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 389 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
Suno builds on transformers and focuses innovation on audio tokenization
“We don't make it a secret that these are just transformers. This is somewhat our backgrounds doing text before, but also transformers scale nicely. A lot of work ends up being done for you by the open source text community, which is always really nice. We can …”
Brooks: OpenAI has no immediate timeline to launch a Sora product
“We don't currently have immediate plans or even a timeline for creating a product.”
Brooks: OpenAI built Sora from scratch to achieve minute-long HD video
“We started from scratch, and we started with the question of, how are we going to do a minute of HD footage? And that was our goal. And when you have that goal, we knew that we couldn't just extend an image generator. We knew that in order to do a minute of HD…”
Ramesh: OpenAI did not spend much effort tuning Sora's visual aesthetic
“Well, to be honest, we didn't spend a ton of effort on it for Sora.”
Adcock: Figure employees work in the office five to seven days weekly
“We work in the office every day, five to seven days a week.”
Adcock: Figure is already generating revenue from customer robot deliveries in 2024
“Companies are, you know, paying us now for robots as we're, like, delivering them this year.”
Adcock: Figure designs and builds everything in-house except battery cells, GPUs, CPUs
“Everything maybe besides like the battery cell and the GPU and CPU at this point, it feels like we've done what we're doing.”
Srivastava: Baseten is avoiding non-NVIDIA hardware investments in the short term
“I think short term you know, it's really hard for me to see how we make investments beyond NVIDIA, especially when there's a customer, where there's like customer A crunch on the other side from customers who are like, hey, we need this now.”
Guo: Portfolio company is buying tens of thousands of unreleased B100 GPUs
“I was talking to one of my portfolio companies that's buying in the tens of thousands of GPU size and is skipping to B 100 because they described it as like free money in terms of training efficiency.”
Papermaster: AMD rejects proprietary walled gardens in favor of open source
“Sarah, the point is, we're not about locking in someone with a proprietary wall garden software stack. What we want is we want to win with the best solution, and we want, or we're committed to open source and we're committed to giving our customers choice.”
Zhao: Notion bet the company on AI after seeing GPT-4
“And after that, we sort of just bet the company on it.”
Hoffman: In 2019, I Told CAA Dystopian AI Stories Damage Humanity
“And one of the things in 2019, I went and talked to all the CA people saying, look, you're damaging humanity with all these stories. You should put the machine also on the positive category.”
Mensch: Distilling state-of-the-art small models requires training massive models first
“The other thing about moving into larger models is that it enables you to train smaller models that are better, which is through variety of techniques like distillation or synthetic data generation. So this, these two things are quite related. If you want to m…”
Arthur Mensch: Mistral Aims to Make AI Safer Through Openness and Scrutiny
“By doing what we do, by being much more open about the technology we create, we want to steer the community into a regime where things just work better, where things are safer because put under more scrutiny, and really our intention there is to, well, to take…”
Masad: Pitched Zuckerberg in 2022 on open-sourcing LLMs via Open Compute playbook
“And I got a meeting with Zuck actually, and I pitched Zuck on this idea. And I remember around the time he did the open compute project. So what open compute was like Google and AWS are going to keep all their data center secrets because it's a company advanta…”
Pomel: Datadog requires every acquired company to ship something within three months
“We have a plan basically that calls for shipping something together within three months of the acquisition, which is very short because the acquisition people celebrate a little bit, you know and then they have to get oriented and you HR systems and whatnot. T…”
Gil: Investing in Anduril's seed round triggered his first-ever hate texts
“When I first invested in Anduril, which was at the seed round, It was the first time that I'd ever in my life gotten like hate texts.”
Scott seized Microsoft's entire GPU budget to stop peanut buttering resources
“At one point I seized the entire GPU budgets for the whole company. And I was like, we will no longer peanut butter these resources around. Like we will focus them because it's all capital intensive. It's like, we will just allocate these things to things wher…”
Kevin Scott: Microsoft Had Significant Internal Dissent Over OpenAI Deal
“So there was a huge diversity of opinions inside of the company on the wisdom of doing doing this.”
Scott: Microsoft software interactions will fundamentally change by the end of 2023
“It will touch all of Microsoft's product portfolio. Like the way that you will interact with our software will be substantially different by the end of this calendar year than it was coming in.”
Koller: Insitro aims to replace untranslatable animal models using human cellular models
“Which ultimately what we're looking to do is to replace the sort of untranslatable animal models with something that is much more driven from human biology.”
Singhal: Medical AI still lacks grounded evaluations within specific clinical workflows
“One thing that has been missing from our work so far is really Grounded evaluations in a specific use case in a workflow to show that there is a benefit both in terms of safety in the short term and in terms of kind of long-term patient outcomes as well.”
Stability AI Is Deploying Four Million Tablets to Children Across Malawi
“So right now we're deploying four million tablets to every child in Malawi.”
Stability AI Is Exclusively Training Video Models on the Eros Bollywood Catalog
“So like now we're training on hundreds and soon thousands of Bollywood movies to create Bollywood video models with our partnership with Eros you know, and that is exclusively licensed.”
Character.AI Enforces Filters Blocking Pornography, Violence, and Self-Harm
“Like, you know, we don't want to encourage people to, like, harm, you know, hurt themselves or hurt other people or you know, we're blocking porn.”
