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 31 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: Google possessed only fourth or fifth best AI models in 2023-2024
“And 2024, 20 23 especially, and large part of 2024 too, Google had like, maybe a fourth or fifth best models at any moment. So as a startup outside Google, you had access to AI that was better than what Google internally had.”
Jeff Dean: Google built a neural simulator 300,000x faster than full DFT
“Take a bunch of output from those simulation runs, the input molecule configurations and the outputs of that. The extensive simulator and then use it to train a neural approximation to the simulator. So this is now a validation device, but instead of it taking…”
Srinivas: Sundar Pichai is personally doing bug support on X
“Like I've noticed even Sundar is doing bug support on X right now.”
Google Photos Reached One Billion Users in Under Four Years
“Google Photos grew to more than a billion users in less than four years, which I think is the fastest growing product of all time, at least at the time.”
Hu: Seven 'Attention' authors founded startups collectively valued over $6B
“That paper came out in 2017, and the fun fact, I was just looking this up, out of all those authors, eight authors, seven of them started different companies, and all of the companies in total, they're rate, they're worth valuation more than six billion.”
Caldwell: Google ran on a stale search index for months around 2001
“There was some point where for maybe three months, maybe four months, I don't remember the exact details. There was no new index of Google. They had stale results. So anyone, any user of Google, they didn't know that, you know, the user didn't know this, but a…”
Caldwell: Gmail invite system was forced by server limits, not growth hacking
“They physically did not have enough servers. So they had to build an invite system. There was not an option to not, but basically there was no option other than building an invite system. It was not like genius PM growth hacking.”
Cutts: The SearchKing lawsuit established search results are First Amendment protected
“The result of that lawsuit was that search results are protected by the first amendment.”
Allred: Google spent $100 million in compensation to retain Sundar Pichai
“Google has in the past spent a hundred million dollars to retain Sundar and stuff like that.”
Political actors use traditional SEO tactics to game Google and YouTube
“We're seeing a lot more gaming of the algorithms as well, and more of these kind of sophisticated techniques. So not just liking and sharing, but using specific keywords to get content trending, to try to get things at the top of Google's search algorithm, try…”
Schwartz: Google dislikes ranking search-within-search platforms like Pinterest
“Google specifically does not like search within search. Google would much prefer that you don't go to Pinterest, that you go directly to where that image was, but maybe that site didn't do a great job of optimizing the image, but Pinterest did, so now Pinteres…”
Schwartz: Local businesses have a Google ranking advantage over national competitors
“You don't really need to rank on unclogged drains anymore, because Google is very local. So if you're in San Francisco, and you're a plumber, and someone searches unclogged drains, you now have a much higher chance of ranking on unclogged drains than Roto-Root…”
Schwartz: Sites penalized by Google can recover within weeks
“Now, like, things are more automated and algorithmic, where if you got hit by the penalty one day, you cleaned it up, did everything possible, maybe filed a reconsideration request, you can be back in a couple weeks.”
Schwartz: Google grew Korean search share via Samsung and LG ties
“What Google used to not be dominant in In Korea, and they've been increasing dominance through their Trojan horse of Android. So Google's obviously very closely partnered with Samsung and LG, Korean companies. And as Korean users use these products, they use G…”
Gil: Google spent hundreds of millions yearly on Firefox and Adobe distribution
“And so examples where people were very aggressive about distribution with things like Google, where they were spending hundreds of millions of dollars a year on things like Firefox, having Google prominently displayed on its homepage. They literally paid for, …”
Dean: Sanjay Ghemawat and I published a 30-page code optimization guide
“Oh we actually published the document maybe a few months ago called performance hints that Sanjay and I wrote. That's like a 30 page document about, you know, various kinds of performance tricks and Some people have taken that and then given it in summarized f…”
Friedman: Gemini API added thinking traces for debugging prompts
“Cause if you're just using Gemini via the API until recently, you did not get the thinking traces and like the thinking traces are like the critical debugging information to like, understand like What's wrong with your prompt? They just added it to the API. So…”
Caldwell: MapReduce was created because Google's batch indexing failed
“This was the genesis for them to create MapReduce, which they wrote a paper about. Which was a way to parallelize and break into pieces all the little bits of crawling and re-indexing the web.”
Alströmer: Pinterest acquires new users primarily via Google SEO
“If you think of Pinterest, SEO is the re, the real way how Pinterest is going. You type something in on Google, there already exists a Pinterest board for that, and you land on that Pinterest board. That's how they acquire new users.”
Rossmann: Make School Has Run Income Share Programs Since 2014
“We've been running the income share based program since 2014. So we actually have five years of data, our students getting jobs at Facebook, Google and Tesla and all these great companies.”
Schwartz: Google Play ranks apps based on all visible text fields
“So on Google, the way they rank an app is based on all the visible text. So it's the name of the app, which is sort of like the title. The short description, which is forget how many characters, but a shorter page description of the app, which you see right ab…”
Schwartz: Google will eventually understand images directly without alt text
“Google eventually will figure out what images are, and they're getting closer to figuring out what images are.”
Google's Series A investors required founders to hire an outside CEO
“I mean, this was back in the days when Google's VCs had invest, insisted that the founders hire an outside CEO as a condition of their Series A round.”
Buchheit: Google founders tried to sell for $1M to Yahoo and Excite
“Larry and Sergey were PhD students there. And they actually wanted to continue being PhD students and, like, finish their degree, so they went off and tried to sell Google to one of the big internet companies of the time, so, you know, Yahoo, Xsite, Infoseek. …”
Bernstam: Firebase pivoted from web chat into backend services before Google acquisition
“Well, Firebase did, right? So they were actually in our batch. They were a different company at the time. They were doing like basically chat for every website. They were trying to do that for everyone. And they ended up pivoting later into doing basically lik…”
Eck: Magenta has a core API enabling real-time MIDI AI collaboration
“I think the API, the core API that allows us to move music around in real time in MIDI, and actually have a meaningful conversation between an AI model and multiple musicians is there, and there's just a bunch more thinking that needs to happen, right, to get …”
Eck: Google AI Duet relies on simple 2002 RNN technology
“And what I noticed, even with AI Duet, which is this like web-based, like, it's a simple RNN. It's like, I can lay claim. It's technology that was published in 2002. It's really a very simple, really simple.”
Hwang: Google DeepDream's barbell representation always included human arms
“It turns out that when you ask it to see, like, ask it to reveal what, like, it thinks a barbell looks like, you know, barbells always show up with human arms attached to them.”
Zaremba: Google avoided ML in Search early on over interpretability issues
“Over the time Google search started to use machine learning because it was, it helps to improve results but simultaneously, they wanted to avoid it for some time as it's more difficult to interpret the results, and it's more difficult to actually understand wh…”