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 16 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
Microsoft messed up its AI search opportunity with Bing Chat
“Microsoft was never really good at consumer products for a long, long time. You can't suddenly change that. So they actually messed up the opportunity, in my opinion.”
Nadella: Just-in-time generated and packaged software will coexist
“So I think, yes, you can generate applications just in time. You could have a prefab application that is really helping with the feedback loop to the model, and I think both of these things will exist together.”
Nadella: AI model capability is overhyped relative to real-world impact
“That is the under-hyped story, I think. Because right now the over-hyped thing is the model capability, and the model capability is fantastic, but man, if we can somehow get the world to recognize that this is making a real difference in the lives of people ev…”
Nadella: Microsoft achieved physics breakthrough to fabricate Majorana quantum chip
“Finally we've had a physics breakthrough, and we were able to actually fabricate that particle, and so therefore that's what has led to this chip.”
Seibel: Microsoft Wins by Copying Startup Innovations Years Later
“A structural advantage with a product that's good enough can win. And man, it really helps when some startups specs the whole product for you. Right? Like Microsoft's move is to not innovate the good enough product. It's to copy it. Maybe five to 10 years late…”
Preskill: Validated topological qubit may appear as soon as 2019
“And it's very ambitious, because at this point, it's not even clear they have a single qubit, but if that approach is successful, and we're, it's making progress, so I think we will see a validated Qubit of this type soon, maybe next year.”
Nadella: AI foundation models are the modern equivalent of SQL engines
“So I think it's still possible for anyone to build an app tier on top of a model, and you have to sort of abstract yourself and say, yeah, the model is just like SQL was to me. And so I think that, I mean, I always dreamt of a moment when AI slash machine lear…”
Hale: Big Tech Experience Does Not Give Founders an Unfair Advantage
“And so if you think it's like, well, I'm a product manager at Google. There's a lot of product managers at Google. If you say you're an engineer at Microsoft, there's a lot of engineers at Microsoft. It's like, great, but it's not one that will make me think, …”
Field: Microsoft alerting Figma to viral internal adoption validated product-market fit
“In reality, it took until Microsoft told us, hey, this is spreading like wildfire, and we're asking ourselves, should we shut it down? Or you know, should we keep going? And the reason we're asking ourselves that is because you're not charging us. Maybe you sh…”
Nadella: World Bank study found AI copilots are top education tech intervention
“By the way, one of the other ones, since you brought it up, there was a World Bank study they did, I think in Nigeria, and now they've taken it to Peru or Chile, one of those in South America. It's, you know, we've been working at Microsoft forever on can ther…”
Nadella: System software is entering a golden age of infrastructure opportunity
“It's golden age of system software. Quite frankly you know, today, if I had to think about anybody who's building at the infrastructure layer, not just the hyperscalers, but even the startups, I think that's a tremendous opportunity.”
Nadella: Vision plus speech AI represents a transformative browser moment
“The two things that are just pretty surreal to me is kind of like a new browser moment, right? There is both vision and speech. I leave it on all the time. It can see what I see, and I can speak to it. That seems like a precision mouse movement, right, to me, …”
Blomfield: Startups must treat cloud and AI credits as cash costs
“So people at AWS, Microsoft, OpenAI, giving out tons and tons of credits to startups. You should treat those as a cash cost. Don't assume you'll have unlimited credits forever. It'll totally mess up your margins.”
Gil: Microsoft essentially bootstrapped via customer fees until its pre-IPO round
“Microsoft actually used to do this in the early days and they similarly never had to raise funding. They took one round right before they went public because of a relationship, but fundamentally they just bootstrapped.”
Nadella names VS Code and Excel as his favorite software products
“If somebody asks me what's my favorite product, it's always, you know, VS code is one and the other one is Excel.”
Ravisankar: Interview Street should have focused on 2-3 companies first
“I think we should have focused on, you know what, we're just going to focus on these two companies, mock interviews, right, versus Any tech company anywhere in the world, and we were scrambling for interviewers from Amazon, Google, Microsoft, all over. We shou…”