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 259 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 5 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
Chen: Smartphone choice has surpassed car brand as a primary consumer identity
“It's much more important whether you own an iPhone or an Android phone and what set of apps you use than whether you drive a Ford or a BMW or whatever.”
Chen: 25% of Facebook developers write deep learning code
“If you look at something like FB Learner Flow, which is Facebook's Automation workflow system for artificial intelligence. They've gotten it so good that 25% of their total software developer universe is writing deep learning. 25%, right?”
Frank Chen: Taping out a custom silicon ASIC costs $50 million
“It's fifty million dollars to tape out.”
Chen: App discovery shifts from home screens to voice assistants like Siri
“If you think about how do you find applications and content, we've gone from, well, the start button on your desktop OS controls that, right? You hit the start button and applications show up. Then we went to mobile, which was your home screen controls that, r…”
Chen: Apple and Google have fundamentally opposing data monetization models
“Apple and Google couldn't be more different on this, and Apple wants to emphasize the difference, which is, Apple says, we make money when you buy iPhones, so we don't have to monetize you in any other ways. We don't have to look in your email. We don't have t…”
Chen: Deep learning enables robots to cook from YouTube videos
“There are systems where robots are learning to cook food by watching YouTube videos of people cooking food. There's systems that can take photos and paint them in the style of Renoir or Van Gogh. There's algorithms that can create paintings that are indistingu…”
Frank Chen: Startups will pioneer continuous customer engagement in insurance
“It's gonna need startups to show the way of what insurance companies ought to do in their ongoing customer journey, as opposed to the existing companies doing it.”
Chen: Cyber loss coverage will be a fastest-growing insurance category
“And so this is going to be one of the fastest growing categories of an entirely new type of insurance, which is I will insure you against cyber losses.”
Frank Chen: Most future video content will be crowdsourced
“What we're moving towards is a world in which most of the video content will get crowdsourced, right?”
Chen: Bloomberg forecasts global petroleum demand will peak in 2020
“Bloomberg's forecasts, even off the more pessimistic IEA base, are that we're going to reach peak petroleum demand in 2020 and we're never going to look back. That between efficiency gains for existing gas-powered cars and the introduction of electric vehicles…”
Chen: Proprietary EV charging connectors harm the entire industry
“Nobody benefits from proprietary charging connectors.”
Chen: Autonomous car brands will matter as little as airplane manufacturers
“The make and model of the car will become the least important, and in fact, you don't care about the decision in the same way that most of us don't care about whether we're riding in Boeing or Airbus or Embraer airplane.”
Chen: 'Smartphone-ness' is replacing 'carness' as the primary vehicle buying criterion
“One of the things that's already true about cars is the carness of the car. Has become much less important a buying criteria already, and the smartphone-ness of it has become much more important, and this trend will just accelerate into the future.”
Chen: EV manufacturing costs will match gas cars by 2025 without subsidies
“Most analysts assume that electric cars will be as cheap to produce as gas-powered cars with no government subsidies by twenty-twenty-five.”
Chen: Speech recognition AI error rates dropped below human levels
“Human word error rate is about five or six percent. If you talk to a human, they will get five or six percent of the words wrong. The algorithms are now at four percent and folly.”
Cardiogram predicts sleep apnea and hypertension using standard smartwatch heartbeat data
“Using that exact same data, they were able to predict whether you had sleep apnea. They were able to predict hypertension. And these things, traditionally, you'd have to have dedicated medical devices for. But just off the heartbeat data, we can predict whethe…”
Frank Chen: Automation won't cause joblessness due to infinite human wants
“I think so long as we have the capacity to want new things, we will always be creating jobs to satisfy those demands.”
Chen: Non-autonomous vehicles will soon seem odd to future generations
“The technology will become pervasive and it will seem odd to our children or our grandchildren that something moves but can't move itself and can't get itself from point A to point B all by itself.”
Frank Chen: AI image classifiers are now more accurate than humans
“In fact, the most accurate image classifiers, as these are called, are basically better than humans at classifying the objects in a picture.”
Frank Chen: Vision AI will shift farming to plant-by-plant fertilization
“And so when AI makes it cheap for us to see and understand what's going on in the world, we won't fertilize fields anymore. We will fertilize individual heads of lettuce.”
Chen: Humans fail at optimization beyond four dimensions while AI excels
“And after about three or four dimensions, your mind just kind of gives up. Your brain isn't programmed or optimized for that type of mathematical optimization, but machine learning algorithms love lots of data and are able to do this in a way that human brains…”
Chen: Real-time earpiece language translation is near commercial deployment
“We're very close to the time that we can just pop something into our ear and hear another language being translated in real time.”
Chen: Self-Driving Cars Will Blend Deep Learning and Rule-Based Code
“And so I think we're going to see some blend of these techniques, but it's a tribute to the power of deep learning and how effective those techniques that we're even having this conversation that you could build an end to end deep learning car.”
