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 52 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 1 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
Aidan Gomez: Becoming dependent on cloud providers is dangerous for AI startups
“It's really dangerous when you make yourself a subsidiary of your cloud provider.”
Gomez: OpenAI's AGI effort is taking a backseat to consumer products
“At least like lately, or in the new OpenAI they're like a product company. They're like hardcore building a consumer product. That is their objective, and it's working. People love that product. It's, you know, a household name at this point. So I think in the…”
Aidan Gomez: AI agent developers are disadvantaged without owning model architecture
“If you're not able to actually transform the model to be better at the thing that you care about, if you're not the one building the model, if you're just a consumer of the model you're structurally disadvantaged to build that product.”
Aidan Gomez: AI Will Not Cause Mass Unemployment
“The fears around displacement and replacement, both on the consumer side, where we're all gonna get addicted to chatting to these chatbots, and on the workplace, the end of work, you know, there's gonna be mass unemployment. I can't see that happening.”
Gomez: In-person work provides an unquantifiable productivity lift over remote
“In-person is just so much better. It's just, you can't even quantify the productivity lift from in-person work.”
Aidan Gomez: There is no market for last year's AI models
“The reality of the matter is there's no market for last year's model.”
Aidan Gomez: AI ecosystem will feature both vertical and horizontal models
“I think we'll continuously exist in a world of multiple models, some focused and verticalized, others completely horizontal.”
Aidan Gomez: Curriculum learning has failed in machine learning
“What's funny is that curriculum learning has actually failed in machine learning. We don't really do curriculum learning. It's just throw the hardest material and the easiest material all at the same time and let the model figure it out.”
Gomez: 13-billion-parameter models now outperform original 1.7-trillion GPT-4
“GPT-IV, if it's true what they say, and it's 1.7 trillion parameters, this big MOE, we have models that are better than that model that are like, thirteen billion parameters.”
Gomez: AI requires exponential compute scaling for linear intelligence gains long-term
“Yeah, I mean, I think it certainly requires exponential input. You know, you need to continuously be doubling your compute in order to sustain linear gains in, in intelligence. But I think that probably goes on for a very, very, very long time.”
Gomez: Pure compute scaling requires becoming a tech giant subsidiary
“If you're just doing the scaling project, you have to be one of those, or you have to be an effective subsidiary of one of those companies.”
Gomez: Data improvements drive nearly all open-source AI model gains
“Pretty much all of the major gains that we've seen in the open source space have come from data improvements.”
Gomez: Current LLM API market is dominated by synthetic data generation
“The current LLM API market is dominated by synthetic data.”
Gomez: Selling Standalone AI Models Will Become a Zero-Margin Business
“If you're only selling models, it's going to be difficult because it's going to be like a zero margin business because there's so much price dumping.”
Gomez: AI Value Currently Accrues at the Chip and Application Layers
“Value is accruing beneath, like at the chip layer, because everyone is spending insane amounts of money on chips to build these models in the first place, and then above, at the application layer, where you see stuff like let's say ChatGPT, which is charged on…”
Gomez: Choice in the AI chip market will expand faster than expected
“Right now, chips are just exceptionally high margin, and there's very, very little choice in the market. That's changing. I think it's gonna change faster than other people think. But yeah, I, I'm very confident.”
Gomez: Google TPUs are now viable for super large-scale AI training
“You can definitely train big models on TPUs. Those are actually now a usable platform for super large scale model training, and I think Google has proven that quite convincingly.”
Gomez: Non-experts cannot perceive improvements between frontier AI model generations
“Because these models are getting smarter, humanity's ability to distinguish between them, or not humanity, but each individual's ability to distinguish between them becomes way harder. You can't tell the difference between generations, because you're not enoug…”
Gomez: Cohere avoids the hyper-inflated valuations of AI comparables
“We are actually in a dramatically better position than a lot of our comparables. Because our valuation is not at the crazy state that a lot of others are.”
Gomez: Software companies shouldn't fear AI margin compression as costs plunge
“For folks like Canva who are keeping the same price I mean, I think it's a good bet. They want to grow their user base. They want to expand their user set. Just give them the most useful product possible. At the moment, don't worry about margins because the co…”
Gomez: Financial services firms are pulling back from cloud to build data centers
“When I speak to folks, It's super conflicted in financial services. Yeah. People are pulling away from cloud. They're pulling away from cloud. They're building out their own data center capacity. Everywhere else still seems to be, we need to migrate to cloud.”
Gomez: AI hallucination rates are falling fast, but will never reach zero
“The models definitely do hallucinate. The hallucination rates have been dropping dramatically, but they'll, they'll always have some chance of making stuff up or getting something wrong.”
Gomez: Microsoft Copilot will not achieve complete enterprise workforce augmentation
“I think Copilot is great, and it's like the right idea of augmenting a workforce with a, with an assistant but it's siloed, again, within an ecosystem, so it's, it plugs into Office and, you know, the Microsoft suite of products, but enterprises don't just use…”
Gomez: Google Brain Trained Language Models Two Weeks After Transformer Paper
“Well, they weren't in the sense that, like, two weeks after we released the Transformer paper, we started training language models. So we, like, technologically and research-wise Google brain was certainly not behind.”
Gomez: Believing AI progress has plateaued is completely wrong
“I think there's sort of like a meme that's going around of people saying, we've plateaued, nothing's coming, it's slowing down. I actually really think that's wrong.”
