you spend on optimizing your software will be worthless within the year.”
Khosla: Investing in startups building independent GPU cloud infrastructure is silly
“Beyond the model itself, and I think it's silly to invest in the cloud, people who are buying GPUs to build clouds.”
Lessin: Seed-stage AI investing is a fool's errand for venture capitalists
“I think most seed investors getting into AI are playing a fool's errand because it's not a place where one to three million dollars Really can move the needle in terms of value, in terms of what the game is.”
Khosla: Regulation ensures Europe will never participate in the tech industry again
“I think the Europeans, for example, have ensured they'll never participate in tech again. You know, they keep shooting themselves in the foot.”
Khosla: Marginalizing Muslims is the one thing that could slow India's economy
“Leaving a community of Muslims behind is such a bad idea. It's the one thing that can slow up a rapidly growing economy.”
Lessin: Frontier foundation AI models are great research projects, not great businesses
“Like what, it's a great research project. I don't see it being a great business personally.”
Dave Morin: Instagram Is a Train Wreck Impossible to Build On
“You know, like Instagram is an absolute train wreck right now. I don't know how you would build a business on this platform anymore.”
Dave Morin: Instagram Is a Declining Asset Meta Is Merely Harvesting
“You know, which to me suggests that this asset is, is now a declining asset. Like they're now in a position where they want to just harvest it, monetize it as much as possible while moving on to the next thing, which is probably threads fine.”
Jessica Lessin: Chatbots Are Not the Future of Consumer Media
“I, I'm making a call. Chatbots are not the future.”
Sam Lessin argues current AI is just an entertaining internet
“If you take a huge amount of data and play guess the next word, you can do amazing shit with translating languages, and it's super valuable. You can, for sure, make more compelling ads. Like, you can make, Fake porn that, like, is really titillating. Like, you…”
Lessin: Big tech platforms will capture AI value while startups die
“If you have a big platform that gets better with better targeting or copy, you're great. You know, the meds of the world, the Google, you're going to do fabulous. As long as you get the cost of the stuff down, you're in business. You're going to do great. You'…”
Lessin: Early-stage AI startup funding will trigger a subprime-style bust
“This, all of a sudden, I think does become a subprime crisis. Right? Like this is all gonna blow up in everyone's faces, like at some point”
Jessica Lessin: Mega AI investors act like fee-collecting Vision Fund clones
“These financial institutions are really Playing a business of collecting assets and collecting fees, and we'll find out how the returns look, but we've seen this show before with the Vision Fund, like things and other things, and we're still in that moment in …”
Lessin: Peak Silicon Valley waste will destroy future experimental funding
“I think right now we're at a point of maximum Silicon Valley waste of talent and money on things that are clearly going to fail. Right. And that actually, I think will destroy the pump of being willing to do these experiments and the freedom of the space.”
Lessin: Andreessen Horowitz structurally hates capital-efficient, single-round startups
“The problem is, you're A-sixteen Z, you fucking hate that shit. That doesn't do anything for you. Because you need to own more of the company. You need them to need your capital, right? And like to finance them over and over so you can own enough of it at enou…”
Lessin: Blackstone has only had one fund over 3x in 40 years
“It's like, in the history of Blackstone, they've raised, what is it, like, call it half a trillion dollars. That's again, that's not the number, but it's an enormous number of capital. They've had, like, one fund in, like, 40 years that has done more than thre…”
Lessin: Private Tech Marks Are Mostly Bullshit and Will Break the Market
“It's more complicated than this, but I actually think the way it breaks is when people realize that most of the private marks on most of this stuff is all bullshit. That may take a long time for anyone. It may be a game that everyone just plays, just agrees to…”
Lessin: Global competition will drive AI infrastructure margins to zero
“The infrastructure business isn't going to work because it's the margins going to be driven to zero by every single player in the world there.”
Lessin: Sam Altman is an "Elon-style showman"
“I think he's a Elon style showman. I think he like, we can go on and on my criticism. Very clear about them.”
Sam Lessin: OpenAI investors have been lighting money on fire
“Or as I've said, for two years are lighting money on fire. Like, you know, the good news is they get paid on the fees. So as long as they make reasonable DPI somewhere, they'll be fine.”
Jessica Lessin: Non-subscription, ad-supported publishers are 'dead, dead, dead, dead'
“Publishers are dead, dead, dead, dead. Not subscription publishers, everyone else.”
Sam Lessin: AI base models will be competed down to zero profit
“You're not going to make money on base models. Right. They're going to be competed to zero.”
Sam Lessin: OpenAI 'ain't nowhere' because middle-tier AI players will lose
“It's going to be great to hold the stock at the top five biggest companies in the world, but like open AI ain't nowhere cause they're neither.”
Sam Lessin says Columbia University was right to arrest student protesters
“You had Columbia where I think, you know, last night they did the right thing and they just arrested everyone and like, you know, we're moving on.”
Dave Morin calls campus encampments deep fake protests driven by activists
“There's actually a whole lot of people involved in these things that are not actually students. And I think that really confuses things and almost makes these things like deep fake protests.”
Sam Lessin vows he will never hire student campus protesters
“Although I'll never hire any of them.”
Sam Lessin claims AI talent is the only scarce talent globally
“I do think that AI talent is the exception because it's the only scarce talent in the world right now.”
Sam Lessin says Google was right to fire employees for office sit-ins
“And like, I think Google does the right thing. You fire the right few people for inching around it. The problem is when you don't, if you have rules and you let people trample them, you're screwed, right? You have to enforce your own rules, right?”
Sam Lessin says artistic hardware devices have no prayer of succeeding
“What I'm really against though is like what I call, and I say this with respect for actually like teen engineering, but like I'll call it like artistic entrepreneurship where there's no prayer that these devices work. There is, it's fun to invest in.”