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 559 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.”
Valar Is the Only Private Company to Ever Produce Nuclear Power
“This is the fifth new nuclear device to make power in the United States since the year 2000. Fowler is the only private company founded since the discovery of nuclear fission that has ever made nuclear power.”
Tan: Jensen Huang's $5B Intel investment is now worth $25B+
“Secondly, very happy that Jensen Huang, my old time friend, he also put five billion in investing and support me. And I'm glad I at least do some good work. It's five billion become twenty five billion now and or more.”
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: OpenAI and Anthropic Refer Traffic 750x and 30,000x Less Than Google
“In the case of someone like OpenAI, it's 750 times harder than it was with the Google of old. With the case of Anthropic, it's 30,000 times harder than the content of old”
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…”
Dent: Chai-2 hits nearly 20% wet-lab antibody binding success
“We have about a two week validation cycle in the lab, and two weeks later, we see that roughly close to 20% of these antibodies actually bind their targets in the intended way.”
Mann: Opus 4 triggered ASL-3 safety protocols due to biological threat capabilities
“And so one of the reasons that our most recent model, Opus IV, is classified as ASL III. Is because it did have significant uplift relative to a Google search.”
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.”
Mansour: Kalshi is the sole legal, regulated US election trading exchange
“So we won this month, and the cool thing now is, like, it's the first time in a hundred years that betting on the election, trading on the election is actually legal in the U.S., It's finally back to actually being legal, and this time it's actually regulated,…”
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…”
Haas: Nvidia, Amazon, Microsoft, and Google Backed Arm's Physical Chip Strategy
“So whether it was Nvidia, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, All people who build ARM-based server chips, they were all on board, and I think the ultimate proof point was when we announced the product last March, we had Jensen, we had Ronnie Boker, we had Amin, we had…”
Hodak: Science is the first to restore form vision in blind patients
“Nobody had previously ever been able to restore a form vision image in the mind's eye of a blind patient in this way.”
Taylor: Nuclear energy causes fewer deaths per unit of power than solar
“Nuclear energy is the safest form of energy, empirically. If you look at the amount of power generated versus the amount of deaths it's even safer than solar, which is very strange, because how does someone die from solar? But actually, most solar is installed…”
Fogel: Booking has grown faster than Airbnb in alternative rentals for 5 years
“For the last five years, we've grown faster than Airbnb in the alternative accommodation area. We do like to like. We've been growing faster the last five years.”
OpenAI internal model reportedly disproved the Erdős unit distance conjecture
“We used an internal model at OpenAI a few weeks ago to disprove the unit Erdos unit distance conjecture.”
Feldman: Cerebras is 15 to 20 times faster than GPUs at inference
“And right now we're the fastest at inference, not by a little bit, but by a lot. 1518, 20 X faster than GPUs.”
Feldman: Cerebras is the only pure-play public AI company
“We would be the first and only, for a period of time, AI pure play. We are the only company that, that you can, a hundred percent of the revenue, this exact market. There's no gaming, there's no graphics, there's no PC, that, this is it.”
Feldman: Cerebras signed a $20B+ OpenAI deal in 4.5 weeks
“For a, 20 plus billion dollar deal to do it in four and a half weeks was exceptional.”
Helberg: Philippines is granting 4,000 acres for forward-deployed industrial base
“We made this arrangement with them where they are granting us 4000 acres, which is obviously very substantial. It's a third of the size of Manhattan. To do a very large industrial build out that's one of a kind that, that helps combine the predictability and c…”
Helberg: AI is driving over a third of US GDP growth
“You know, the American economy has been proven incredibly resilient, and a big part of that is AI being this incredible, you know, incredibly strong economic force that is already fueling over a third of our economic GDP growth right here in the US.”
McDermott: Cybercrime is a $1 trillion per month global problem
“U.S. Is the world's largest economy, China's number two, and cybercrime is number three. It's a one trillion dollar a month problem.”
Allaire: USDC is the world's most transacted digital currency
“So now today, like you know, you actually can look at like transaction volumes of USDC, which is by far the most transacted digital currency in the world, way more than anything else.”
Karpathy: Open source trails closed frontier AI models by 6 to 8 months
“So there may be, they're behind by like, what is the latest, maybe like eight months, six months, eight months kind of thing right now.”
Tiwari: Blackwell GPUs achieve 90 to 100x inference efficiency over Hopper
“And so for the hoppers, the H 100 or H 200 series of GPUs into the Blackwells there was a claim made that it could be 30 times more efficient. And I think the data from, you know, some analysis showed that it was 90 to a hundred times more efficient in terms o…”
Desai: MongoDB is the only new database to cross $2B revenue
“There are many attempts have been made by many folks to create next version of database. This and that or next disruptive database. Nobody has passed billion, and definitely nobody has passed two billion, and MongoDB did that.”
Michael: SpaceX, Anduril, and Palantir all sued the Pentagon for first contracts
“SpaceX and Anderil and Palantir all had to sue the Department of War for their first contract.”
Michael: The US does not manufacture fiber optic cables domestically
“I mean, you know, fiber optic cable, we don't make fiber optic cables in this country. Fiber optic, you know, basic fiber, which they're using in the Ukraine and Russia war to do drones because they're jamming and all that, and we use for telecom and all that.”
Michael: The US relies on China for drone brushless motors
“A brushless motor goes into a drone. We're dependent on China for brushless motors.”
Huang: Radiology software is 100% AI-powered, but radiologist headcount grew
“A hundred percent of radiology applications are now AI powered. That's completely true. And in some eight years time, it is now completely pervaded radiology. However, what's interesting is that the number of radiologists increased.”
Huang: NVIDIA self-driving stack is rated number one in safety globally
“NVIDIA's self-driving car stack, by the way, number one rated safety in the world today.
Number one.
We just got that rating today.
last week, and number two is Tesla”
Huang: NVIDIA's autonomous vehicle business is approaching $10 billion
“NVIDIA's AV business It's coming up on ten billion dollars. Nobody ever talks about that, and because you have to train world models, you have to train these AI, AVs, and it's happening, robo taxis happening all over the world.”
Gil: Chinese open-source AI models rank among highest on benchmarks
“Some of the highest
Scoring models against benchmarks now are Chinese models on the open source side.
On the closer side, it's still a lot of the US models, but things like Quinn, DeepSeq, et cetera, are doing very well.”
Wickramasekara: Major pharma increasingly licenses drug molecules from China
“We've seen this huge uptick in pharma going to China and buying molecules that they typically would have bought from American biotechs.”
Ramaswamy: Google's PageRank Ran Out of Juice by 2004
“The insight that powered Google was PageRank. It was a way of harnessing the power of the entire internet to figure out what was popular and what was not. But PageRank ran out of juice. Like in six years, like 2004 or five. And while Google never really liked …”