Aidan Gomez: Enterprise Buyers Will Not Buy Major Purchases From AI Bots
“If I'm getting sold to by a bot, I'm not buying. It's that simple. I don't want to talk to a machine. I like for certain like simple purchases, maybe, but for the purchases that count, The ones that matter to me and my company. I would want a human accountable…”
Aidan Gomez: Cheap, robust humanoid robotics will be cracked within 5 to 10 years
“Soon, someone's gonna crack the nut of general purpose humanoid robotics that are cheap and robust. And so that will be a, that'll be a big shift. I don't know if that comes in the next five years or 10 years. But it's going to be somewhere in that range.”
Aidan Gomez: Rejects Hinton's AI doomsday view, aligns with LeCun
“No, I'm way more aligned with Yan and his beliefs about AI. So Jeff is like very, you know, doomsday pilled and thinks that this technology is gonna destroy the world. Yan is much more optimistic, and I'm aligned in that direction.”
Gomez: Yann LeCun has become an 'Elon reply guy'
“I think that Unfortunately, Jan has kind of become an Elon reply guy.”
Gomez: European culture is hostile towards tech and obsessed with regulation
“The culture is just hostile towards tech. It's hostile. Like the solution to tech is regulation in the European mind.”
Aidan Gomez: AI market will definitely undergo consolidation
“There's going to be a consolidation in the space for sure.”
Gomez: Cohere does not train AI models on customer enterprise data
“Especially with enterprises, they never let you train on their data. And so we can't train on any of our customers' data.”
Gomez: Cohere Will Soon Expand Its Product Suite Beyond Model APIs
“I don't want to name names, but let's say Coherit right now only sells models. We have an API, and you can access our models through that API. I think that that will change soon. There are going to be changes in the product landscape and what we offer to sort …”
Gomez: GUIs Are Not Dead and Should Not Be Fully Replaced by Chat
“Chat as an interface onto everything, I don't think makes sense. I don't want to have to type out explicitly my instructions to get stuff done. Like sometimes I just want to click some buttons and go through a GUI and get the job done. So yeah, I don't think l…”
Gomez: Building last year's AI model gets 10x to 100x cheaper annually
“It becomes cheaper to build last year's model by like a factor of 10 or a hundred each year. We just get better data, cheaper compute. So yeah, it definitely lowers the barrier to the previous generation of models.”
Gomez: Ilya Sutskever envisioned compute scaling years before GPT-1
“They pave the way. Like, just sort of like a irrational conviction to this vision of scaling, and I think that, that was driven by, I remember talking to Ilya about this stuff way before GPT-One, you know, like in the Transformer times, around that time becaus…”
Gomez: Enterprise concern over AI hallucinations is overblown relative to human error
“We exist in a world with humans, and humans hallucinate. Constantly. We get stuff wrong, we, you know, misremember things, and so we exist in a world that's robust to error, and so I think there's too much emphasis on that.”
Aidan Gomez: Enterprise software is extremely sticky and persists for decades
“The other thing is that you forget how sticky enterprise software is. There's not a lot of like mass displacement of enterprise software. It kind of just stays for decades. It's really hard to displace an enterprise software company.”
Gomez: Cohere Has Top AI Researchers, Ecosystem Talent Is Now Distributed
“Cohere. But other than Cohere, I think it's quite distributed at this stage. It used to be very concentrated. It used to be like Google Brain.”
Gomez: OpenAI's Best Move Was Pursuing the Scaling Hypothesis
“The scale hypothesis, for sure. Like, just that scaling is gonna sustain, and that we should continue to 10 x, 10 x, 10 x, 10 x. Yeah, so many people didn't believe in that. There was so much pushback on it. It was just like, Such a stupid, superfluous effort …”
Gomez: AI reasoning and planning capabilities will soon hit production
“For the past year, year plus, folks have been focusing on that, and it will be ready for production. And so we'll see that come out, and I think that will be a big change in terms of capability.”
Aidan Gomez: Chatbots Will Not Replace Dating or Cause Birth Rates to Plummet
“There's no world where suddenly we all start dating chatbots and, you know, human birth rates plummet. I don't think that happens, right?”
Gomez: AI models are hyper-sensitive to single bad data examples
“Like a single bad example, right, amongst, like, billions. Like, it's so sensitive. Like, it is a bit surreal how sensitive The models are to their data. Everyone underrates it.”
Gomez: Shifting Europe's anti-tech regulation mindset might take a decade
“I think there's pressure to change though, and France is becoming much more ambitious and making a lot of noise on the European stage as well as the global stage about we need to be more progressive. It might take a decade though.”
Aidan Gomez: Video games teach founders resilience and willingness to grind
“Video games teach something to you. You're much more Willing to grind. Right. To just do repetitive, difficult, painful things towards some broader goal. So that sort of resilience I think is important. And then also the fact that you can respond. Like you get…”
Gomez: Cohere won't build data centers because cloud pricing is cheaper
“We're an economically rational actor, and so if it's cheaper for us to build out our own data centers, we'll go do that. We've run the numbers, and we feel confident that the price we're getting from our providers makes that not a really attractive path.”
Gomez: Industry took two to three years to realize language model scaling worked
“With language modeling and the whole scaling project, I thought the world would catch on way faster to that piece. It started to become really obvious, but then it was two, three years before everyone woke up, and it sort of hit the world.”