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 38 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
Srinivas: Breaking up Google harms America and will not increase competition
“I don't think Google should be broken up for two main reasons. One is, it's not even in the interest of America for Google to be broken up. And number two is, it doesn't actually increase competition. It's just gonna, like transfer from one monopoly to another…”
Srinivas: Google Gemini is a horrible product despite a great model
“The assistant that they have, Gemini, is actually pretty horrible, and the model is great, But the product is not.”
Perplexity will be pre-installed on Android phones as default assistant
“We are going to be partnering with a OEM. I think Bloomberg's already written about it. Perplexity will be pre-installed on the phones of that OEM, and we'll be able to, like, push notify all those users to set perplexity as the default assistant on the Androi…”
Aravind Srinivas: Frontier AI Model Leads Will Last Only a Few Weeks
“My, our belief is that nobody's gonna have a lead in them having the best AI model for more than a few weeks.”
Srinivas: Musk made X much better by charging $8 for verification
“Like in, in some sense, Elon has turned X into some, something like that. There are a lot of trolls, a lot of random accounts and all that stuff, but by forcing people to have the blue mark and paying eight dollars a month and all that stuff, I think he's alre…”
Srinivas: Google lacks incentive to enable native shopping and travel checkout
“Google even if Gemini gives you shopping answers, they have no incentive to, like, let you transact. Because like, they lose, they make money by sending you merchant sites. That's why Google Flights doesn't let you book flights on Google. You have to book it o…”
Srinivas: Foundation model companies are not guaranteed to win applications
“This is why I think Like model companies are not guaranteed to win the application layer because you have to work on all these boring things.”
Srinivas: Perplexity is building a browser to capture broad user context
“That's kind of one of the other reasons we wanted to build a browser is like, we want to get data even outside the app to better understand you. Because some of the prompts that people do in these AIs is It's purely work related. It's not like that personal. O…”
Srinivas: Algorithmic feeds kill curiosity while AI supercharges it
“Two paths to curiosity, one that can kill it and one that can supercharge it. In my opinion, the one that kills curiosity is algorithmic feeds. Like, the brain rot that you're fed every day, which is, you know, this continuous doom scrolling, that's bad. And t…”
Srinivas: Mobile OEMs previously refused search meetings because Google paid too much
“Until now, like, people with OEMs would just not even take a meeting with you. If you ever go to them and say, hey, like, what do you think about using an alternative assistant or an alternative search? They'd be like Google is paying too much money. I'm not g…”
Social networks boost AI usage but AI apps gain little from social
“So it's more like the other way where a social network can help you grow usage of an AI app pretty, pretty immensely compared to like an AI app benefiting from a social layer, so far at least.”
Aravind Srinivas: Frontier AI Models Will Look Roughly Identical to Users
“The difficulty, which is why everybody's working on the difficult problem is making these truly smart and like better at all these reasoning tasks. And so that's going to end up making all these models roughly similar looking to the average user.”
Srinivas: Billionaires use X to interact with normal people, not each other
“So it's not like if you get billionaires they want to stay with the other billionaires or stay exclusive. I think they actually like using a product like X to stay connected to the normal people.”
Srinivas: Perplexity will allow user thread publishing on Discover feed
“We have this thing called Discover and we're trying to increase the volume of content on Discover, and once we do that in an automatic way with curation to users interest. Like we're going to let some of the users pub try to like publish it to discover on thei…”
Srinivas: Neither the US nor China will slow down in AI race
“Like, the genie's out of the bottle. China versus America. That race is already going on. Nobody's gonna slow down and everybody wants glory. Nobody cares about the other people or something. Everybody wants glory and some kind of power to control the future.”
Srinivas: Instagram data shows user engagement drops when ads are removed
“Instagram has shown some stats where the engagement time on their platform reduces if they remove the ads because that's the level of personalization of the ads.”
Srinivas: Google's siloed product teams fail to share lessons
“I think Google is actually the closest to ByteDance of America. If you think about it, they have so many different apps in one umbrella, but they don't share lessons. Like the YouTube team is so different from the Gmail team, sort of from the Chrome team, and …”
Srinivas: Perplexity submitted a bid to acquire TikTok US
“We, we've submitted our bid. We never expected to be the leading candidate or anything.”
