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 180 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 5 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
Google Reports That Gemini Reached 450 Million Monthly Active Users
“And that reflects the actual number that they shared, four hundred and fifty million monthly active users.”
Coogan: Gemini matches OpenAI and Anthropic in research quality
“Gemini is, is at the same like level of like AI research quality as OpenAI anthropic by most benchmarks, by most people that use them.”
Hays: Zuckerberg offered tens of millions to mid-level Google engineers
“Going back to Zuck raiding Google in, in, in, in, in, in, in, he was offering tens of millions of dollars in stock packages to mid-level engineers just because he was like, I need a really good ad product.”
Moore: ByteDance's SeedDance video model is already outperforming Google's Veo 3
“The new Minimax model, the new ByteDance model, SeedDance, which is in the arena, already outperforming VO-three.”
Kovacevich: Google's network ad revenue fell from 16% to 11%
“This is part of what's called their network business, which is basically like serving ads on other people's websites. This is the part of Google's business that's actually shrinking. So it was like, 16% of their business, like five years ago, and now it's down…”
Yanisse: Mobile Driver's Licenses in Digital Wallets Will Replace Photo Scanning
“The other thing that I'm bullish on is electronic driver licenses and wallets, you know, like Apple and Google are starting to have your driver license in your wallet, like Apple pay. And I think you know, and the government, especially in Europe and other cou…”
Kilpatrick: Google team is exploring AI-assisted and non-AI technical interviews
“I think we've actually been looking at doing like AI assisted interviews and not AI assisted interviews. Like, I think the world needs both right now. It makes perfect sense to evaluate both.”
Kilpatrick: Large High-Demand AI Models Require Massive Inference Investments
“Especially with larger models and especially with models that have lots of demand, like there's no world where you can get away with not putting a large order of magnitude of investment into inference.”
Logan Bartlett: Wiz successfully controlled the media narrative after rejecting Google
“What was interesting in that Wiz announcement when they announced that they were going their own and not going to be bought by Google, was like, everything that they said was then reported on the media in the media because of the leaked memo. And so they got t…”
Hudson: Honey charges low commissions compared to double-digit Google ad costs
“So it's not like the marketing spend on Google where you're spending well into double digits percentage of revenue on acquisition or what you're spending on Facebook. We're talking like really small numbers and Part of that reason the rates are low is actually…”
Hays: Consumer-Aligned AI Search Threatens Google and Amazon's Ad Model
“It's obviously a threat to Google and to Amazon and other marketplaces when I'm going there and I'm saying, this is what I want to buy. Like help me buy the best version. And it can be more aligned with my interests than an ads based business model.”
Coogan: Microsoft, Google, and Meta will spend $230B combined on CapEx
“Microsoft is expected to top ninety billion in CapEx this calendar year. Google is spending seventy-five billion and Meta is spending sixty-five billion.”
Hays: ChatGPT leads consumer AI through mindshare and search-like utility
“The reason that ChatGPT has stayed very dominant from a user standpoint is because they have the consumer mindshare. The average person is not like prompt engineering. They don't care about the context window. They're just almost using it like a Google that ca…”
Coogan: Booking middleman sites arbitrage Google search ads against hidden fees
“And they're just arbitraging the Google ad cost of winning that auction and the fees that they can add. So they think, okay, it cost us 20 dollars to acquire this customer. We'll add a hundred dollars of fees at the last second.”
Sequoia Has Generated Over $70 Billion in Cumulative Gains
“Over the years, it's made its limited partners and its own rainmakers who pocket around a quarter of the gains plus a management fee a total of over seventy billion dollars, thanks to early bets. On future tech darlings like Airbnb, Apple, Google, and Nvidia.”
Marking Cold Sales Emails as Spam Trains Google's Algorithm Against Senders
“I've since moved to just the Gmail spam button because if you hit that, it blocks the sender and it also sends the message to the Google algorithm that like this company sucks, which I like.”
Coogan: Keras creator François Chollet is leaving Google to start a company
“Francois Chollet is out at Google, entering free agency. He's gonna start a new company.”
