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 118 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 7 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
Hoffman: Trump abused state power for personal gain in first term
“Even in the first administration, there was the, there were some abuses of instruments of state for personal gain, for personal power. And that is, I think anti the spirit of anything in democracy, anti the spirit of anything in American.”
Hoffman: Buying Truth Social stock or crypto enables foreign political corruption
“What if foreign actors, Russia, others, were transferring economics to people with political power in order to influence the U.S. And what they're doing? You know, easy ways to do that are like, you know, buy true social stock. Easy ways to do that are buy fre…”
Hoffman: Medicare should eliminate public spending on end-of-life care
“And you go, well, look, there's a whole bunch of money that's spent on these last three to six months of life. Let's reduce the spending on that and say that is not a public, you know, a public expense. And let's increase, like, for example, preventative and o…”
ByteDance Will Delay TikTok Action Until After the US Presidential Election
“Likely, and I have no inside information here, I think ByteDance waits for the election, because they presume that Trump could get bought off by investors since, you know, he's a coin-operated person in his entire life, not just as in his presidency.”
Hoffman: Trade wars will cause a massive drop in U.S. prosperity
“The trade wars will create a massive drop in prosperity in the U.S.”
Hoffman: DOGE has zero chance of cutting $2T without defense cuts
“There is next to zero chance that the missions that they have declared will be successful because the only way to get two trillion out of the budget would be to massively reduce the deficit and reduce defense spending.”
Hoffman: China uses subsidies as mercantile warfare to destroy Western competition
“You're actually, in fact, trying to destroy our industry in the short term so that you can then raise prices later and capture it. That is mercantile warfare. Responding to mercantile warfare is completely fine.”
Hoffman: Prioritizing 'woke AI' is silly and misses AI's real stakes
“Now, the challenges would be is, what if he goes, no, no, the most important issue facing AI is woke AI. Because we have this calling card, which means a whole bunch of different kind of, You know, like, you know, these people are evil and terrible. That's sil…”
Hoffman: US should stop building aircraft carriers vulnerable to $2M hypersonic missiles
“We should not be building aircraft carriers. Aircraft carriers themselves cost billions, The planes on them are more billions. They put, you know, thousands of American lives on them, and in the modern world, you have to, like, sure, an aircraft carrier is gre…”
Hoffman: U.S. Should Ban TikTok Based on Commercial Reciprocity
“The right way, I think, to think about this from an American or any other perspective is to say China bans Competition in China from Meta, Twitter, etc. And so the right way to say is like, look, if you're banning our companies, we should ban yours. Commercial…”
Hoffman: Elon Musk's greatest strength and weakness stem from blind conviction
“Elon has a conviction that he, what he believes is true is absolutely true even when all of the evidence is against his belief, right? And so that allows him to do, I can see that we can colonize Mars, and here we go. Right? And that creates, you know, SpaceX,…”
Hoffman: Distinguish freedom of speech from freedom of reach in media
“The importance of freedom of speech, there's a really interesting distinction between freedom of speech and freedom of reach, right? So, if you're standing at the local corner, and standing on a soapbox, and saying, the moon is made out of blue cheese, and the…”
Hoffman: Media platforms should attach expert determinations to false claims
“Look, if I could, through a democratic process, because I believe in democracies, I believe in collective governance, get our society to agree to say, hey, what we should do is identify some topics that panels of experts can yield To a truth determination on. …”
Hoffman: Blocking tech acquisitions entrenches monopolies by deterring startup funding
“If you want competition with those large companies from startups, Investors, say for example, I'm an investor who's gonna put a billion dollars into a company that might compete with one of the large tech companies. I'm only gonna put the billion dollars in if…”
Reid Hoffman: Twitter is substantially worse post-Elon Musk acquisition
“With deep regret, I would say substantially worse.”
Hoffman predicts Bitcoin will approach $200,000 by the end of 2025
“I would say end of 25, so I'm approaching 200,000.”
Massive Tech Incumbents Funding Risky AI Projects Benefits Society
“And that actually is a feature, not a bug. Like part of the benefit you have is take this AI revolution we're in. Like it's because you have these large companies that can invest in multi-year risky projects that can create things that are massively valuable f…”
Microsoft Board Approved $1B for OpenAI Despite Having No Clear Product
“The very first OpenAI Microsoft deal was, you know, Satya and Kevin Scott brought to the Microsoft board. We want to put a billion dollars into the investment in this vehicle. From a five one C three that doesn't really have any particular plans at making its …”
Hoffman Offered to Cover OpenAI Salaries When Elon Musk Departed
“When Elon had announced to the company that he was leaving and not financing it anymore, and, you know, blah, blah, blah. And, you know, Sam called me, and I said, look, I'll cover the salaries, and on, and he asked me if he joined the board, and I said, yes, …”
Sam Altman Over-Indexed on AI Safety Advocates for OpenAI's Board
“I think he was making too much of a AI safety, you know, kind of, who are the most AI safety people, make sure they're on the board.”
Hoffman: LLM scaling continues and larger models will show new magic
“We're not reaching the upper end of LLM. The next large LLM that's training with a larger computer will still have new magic in it. The scale game is still playing.”
Hoffman: DOGE will not attempt to reform Medicare spending
“Now, again, you know, unfortunately, I would predict that they're not going to do that because it's a political third rail and it requires, you know, Courage and other things to go into it.”