Srinivas: Perplexity grounds even conversational identity queries in web search
“In fact, it's more like a citation first service that it'll never say anything that it cannot say. So if you, if people have tried to play with it as if it's like chat GPT where like, tell me who are you or like things like that. And even for those questions, …”
Srinivas: Only pursued a US PhD because it was fully funded
“To be very honest, I only came to the United States for doing a PhD because there was no other way for me to come to the United States. Like I could, I couldn't take a loan for a master's or something like that. So a PhD is fully funded and like sponsored. So …”
Huang: NVIDIA is not trying to be an AI model company
“You know, we're not trying to be an AI model company. We're trying to help industries create AI models. Mostly we're trying to help developers.”
Armstrong: Coinbase will support segregated accounts for AI agents
“It's going to be possible to create a separate agentic account with segregated funds on Coinbase in the near future. And you can give your agent access to just that to do trading and payments on your behalf. That's kind of linked to your identity as human.”
Armstrong: New Limit's initial clinical trial targets alcoholic liver disease
“With our liver program, the initial phase one clinical trial will be in people with alcohol liver disease or alcoholic liver ALD.”
Armstrong: Coinbase invested in Honduran SEZ Próspera
“Coinbase actually made an investment in that just to like learn more about it and see what was going on.”
Haas: 80% to 90% of Arm engineers use AI daily
“I would say we probably have 80 to 90% of engineers today in Sidearm who use it on a daily basis.”
Haas helps direct SoftBank portfolio companies Ampere, Graphcore, and Stack AV
“So, yes, I, I'm leading the direction of Ampere and Graphcore and another company called Stack AV that's doing things around Autonomous, but maybe a better way to think about it, Elad, is that I'm kind of in the room on a lot of discussions that Masa's having …”
Hodak: Science focuses on sensory restoration and substrate independence, not brain keyboards
“The, at the other end of that spectrum are things like generating vision or generating hearing or achieving substrate independence. Those are the things that we are focused on, not brain keyboard.”
Chess.com launched Gambit to bring chess-style skill ratings to poker
“We recently launched gambit at gambit.com, which is our poker
site and you can play gambit on your phone as well, but we're doing poker in a different way too.
We're bringing the chess playbook, which is like poker for ratings.”
Tang: DoorDash partnered with Rivian spin-out Also for autonomous vehicles
“We actually partnered up with this company called also, which is this micro mobility company that spun out of Rivian.
[2316] Stanley Tang: So,
[2317] Stanley Tang: RJ is actually the board of founder and chairman of the company. So if, you know, like, why do…”
Fang: DoorDash internal AI spend jumped 20x from January to June
“I think our spend in June went up like 20 X versus what the spend was in January.”
Tan: Intel CEO personally handles all recruitment without search firms
“By the way, all the recruitment, I do it myself. No search firm helping.”
Lip-Bu Tan reports 159 IPOs, 126 M&A exits across his investment career
“You know, I still have 159 IPO, one 126 you know, M&A. And that's include semiconductor. Just break down to semiconductor. I invest over the years 200, and 38% is in US.”
Zuckerberg: Biohub leadership shifted from biologists to AI researchers
“Prior to Alex leading the effort, the previous leaders of the Biohub were basically primarily biologists who were interested in technology, right? And now I think we, this is the point where we really flipped that, right? Where, I mean, obviously you have a ba…”
Nadella: Microsoft uses the GitHub harness across all its AI products
“So we have, in our case, we have the GitHub harness, which essentially we're using across all our products. It's available in Foundry”
Feldman: I refuse to build or sell consumer products
“I have a rule that if my mother buys it or uses it, I don't want to make it or sell it. Cause I really want super smart customers who are doing really interesting things with our stuff.”
Helberg: Pax Silica targets June rollout with 4-5 major strategic lines
“We're thinking about making a big play in the logistics space in partnership with large, you know, corporates. And in June we're looking at potentially doing a broader rollout where we're going to roll out four or five different big lines of effort.”
Taubman: Talent leaves legacy PE for Long Lake's AI-native approach
“We have folks from Blackstone, TPG, HIG, and mostly the reason they come to Long Lake is because, you know, even though these firms are extraordinary firms at what they do, they're not AI native.”
Taubman: Long Lake aims to hold acquired companies permanently
“I'd want to own that company forever and compound on that advantage for decades to come and then extrapolated into ancillary areas and other service lines. And so our vision really is to be a long-term owner partner to world-class services companies.”
Srivastava: Baseten Runs 90 Clusters Across 18 Clouds at Mid-90s Utilization
“We run them in, like, uncomfortably high utilization. You know, we, when I'm saying we're like mid-nineties utilization most of the time there is, we have made, we have, we sit in 18 different clouds now. We have 90 clusters around the world across 18 differen…”
Herzig: SAP developed RPT-ONE tabular foundation models after two years of research
“And that led, actually, this was two years of research. We published it also at NeurIPS and a bunch of other conferences. We call this RPT-ONE, so RAPID-ONE stands for relational pre-trained transformers. It's still based on the transformer architecture, but w…”
Fedus: Periodic Labs launches as a software intelligence layer, not discovery model
“We're thinking about us ourselves as an intelligence layer for these companies. So you can think about system of record control plane for different Experiments and getting to solutions. But like you're saying, there is a very interesting aspect of some breakth…”