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 47 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: 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.”
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…”
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.”
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.”
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.”
Kushner: Antonio Gracias saved over $10B annually on Social Security
“I know Antonio Gracios has done amazing work helping figure out how to get, you know, make sure we're only paying social security. I think he saved over ten billion a year so far from that.”
Fei-Fei Li: World Labs is the first company building 3D foundation models
“So we are the first company we know of that is solving this the three D generation foundation model problem.”
Huang: NVIDIA has never abandoned a single piece of software
“We've never given up on a piece of software.”
Jensen Huang: Computing marginal costs fell 1,000,000x over the last decade
“We've driven down the marginal cost of computing down probably by a million X in the last 10 years, to the point that we just, hey, let's just let the computer go exhaustively write the software.”
Allaire: Circle's Arc enables transactions costing a millionth of a penny
“And so with ARK, which we can come back to, you know, we now have an infrastructure where we can conduct transactions for a millionth of a penny which just was never feasible before.”
Allaire: Circle is the most actively traded tokenized stock
“There are tokenized stocks that are out there, and the most active tokenized stock today is not Tesla. It's not the S&P index. It's actually Circle.”
Scaringe: Only Tesla and Rivian avoid domain-based vehicle architectures
“With the exception of Tesla and Rivian, every car on the road has what is called a domain-based architecture.”
Nadler: Medical error is the third leading cause of US deaths
“It's well known, and it's been often repeated, that medical error is a third leading cause of death in the United States after heart disease and cancer.”
Prince: Musicians make millions writing songs to fulfill unmet Spotify queries
“Spotify actually looks at queries that people have run that they don't have good answers for, where there's, you know, somebody searches for, I don't know, I want a disco song about like how fun it is to dance with your dog, right? I don't know. And if somebod…”
Younis: Porsche generates $30,000 to $40,000 profit per vehicle
“Porsches are the most profitable cars on the planet. There's 30 to 40,000 dollars in profit per vehicle.”
Gil: No $50B+ biotech started since the 1980s, excluding Moderna
“The last time a fifty billion dollar plus biotech company was started from scratch, excluding Moderna, which was kind of an accident of COVID, was in the eighties. I think it was Regeneron. And so it's been almost 40 years since we've had a de novo, like tens …”
Polosukhin: First organizations run by AI agents will emerge in 2023
“I think we'll see, you know, first organizations like this, probably even this year where Potentially with a simpler mission, some kind of more straightforward like KPI metrics, but where kind of this information propagation and onboarding of people happens al…”
Gil: Nuclear regulation prevented new reactor approvals for 50 years
“The new nuclear regulatory body, which was established in the seventies, prevented any new nuclear power plant designed from being approved for 50 years.”
Gil: NRC creation stopped US nuclear reactor approvals for 50 years
“You do realize that once the NCR, the Nuclear Regulatory Agency existed, we had no new nuclear designs approved for the last 50 years due to this agency existing.”
Zipline is projected to increase its flight volume by 400% in 2023
“We're going to increase you know, total flight volume by 400% in 2023 based just on contracts that are already signed. So that means we'll do about two times as many autonomous deliveries in 2023 as we've done in the history of the company since its founding.”
Gil: No major drug-developing biotech founded since late 1980s hit $30B-$50B
“The last time a biotech company hit, I don't know what it is, 3040, fifty billion dollars in market cap, something like that. The last year such a thing was founded was in the late eighties. So it's been at this point, what is that? 35, 40 years without a new …”
A $500 million AI model will likely be trained by 2025
“You can probably easily 10 X that, you know, I wouldn't be surprised if there's a five hundred million dollar model that's trained in the next year or two.”
Inference-time search improved Noam Brown's poker AI performance by 100,000x
“If we were to add this search, this planning algorithm that would come up with a better strategy when it's actually in the hand, how much better could it do? And the answer was it improved the performance by about a 100,000 X. It was the equivalent of scaling …”
Helberg: China emerged as a rare earth superpower around 2015
“China only emerged as a rare earth mining superpower about 10 years ago. It came out in twenty-fifteen with its Made in China twenty-twenty-five plan, and from that date onwards, we actually saw China's refining activity of rare earth materials skyrocket.”
Laskin: Most Contributors on OpenAI's o1 Paper Worked on Evals
“When you look at the model card for, let's say, the O-one paper that came out, I think, last year. If you look at the distribution of what most people worked on, on that paper, it was evals.”
Fei-Fei Li: Her and Andrej Karpathy's image captioning research was first
“And Andre and my work were the first together with Google's that was out of the door.”
Caruso: MacArthur Park fire station is America's busiest due to overdoses
“The most active fire station in the United States is in an area around MacArthur Park in Los Angeles. It's the most active because of the amount of people dying on the streets from overdoses.”
Clerico: Paradise voted down stricter fire building codes during rebuilding
“When the city went to rebuild, there was an opportunity to pass, you know, more significant building codes at the local level, and that was voted down because it was seen as sort of too expensive and too restrictive for people to build. So Paradise largely got…”
Clerico: Cal Fire Budget Is Roughly Triple the US Forest Service's
“Cal Fire's budget is, I think, about triple what the US Forest Service budget is.”
Ejeckam: Akash expects 20 to 40 degree chip cooling within 12 months
“We're looking at further reductions, 2030, 40 degrees down the line over the next 12 months.”
Mansour: Kalshi is first legal US prediction market platform
“CalShay is actually the first legal platform in the U.S. Where you can basically bet yes, no on any future questions.”
Elad Gil notes major Microsoft Office apps originated as third-party software
“I think people also forget that all of Microsoft Office at some point were third party applications. So in the eighties, there were separate companies like Lotus and others that were providing what turned into Excel. There was a PowerPoint company that was ver…”
Elad Gil notes larger context windows significantly improve AI protein folding fidelity
“I think one of the most striking examples of long context window being important is actually some biology models that have come out recently where just increasing the context window for things like protein folding Seems to really make a big difference in terms…”
Adcock: No entity has delivered a commercial humanoid in human history
“Nobody's been able to deliver a commercial humanoid into a market in human history.”
Papermaster: AMD has shipped integrated CPU-GPUs longer than any competitor
“So we've been shipping CPUs and GPUs combined for PC applications longer than anyone started shipping those in 20 11. With what we call APUs, accelerated processor units.”
Guo: GitHub Copilot operates by inspecting only five recent files
“Today, you know, you have Copilot looking at your five open files, your five most recent files and doing Function completion. And like that already has such a massive impact on productivity, but I think we're really early in figuring out how to deliver more co…”
Stability AI Repositories Beat Ethereum and Bitcoin Combined in GitHub Stars
“You know, on GitHub stars, we've overtaken Ethereum and Bitcoin cumulatively. It took them 10 years. We got there in like three, four months.”
Ramaswamy: Google Beat Live.com Image Search Through Main Results Integration
“Google knocked out live.com Bing's image search as the top image search product in the world by integrating image search right into the search experience.”
Krishnan: DeepSeek Preceded Anthropic and Google in Releasing Reasoning Models
“DeepSeq was the only reasoning model, which was not open AI. So I don't think Claude had come out of the reasoning model yet. I don't think Google had yet. It was the only non-open AI reasoning model.”
Mann: Anthropic maintains only two models on cost-performance frontier
“In our case, we only have two models and they're differentiated by like cost performance Pareto frontier.”
Jain: The entire internet was one billion documents in 2004
“In 2004, the entire internet was actually one billion documents.”