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 516 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
Rao: xAI's GPU clusters broke rules and are not repeatable
“And the things that have been realized I mean, like the XAI clusters and stuff like that, You know, valiant efforts. No doubt about it. And it's amazing to push through and get it done, but it broke a lot of rules and is doing a lot of stuff very inefficiently…”
Rao: Circular AI mega-deals are justified by coming demand
“I know we talk about it looks bad or whatever, but the bet is that the demand will come, and I think that's actually a good bet. So I see it as like, all right, fine, it looks, it doesn't look great in the short term, and I can see why people are irked by it b…”
Das: Founder secondaries in over-raised venture rounds create toxic incentives
“Some people also over-raise because, you know, founders get secondary when they over-raise. So that's just the whole other topic. Generally, really poor incentives in the Valley. You know, we've seen that happen. We've heard rumors about all sorts of things wh…”
Cliffton: Low-altitude octocopter drone deliveries are terrifying 'lawnmowers of death'
“You're, like, descending this massive octocopter of, you know, sounds like a lawnmower of death to within, like, you know, 20 feet of you. It's like, you know, you're like, it's incredibly loud, incredibly scary. It's actually super dangerous to have an aircra…”
Senra: Raising money is not an accomplishment, building a durable business is
“Raising money is not an accomplishment, so I'm not going to say congratulations. Building a durable business is an accomplishment”
Katzenberg: 95% of the longevity industry is snake oil
“95% of what's going on around it today is snake oil sales. You know, driven by, you know people trying to sell supplements and, you know, new treatments and process that are really not driven by actual science.”
Luckey: UAPs likely originate from the distant past, not future
“My current working theory is that they come from the past. So. Interesting. Ok. Coming from the future is too hard. The physics just don't seem to work out.”
Stephens: DoD operated like a centrally planned economy for over 30 years
“We think it's really great to have more companies in the space that are, ah, you know, moving away from kind of the semi-communist, centrally planned economy way that the department has been doing business for really the last 30 plus years.”
Schimpf: Traditional cost-plus defense contracts are a disaster
“Versus the traditional approach where it's like the government took all the risk and you get a fixed profit fee. That's a disaster. Like everything just gets more complex and more expensive. It doesn't work out.”
Michael: The Iraq and Afghanistan wars were a net negative for US
“The second war in Iraq and the Afghanistan war, and there were long, expensive conflicts where the benefit to the United States, looking back on it, was negative. It wasn't even neutral, right? It cost a lot of people their lives, and Afghanistan is still, Afg…”
Tusk: Universal Basic Income is the necessary unlock for AI
“The unlocked AI is UBI, Universal Basic Income. It's like Andrew Yang, I think, was absolutely right about this.”
Clark: Every major large model paradigm has originated at OpenAI
“Every single major paradigm In large models at this sort of macro level that has been very successful to my knowledge has come from open AI or at least been originated at open AI.”
Karp: Financial analysts lack common sense and never admit being wrong
“It's hard to be fair to the total bereft of common sense, and in, in practice, not particularly honest, analyst expert class, not because they're wrong the first time, but primarily because they can't admit they were wrong the first time when they're wrong the…”
Karp: Global spread of American values is downstream of military superiority
“All the stuff you're learning at Berkeley about people are just going to inherently absorb American values is really just downstream from our military superiority.”
Karp: LLMs are commodities and orchestration is far more valuable
“Everyone's saying LLMs are going to solve all these problems, but I believed, and it turns out that LLMs are commodity products, and orchestration would be much more valuable than the product themselves.”
Gil: Parker Conrad and Palmer Luckey were unfairly thrown under the bus
“Palmer Luckey is another one where I backed Andrew in the very first round, and he was controversial given what happened at Meta early on with him. I think in both cases, they basically got thrown under the bus in one form or another.”
Gil: State-level regulations like California's could curtail US AI progress
“And the dangerous part in AI was there's state level initiatives that have been very negative or could have been very negative for AI. I think Scott Wiener proposed one in California. I think there's others that have been proposed in other states that you coul…”
Lowery: Anduril is pursuing a 'me too' strategy against China's manufacturing
“There's an element, one, of folks doing me too, like Andrew's very me too to China. They said, we're going to go toe to toe. We're going to manufacturing in volume. We're going to build computers. We're going to build drones. We're going to build everything th…”
Rabois: Homebuyers should replace real estate agents with ChatGPT
“Instead of using a real estate agent, there's no reason they can't use ChatGPT or an equivalent product.”
Siemiatkowski: Large SaaS firms lack incentives to streamline complex software
“One of the challenges I think with SaaS models is especially the larger SaaS companies. They are less dependent on their monthly subscription fees, but they have this whole ecosystem of consultants who charge on the hour to implement and fix. It's true for Sal…”
McGee: China Exploited Apple for Tech Transfer, Not Vice Versa
“My narrative is not a book about Apple exploiting China. It's a book about China exploiting Apple, right, and getting technology transfer through these arrangements.”
McGee: Apple Cannot Move Manufacturing to India or the US
“I don't think they can move to India. They certainly can't move to the US. Their production plants are basically encircled by Chinese competitors that they themselves created, and they're in a position where they can't make any good moves.”
Little: Defense Consultants Mostly Sell PowerPoints, Could Be Replaced by ChatGPT
“These are the consultants and SIs that mostly sell PowerPoints, mostly can be replaced by a subscription to GBT for 20 bucks a month.”
