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 17 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
Helberg: DeepSeek lied about compute capacity and distilled ChatGPT weights
“The main takeaways of how DeepSeq achieved the performance its performance was Incremental efficiency gains. They lied about their compute capacity because they have a billion dollar cluster, and they distilled ChatGPT's model weights.”
Caruso: Mayor Bass cut LAFD budget, leaving equipment mothballed in lots
“The city didn't even have enough equipment because they've underfunded the fire department for so long, and Mayor Bass cut even more out this last budget cycle That they had equipment mothballed in parking lots.”
Tan: President Trump asked him to resign over conflicts of interest
“Well, the most surprising that I don't learn from my previous job or even training is one day early morning, President Trump asking me to resign and a conflict of interest, and there's no exceptions.”
Helberg: Belt and Road countries frequently default, yielding equity to China
“It is Chinese workers, Chinese companies, you know, and a lot of the times it's Chinese equity because the debt converts to equity if, you know, the host country defaults. They do a lot of the times.”
Huang: China contributes more to open source than any other country
“No country in the world contributes more to open source than China.”
Liemandt: Alpha School yields top 1% academic performance in two hours daily
“And so we built a learning engine that teaches kids 10 times faster. It's all based on the principles of learning science. And so then now we can commit to kids. You just need to do two hours a day and you're going to crush your academics. So top one percent p…”
Patel: Microsoft dropped Stargate for OpenAI due to slow execution
“Microsoft is not building
Stargate for OpenAI, right? It's because it would have just been too slow, and they're doing it the lame and old way.”
Patel: Huawei Obtains TSMC Wafers via Shell Companies
“Huawei is still getting you know, wafers in Taiwan from TSMC through, like, shell companies, right?”
Prince: Cloudflare will soon publicly expose misbehaving AI scraping companies
“So, you know, watch our blog, and I have a feeling that some prominent AI companies that are misbehaving are Can get called out pretty soon.”
Krishnan: Biden Diffusion Rule Effectively Banned US GPU Exports to Allies
“Under the Biden era, there was something called the Biden diffusion rule, which basically was a 200 page document, which basically made it illegal for America to export GPUs. It was really hard for you know, if you're Jensen or if you're Lisa Su to really kind…”
Caruso: Palisades hydrant failure was caused by empty reservoir, not broken pipes
“The hydrants are empty. We're not getting water. It had nothing to do with broken pipes. It had everything to do with the reservoirs not being filled. Everything up there is gravity flow. So those reservoirs draining are coming into the hydrants, and there's p…”
Caruso: LA reservoir was drained for repairs despite high fire risk
“There's a whole reservoir that was empty. That was drained because they wanted to have repairs on it. Well, we had a fire in Malibu, 10 minutes from the Palisades fire, three weeks before. That's probably a pretty good sign that we needed to be prepared, and w…”
Wang: AI gets no positive transfer across modalities like video to text
“My understanding there's no positive transfer from learning in one modality to other modalities. So like training off of a bunch of video doesn't really help you that much with your text problems and vice versa.”
Khan: FTC Finalized Rule Banning Most Employment Non-Compete Clauses
“A few months ago, the FTC finalized a rule that would ban non-compete clauses in the vast majority of employment contracts.”
Alexandr Wang: Cross-modality training produces no positive transfer between video and text.
“I think the main thing, fundamentally, is I think there's very limited generality that we get from these models and even for multimodality, for example my understanding there's no positive transfer from learning in one modality to other modalities. So like tra…”
Mensch: LLMs are not marginally more dangerous than web search
“Nothing is showing that LLM is actually marginally better than a search engine to find knowledge on, on topics that would enable bad use.”
Gil: SARS leaked from laboratories four times in first two years
“Because SARS, they both snuffed out with the original form, but then it leaked four times in the first two years after it was cultured in a lab. It kept leaking from what eventually became the Wuhan Institute of Biology when they moved it from Beijing to Wuhan…”