Srinivas: The next stage is AI chatbots becoming action-oriented native phone assistants
“I feel like this is the next stage, like, you know, moving all these AI chatbots to native assistants on the phone that not just answer your questions, but also help help you get things done.”
Srinivas: Most ChatGPT users do not know o1 or GPT-4 differences
“In fact, most people using tracks between the world don't even know there's a model called O one or O three and don't even know what the difference is for GPT four.”
Srinivas: Most AI apps struggle with daily retention without native social
“But if you could figure out social for an AI app within the app itself it can definitely make it more daily usage and high retention, which is what most AI apps struggle with today.”
Srinivas: Perplexity launched voice assistant early over waiting for perfection
“I'll literally read out to you the chat I had with our engineer who worked on this. Be good to launch and announce today, question mark. And then he's like, yes, still making improvements, but let's launch. And me like, do you want to address some of the onboa…”
Srinivas: Bloomberg Terminal retains users because it is an elite social network
“Bloomberg terminal is another interesting thing where, you know, nobody thinks about it as a social network, but it is what it is today. People are not leaving it because of the network it has.”
Most consumers only use ChatGPT and have not heard of other apps
“We are living in a bubble, like they're, most people are only using chat GPT and they don't, they haven't even heard about like most of the other apps.”
Srinivas: Launching Perplexity around GPT-4 would have been too late
“You want to build at the right moment where, like, kind of, like, how we built perplexity around the GPT 3.5 time, not GPT four time. It would have been too late then.”
Srinivas: Most AI foundation model investment will go toward reinforcement learning
“I think RL is the place where most investments are gonna go to especially with models like O-three that are able to do tool calls pretty natively rather than being prompt engineered to do that”
Srinivas: AI subscription market will expand dramatically as agents perform tasks
“If AI start doing things, not just answering questions or writing code people will pay even more because they kind of think about it as hiring somebody. If you look at the amount of people, people pay for personal assistants, chiefs of, chief of staffs, person…”
Srinivas: TikTok US decision is delayed and likely tied to tariffs
“I think they've delayed the decision and it's probably going to be coupled with the tariff situation too.”
Srinivas: Apple SDK allows integration with Calendar, Mail, Maps, and Music
“A lot of it is still exposed in the Apple SDK through the events kit. So that's how we got things done, like calendar, mail, reminders. These are all part of their SDK. So you can actually call it podcasts, Apple music that's Apple maps. All of these are possi…”
Srinivas: Apple restricts third-party AI from controlling native system settings
“You cannot do stuff that's more native, like alarms and volume and brightness you know, people want and everything system at the end of the day.”
Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity Will Keep Using Third-Party Models When Needed
“I think we'll continue to keep the same strategy, which is have a version of our product that can run with our own models, but not hinder or disrupt the user from this best experience that we can provide to them. If we're not able to do it with our own model, …”
Srinivas: User retention from Perplexity's Super Bowl ad beat expectations
“The Super Bowl was good, like, in fact, like, the retention from people who came to the Super Bowl exceeded my expectations.”
Super Bowl ad was mocked on X but drove mainstream Perplexity adoption
“Actually, if you notice the Superbowl tweets didn't actually matter on X, like most people made fun of it or didn't even engage with it, but it did help us get a lot of like mainstream normal people become aware of the app and use it.”
Srinivas: Perplexity replaced a three-model agent pipeline with a single model
“Before O-three, the way we built, like, our agents, is there would be one model that gave, came up with a plan for the query, another model that would execute the plan by converting the plan to, like, Smaller queries, filtering links, calling searches, and the…”
Srinivas: Perplexity plans to invest more in RL post-training this year
“The nice thing is a lot of open source code bases exist on how to replicate GRPO or PPO and post training these models. And we've been doing that work already. So that's where we plan to invest more resources into for this year.”
Srinivas: Perplexity aims to launch Comet browser by mid-May
“We've tried to scope it down and we're aiming to get it out by mid-May.”
Srinivas: ByteDance centralizes infra, growth, and mobile dev across apps
“They do have their own growth teams, but that's one team by dance that takes our infrastructure for all their companies. One team that takes their growth for all their companies. One team that takes their front end mobile development for all their apps. And so…”