Overbuilt AI Infrastructure Will Eventually Enable Future Winners Post-Bubble
“This could lead to a bubble that pops, but it still could be amazing that all this stuff gets built out and there's all this infrastructure. And that's exactly what happened in the dot-com boom. There was a lot of dark fiber and that's what enabled Google to g…”
Google's Borg scheduler maintained over 95% compute capacity utilization
“So Seb and Mihai built the Borg XBorg GQM scheduler, which kept the Google internal capacity pool at more than 95% utilization. Therefore, it was at 94% Utilization that was considered a major outage globally.”
Google earns $460 per US user annually, while Meta earns $250.
“Google makes. 460 dollars per user per year in the United States, mostly on ads. I didn't know that their ARPU was so high. Meta makes around 250.”
Hays: Google previously sued network of 10M compromised smart devices
“Last year, Google sued. The anonymous operators network of more than ten million internet connected televisions, tablets, and projectors saying they had secretly pre-installed residential proxy software on them.”
Hays: Google's AI CapEx budget is four times NASA's annual budget
“Four times NASA's annual budget.”
Coogan pays $250 monthly for Google Veo 3 due to lacking competition
“VO three was the moment when I was like, okay, they got something that nobody else has. I got a fork over two 50 a month.”
Google added $2 trillion in market cap since the Gemini image controversy
“Google has now added two trillion dollars to its market cap over the past 20 months since the boob shirt guy asked Sergey Brin about woke Gemini images while having a foot-long Subway cold-cut trio for lunch.”
Hays: Naming Gemini after internal drama is quintessential Google culture
“It's extremely Google that a flagship consumer product is named as a reference to inner org drama that happened three years ago.”
Rosenthal: Acquired conducted 30+ hour-long background calls for Google episode
“Like for our Google series that we just wrapped up, we probably talked to 30 plus people. You know, those are all hour long research calls where, you know, sometimes people are like, oh, is this going to be recorded? And we're like, no, no, no, this isn't for …”
Coogan: Gemini Daily Requests Grew Over 50% Quarter-Over-Quarter
“Daily requests grew over 50% from Q-one to Q-two.”
Hays: Character.AI Had 20M+ Users and $100M Cash When Founders Left
“So when Character AI, when the Character AI founders and part of the core team went back to Google, the other, the Character AI became a ghost ship, but it was cool in the fact that they had 20 plus million users. They also had a hundred million on the balance…”
Hays: Facebook's 2010-2011 Poaching Raid Forced Google To Raise Comp
“In 2011, in 2010 and 20 11 Zuck and Facebook went super aggressive poaching from Google. So Facebook had crossed half a billion users. They were, in that period of transitioning from a super scrappy startup. Yep. And they went heavy into Google. So they went a…”
Kilpatrick: Heavy Gemini 2.5 Pro Demand Forces Continuous Inference Optimization
“Our team who's Like actually working around the clock right now to make it so that people can keep scaling with 2.5 pro because there's so much demand and we're having to like, you know, as a an artifact of the constraints that we're under, like we're having t…”
Coogan: Apple earns about $20B at 100% margin from Google search deal
“And that's exactly what happened with Google, where, where they knew that people were going to be searching the internet using a search engine and they could, and they never needed to build a search engine because they were able to tax Google. And so they got …”
Coogan: TikTok ban legally targets app store distribution and Oracle hosting
“The law doesn't require TikTok to turn off the app. Instead, the law requires App Store operators like Apple and Google to stop making TikTok available for downloads. It also requires Oracle, TikTok's cloud provider, to stop hosting the app's U.S. Data user da…”
Coogan: Ramp significantly accelerated receipt scanning using Google OCR and GPT-4
“Early on, I remember they were they were one of the huge beneficiaries of GPT-IV for the receipt scanning because they could just do exactly what we did with the red book where they would OCR it with Google, take all the text in the picture, and then throw tha…”
Alphabet stock drops five percent at market open following DeepMind news
“Stock's down. It was down five percent around the open. It's recovered a little bit, just down three and a half percent.”