Power: Kalshi's 18% odds on Trump reviving manufacturing are severely underpriced
“I think the answer is yes. I think the answer is yes. I would take that bet. I think they're selling, you know, dollars for 18 cents.”
Altman: VCs are very unlikely to actually help with company or product
“It's also a big part of what informs my view that it's very unlikely for VCs to help in ways that have to do with the actual company or, like, the product.”
35-year-old marketers lack the viral sense to create massive hooks
“You need to be tapped in with young culture to understand what's funny, and you can have like a thirty-five-year-old marketer who's like Scrolls as much as they want. For some reason, they just won't have the viral sense to come up with hooks that are capable …”
McCord: Government AI predictive maintenance claims are largely 'false goods'
“On the government side specifically, I think there's been a lot of like false goods that have been sold, predictive maintenance, prognostic, you know, type things that when you actually get down to it, like the data, the telemetry and the sensor data and the l…”
Garrett: Defense tech is currently overrated in venture capital
“What's, what's overrated? And I would say it was overrated actually is defense tech.”
Ritter: Almost no dollar price is too high to beat China
“The national security part, we should put in I, it's one person's opinion, but we need to make sure we win this race against against China in particular. And I, there almost no dollar price is wrong in that using that lens”
Socher: AI search competitors fake citations and prioritize marketing over accuracy
“And when we do a lot of comparisons to the competition, usually the competition spends much more money on marketing and design and less on accuracy of the technology and accuracy of the answers and even the citations. A lot of folks just Fake their citations a…”
Genuine AGI safety concerns are 10 to 20 years away
“I think this is likely what we're doing with AI and AI safety and stuff like that, that we could foresee in 1020 years AGI, where there's actual safety issues, but we are so far from that today. That's, I think, actually getting close to the peak of inflated e…”
Mark Suster argues Series A is VC's most overvalued funding round
“And so I think that a round is the single most overvalued round in venture capital.”
Asparouhov is skeptical of non-pharma microgravity manufacturing startups
“There have been a couple of companies come up, starting to try to tackle non-pharmaceutical product areas in, you know, microgravity manufacturing. And to me, I just find it quite confusing because they always phrase it as like, well, Varda is going to go to t…”
'Gundo bro' culture is off-putting to women and limits talent pools
“I find some of the, like, you know, sort of you know, gundo bros or gundo boys, you know, culture you know, a bit off-putting to, you know, people that are not of the male gender, and it's something that I've, you know, heard validated, you know, sort of acros…”
Busch: Workers who can't change tires should be able to build ships
“There's no reason somebody who can't change a tire shouldn't be able to go and build a Corsair, or work on a Marauder, or work on a larger ship.”
Mendler: Comms customers need more reliability than a SpaceX architecture offers
“They are, they're monetizing bits and the customers that are buying their bits are the ones that need more reliability and flexibility than maybe like SpaceX driven architecture.”
Beck: The biggest commercial application of space hasn't been conceived yet
“I think, you know, my hot take would be, I think, the biggest thing to be done in space hasn't even been thought about, let alone talked about. So I think we're at the very, very beginning of the whole process. If you want to, you know, make an analogy here, i…”
Beck: Spacecraft components are massive moats due to fractured supply chains
“Launch is a huge moat, but all of these spacecraft components are huge moats as well, because, you know, it doesn't matter how much capital you've got. If you turn up tomorrow and say, I want to build a thousand satellites, good luck. Like it's just not happen…”
Lamm: Direct air carbon capture is a dumb climate solution
“So when we were solving these problems, if we are solving it in dumb ways, like, I think, you know, a lot of the air capture systems in other ways, the direct air caption carbon systems and others in a lot of other ways that we're trying to solve climate are d…”
Lamm: Academic research labs are underfunded, politicized, and dilapidated
“Go work back in academia where you're underfunded. It's all like massively politicized and it's massively competitive and your labs are like held up by pizza boxes, right?”
Market Is Currently Pricing In Perfect Execution for AI Companies
“At the present, the market is pricing in perfect execution for every company. Every idea that you see, the market wants to reward it because it thinks that Their returns are outsized, and the gains are going to be so huge that it doesn't matter.”
Monroe-Anderson: Modern conflict demands US factories producing millions of drones annually
“America should have the capability to have factories that can make millions of drones per year, because that's what modern conflict demands.”
Monroe-Anderson: DJI Has by Far the Best Technology
“With DJI, like they just have by far the best technology.”
Lopez: Competing home batteries target wealthy buyers and neglect the grid
“So if you look at other competitive battery products that are like sold mostly to wealthy people at very high costs, they're like small, typically wall mounted, take a long time to install and aren't really focused on supporting the grid.”
Fox: Coding Agents Have Expanded AssemblyAI's TAM by 100x
“So I think about this as like our TAM has just increased by a hundred X because we're not just selling to engineering teams within product companies. It's now like any, anyone.”
Tony Kim expects massive public market appetite for AI lab IPOs
“I am, ah, I'm hopeful, excited to see the big labs go public in the next 12 months. I think that will be, I think that'll be, I think it'll be interesting. It'll be exciting. And I think there is huge market appetite for it.”
Friedberg: Labor should be taxed less than capital to prevent inequality
“Basically labor should have always been taxed less than capital. And if we had tax capital at a higher rate than labor, then you wouldn't have seen this massive kind of inequity.”
Friedberg: The socialist movement operates like an emotionally viral cult
“The thing about the socialist movement is it's designed to be viral. It's designed to be eccentric. It's designed to be sensational. It's designed to be emotionally titillating. It's designed to have an enemy that incites emotion inside of you to drive you to …”