Chen: Tesla Gigafactory will surpass pre-2013 global battery output by 2020
“When it's in full production in 2020, this Gigafactory will produce more batteries each year than were produced in the entire world cumulatively through 2013.”
Chen: Algorithms can predict skin cancer from selfies and depression from voice
“We can use selfies to predict skin cancer. We can use changes in your voice to predict depression or on early onset Alzheimer's.”
Chen: Predictive health technology lacks business, privacy, and ethical frameworks
“What's missing is a business model and a privacy model and an ethical framework to tie these two pieces together.”
Chen: Smart toilets in the 2030s will monitor health via urine analysis
“Now, it doesn't look like it's changed much, but like most other things in her house, this has become a smart toilet. It measures 10 properties of her urine, including glucose, and it looks for health problems before they become actual health problems.”
Chen: Kitchen and delivery robots will automate personalized meal services
“Once they've built the meals, they'll deliver them to her autonomously via delivery robot, and we're going to use kitchen robots inside the kitchens to keep the cost of all this personalization down.”
Chen: Future dietary protein will be supplied by bioreactor-grown cultured meats
“Now, one intriguing place where she could get protein, because she needs protein, she's training for the marathon, is with something called cultured meats, meats that we're going to grow in a bioreactor.”
Chen: AR contact lenses with built-in projectors will display real-world overlays
“So we'll have tiny projectors and cameras built into contact lenses so she can just pop into her eyes and they'll work in conjunction with nearby computers to basically give her a heads up display on the real world. As people come into her field of view, she'l…”
Chen: Morning people and night owls peak at opposite times for creative work
“If you're a morning person, you're best off doing your focused analytical work in the morning and your creative work in the afternoon. But if you're a night owl like my wife, it's actually reversed. You're best off doing your creative work in the morning and y…”
Chen: Custom apparel design research will be automated within hours by 2030s
“In the 20 thirties, this is going to be automated with software in a matter of hours.”
Chen: Real-Time Translation Will Become Mainstream in VR Rooms
“But the VR room, like all VR rooms, will do real-time translation, so they all hear each other's native languages. This is the product that the CIA director was hoping for. It's going to be mainstream in these VR rooms.”
Chen: Software will automate global A/B testing within hours by the 2030s
“But in the 20 thirties, all of this software automates this process. So we can literally run the process the same afternoon.”
Chen: Consumers will accept weird-looking robotics to maintain independent living
“And look, I know this thing looks really weird, but if it was my choice between weird looking and being able to live independently for a few years longer, I know which choice I'd make.”
Frank Chen: Inverted supply chains will allow influencers to launch custom apparel brands
“We've seen a flipped supply chain that allows people with big fan bases to actually make their own lifestyle brands, make clothes for them.”
Frank Chen: Drone racing in malls and glowing pets will emerge by 2030
“And we've seen a set of new experiences, going to a mall to watch drone racing or having a glow in the dark pet.”
Chen: Robotic furniture requires no tech breakthroughs and exists today
“Actually, no technology breakthrough needed at all. You can actually go buy this today if you wanted, so we know how to make robotic furniture.”
Chen: Scaling IoT devices to hundreds will require UX design breakthroughs
“And so we're going to need a breakthrough in usability design that makes the experience of upgrading software for all of the devices in our house, every light bulb, every plug, every shirt, so that we're not getting prompted all the time. And we're definitely …”
Chen: Cows cause 17% of global greenhouse gas emissions
“17% of all greenhouse gas emissions are caused by cows burping and farting.”
Chen: Most technology for autonomous pod transportation already exists
“It turns out that most of the technology that we need to build the Autopod already exists, because it's a subset of what we need to build for self-driving cars.”
Frank Chen: Average founder-investor relationship lasts 8 to 12 years
“As Scott will point out, the average length of time that you will work with a venture investor, eight, 10, 12 years, is longer than the average marriage.”
Chen: VCs expect half of portfolio companies to fail
“Realizing that like half your portfolio is going to go belly up anyway.”
Accenture CTO: AI enterprise growth outperforms all prior tech trends
“He's seen the rise of smartphones, and he says he has seen nothing grow as fast in businesses as AI.”
Chen: 78% of organizational customer interactions still happen via voice
“It turns out that when you interact with an organization, 78% of those interactions still occur over voice, which is pretty surprising in the era of text and websites.”
Chen: 90% of global factory work is still done manually by humans
“Despite our massive investment in robotics technology worldwide, something like 90% of all factory work is still done by human hands.”
Chen: Drishti AI boosts factory labor productivity 25% and halves error rates
“Customers that have deployed Drishti Are experiencing 25% increases in labor productivity and error rates are going down by half.”
Chen: Doxel AI helped Kaiser Permanente finish San Diego project 11% under budget
“Customers like Kaiser Permanente that are using this technology are finding almost, ah, incredible, 38% increases in labor productivity, and they recently finished one of their buildings in San Diego, 11% under budget, by noticing things like, uh-oh, the elect…”