Hoffman: Climate change priority will drop under the next US administration
“I think it's guaranteed, unfortunately, and given that it is an inevitable, it's a physics process. I worry about that. That's one of the I think likely outcomes of the next administration that will be a serious impact.”
Hoffman: Data centers and AI consume single-digit percentages of global power
“Data centers, I think, are something like, it's some single digit percentage of all power consumption. Like three, something, so it's not very big. And then AI within data centers is like, you know, a single digit percentage of that. So currently AI is not acc…”
Hoffman: Ukraine's initial defense would have failed without Starlink
“And by the way, the initial defense of Ukraine would not have worked without Starlink.”
Hoffman accuses the right wing of practicing cancel culture
“Is the right wing. Says woke. Is cancel culture. And yet, that's the shit they do. It's of course normalist and destructive.”
Hoffman: Brexit was a terrible idea for the UK
“Maybe I can say this as an American, you know, Brexit was a terrible idea.”
Reid Hoffman expects Trump administration to quietly preserve CHIPS Act work
“While I expect that the next administration, because they'll say everything the Biden administration did was terrible, we're tearing it all down, that they'll tear it down in words and then keep doing the work, right, would be my hope.”
Hoffman: LLM scaling is not out of data thanks to synthetic data
“It's like, well, actually, in fact, we can create synthetic data, and there's a ton of data that's out there that's not part of the standard internet training corpus. So, the scale game is still playing.”
Hoffman: Derailed Adobe acquisition will make me more money on Figma
“I mean, look, I'm an investor and all the rest, and I think Figma is an amazing company that's gonna, gonna, I'm probably going to make substantially more money because the deal was essentially derailed, but there was a bad theory of the case.”
American Electorate Has Forgotten Donald Trump's Corruption and Incompetence
“The American electorate right now hasn't really fully remembered the corruption and incompetencies of Trump.”
Putin Using AI Is a Greater Threat Than Autonomous Robots
“The real issue is AI is a human amplifier. I'm a lot less worried that the robots are coming than Putin is coming with his AI enablement.”
Professionals Not Using AI Will Be Incompetent Within Five Years
“I think that, call it five years from now, there won't be a professional doing professional activity who, if they're not using AI to help them with it, is being fully competent at the profession they're doing.”
Foundation AI Models Will Not Become Simple Commodities
“I do think that it won't be, that it's kind of like a grain, like grain of wheat. Or a pound of copper, you know, kind of in the classic thing. I think that foundation models will be different. They'll be different, like there'll be this one, there'll be found…”
Tech Industry Is Seeing an Effective Resumption of Moore's Law
“And so I think we're already in the equivalent of a resumption of the acceleration of Moore's law.”
Pure-Play AI Foundation Model Companies Will Be Viable Businesses
“So I think that there is literally no doubt in my mind that there's viable businesses that will play out, and... Purely in the foundation model. Purely in the foundation model”
Tech Is Expanding to 15 Global Giants, Not Consolidating to Three
“If what we were was, call it, seven big tech companies heading to three, then I would be concerned, right, because of, kind of, the monopoly effect. But I actually think we're seven big tech companies heading, like, 15.”
The Era of Creating New AI Frontier Models Is Over
“I think it's almost zero percent the way a frontier model created and the way the frontier models exist today. I think that wave is gone.”
Human Data Quantity Matters More Than High-Prestige Journalism Sources
“People frequently mistake what quality of data means because they think, oh, you have to train on the New York Times. And actually, in fact most of it is quantity of human data, not because you've had any particular journalist who's, who's got a particularly n…”
Startups Cannot Finance Pre-Revenue Billion-Dollar AI Compute Runs
“Look, if you're saying what really matters is, like, the driving function here will be the billion dollar compute run to make this model, it'll be very difficult for startups to do that, right? I mean, even in this more modern global venture capital where star…”
ChatGPT's Release Forced Google Onto Red Alert After Delaying Transformers
“Google Brain invents the kind of transformer and publishes it, and it's kind of bouncing around as kind of a research project, and it takes OpenAI developing it, scaling it, and releasing it as ChatGPT for Google to go on red alert and go, oh my god, we should…”
Sam Altman Sought Independent Board Governance Over a Rubber Stamp
“Sam was very very much wanted to have a board that was separate governance from himself. A lot of founders tend to set up as, no, the board is my rubber stamp vehicle.”
Peter Thiel's Greatest Weakness Is Assuming His Way Is the Only Way
“Oh look, super smart. I'd say his biggest strength Is a willingness to be contrarian based on first principles and an absolute, like, maximization of speed. Right? Like, can we have this done by the end of the day? But, you know, that kind of thing. And I thin…”
Every Smartphone User Will Daily Consult Personal AI Agents
“Well, one of them is I think even shorter than that, Every single person who has a smartphone will have one or more personal agents, personal AI agents, that's why we, in inflection we call it Pi, that is their agent, but it is like there for them, and on a wh…”
Smartphone AI Medical Assistants Will Soon Beat the Average General Practitioner
“I think your most important job is I have a line of sight to a medical tutor, or sorry, a medical assistant, probably better than your average general practitioner on every smartphone.”
Mark Zuckerberg's Strategic Pivot Into AI Is 100% Correct
“I think obviously the public market should have responded differently because I think he is a great, you know, kind of metastrategist, and his, you know, kind of turn into AI who's going to matter fundamentally here is a hundred percent correct.”