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 19 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
Thousands of potential Einsteins and Musks never reach their full potential
“I firmly believe that for every Albert Einstein, Marie Curie, or Elon Musk, there are thousands more that never fully bloom, that never fully blossom, and become their fully realized version of themselves”
Silicon Valley will solve its housing crisis and remain the tech hub
“I think we will. I think Silicon Valley has managed to produce significantly harder innovations than fixing housing, but I think that's the ticket to becoming the home for things like cryptocurrency and longevity, because ultimately people need to be able to a…”
Gross: Airbnb likely would not exist without Michael Seibel and YC
“It is less likely that Airbnb would have been created had Michael Seibel not recruited the founders to Y Combinator, introduced them to Paul Graham, the program had been set up in place, the investment been available, demo day being available”
Gross: AI platform startups face tough competition from TensorFlow and incumbents
“Second is for the platform companies, I do think there's a less obvious but likely business model as well. Less obvious because unlike the database analogy I provided, it's not immediately clear that there'll be An Oracle or a MySQL, that is to say, a company …”
The real value of the Ivy League is community, not curriculum
“Because fundamentally what we want to do is we want to build something that has the real benefits of the Ivy League, which is not, in my opinion, the curriculum. It is the community and the network.”
Religion is a potent tool that gets people playing infinite games
“I do think religion is an incredibly potent tool. I think it can be used like everything that's powerful. And I think it basically gets people playing an infinite game”
Gross: No independent company exists solely because of modern ML
“Currently, the way you kind of look at the world today, there is yet to be an independent entity that you could really say is an AI company, or I think a better framework for this only exists because of the kind of latest and greatest machine learning technolo…”
Gross: Autonomous driving startups are operating without LIDAR
“And there certainly are startups that are working on autonomy, literally with cameras and deep learning alone without the help of LIDAR.”
Gross: Machine learning-enabled software will eat traditional software
“I think that there are going to be business models of taking AI and applying it to a vertical in the same way that you could literally take the advent of the database and apply it to a vertical. You know, software eats the world. Is a quote I think originally …”
US productivity and innovation growth has dropped below one percent
“Economic productivity in the United States and innovation in the United States has slowed down from just below two percent to below a percent over the course of the past few decades.”
Pioneer aims to eventually distribute grants to one million people
“Our dream one day is to be able to hand out grants to a million people, and we just need to figure out a way where we can create the capital to do that.”
Riding a Jump e-bike felt like using the first iPhone
“And it was the closest thing to trying an iPhone for the first time. It was that level of experience. And I hadn't had that in almost a decade.”
Gross: AI in 2017 mirrors the 2005 big data hype cycle
“AI today is a little bit like that kind of big data trend everyone talked about in 2005 and six, where it's changing the world in a bunch of different ways that I'll detail in a moment. But it's not really living up to, I think, all the hype, and that's probab…”
Gross: Humans consistently fail to predict when research becomes a commodity
“I also think that we are very, very bad as a species at predicting when things that are the far end of research are about to become a commodity.”
Gross: Breakthroughs in reinforcement learning will transition to market quickly
“Because when something really big happens with, say, reinforcement learning, which is an area mostly attributed to research today, it's going to happen really quickly.”
Gross: Y Combinator launches YCAI as its first AI vertical
“We launched this thing called YCAI, which is an experiment, and it's a really, it's our first vertical of YC that's dedicated to AI”
Gross: Bad engineers over-apply AI to problems lacking ambiguity
“Really great machine learning engineers have the same characteristic that really great all engineers have, which is they're kind of lazy, and they want to find the kind of Occam's razor, the dumbest way to fix the problem, and the bad ones want to kind of over…”
Daniel Gross reveals angel investment in Parker Conrad's Rippling
“My most recently announced investment is a company called Rippling, which was started by the CEO of Zenefits, Parker Conrad”
SpaceX began as a temporary project to photograph a plant on Mars
“SpaceX with all of its grand and glory was started as effectively almost as like a Hollywood ask moonshot project to just like take a photo of a plant on Mars, and Elon was going to find some Russian rockets to just send a bunch of stuff to Mars, cameras, take…”