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 18,204 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 249 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
Morell: Intelligence Case for Iraq WMDs Was Stronger Than Bin Laden Case
“And the punchline, right, the punchline was, Mr. President the case that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction was stronger than the case that Bin Laden is. You could hear a pin drop in the Situation Room, and it was true, right?”
Morell: Backed Apple over FBI in encryption debate to avoid vulnerabilities
“On the encryption debate, I was actually not where you would expect me to be. I was not on the side of the FBI. I was on Apple's side, because by forcing Apple to create a key for its keyless encryption, you were creating another huge security vulnerability.”
Harari: Swearing on the Bible is like swearing on Harry Potter
“And even when people testify in court, I swear to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, they swear on the Bible, which is so full of fictions and myth and error. It's like you can swear on Harry Potter just the same.”
Harari: Corporations and governments will soon understand individuals better than themselves
“What we will see with regard to the individual is that at a certain point, external entities, whether it's corporations or whether it's governments, they will have enough data, especially biometric data, and enough computing power to be able to understand me b…”
Buterin: Ethereum and Bitcoin are useless for many apps due to scalability
“So, you know, Ethereum, Bitcoin, Bitcoin Classic, and Bitcoin with Segwit, like, all four of those are just pretty much completely useless for a lot of what people want to do because the scalability just isn't high enough.”
Ross: Declassified US estimate puts Chinese cyber IP theft above $300B annually
“When I was in government, we declassified a national intelligence estimate, which we tend not to do. Well, we declassified a national intelligence estimate that actually put a number on the amount of intellectual property theft taking place because of cyber at…”
Ross: Iranians repurposed US malware to destroy 30,000 Saudi Aramco computers
“I've seen evidence that the malware that the United States is alleged to have used against Iran it looks like, if you look at the code base, it looks like Much of that code was used by the Iranians against the Saudis in attack, in an attack against Saudi Aramc…”
Mason: Candidates objecting to progressive equity caps are bad fits
“In terms of the downside of executive recruiting, I mean, I just think anybody that feels like, ah, you know, you're capping me out or you're taxing me. I don't know. Like that person's an asshole. I don't really want to work with them.”
DoD preparing counterattack framework against major cyberattacks on US firms
“We are also working on which combination of defense, intervention, and even counterattack In order to tell people that if they attack Americans in cyberspace, at a certain level, we're gonna regard that as an attack.”
Andreessen: Consumers who use weak passwords should be held legally liable
“Consumers like who use bad passwords, like ought to be held liable for the consequence. Like consumers at some point, like at some point as an adult, you learn that when you leave your house at night, you lock the door, right? Consumers at some point are going…”
Carter: Chinese state-sponsored cyber aggressors are smart and largely unopposed in US
“Jim Comey is basically telling the truth. The Chinese government-sponsored and at kind of one arm's length proxy I.T. Aggressor, ah, services are large, they're smart and they're largely unopposed in this country”
Katie Haun admits the majority of ICOs are frauds or scams
“Look, initial coin offerings or ICOs, I'll be the first to tell you, there is a tremendous amount the majority of them are, seem to be, Frauds or scams.”
Krugman: Significant probability Bitcoin's value eventually drops to zero
“Now, I'm not a hundred percent sure of that, but maybe, ah, ah, but I think that there's a certainly a, I would say a quite significant probability that the whole thing just drops to zero, ah, because I have not yet seen any reason why this has to be a valuabl…”
Geoffrey Hinton: Backpropagation is a dead end for reaching general intelligence
“He says, I think we need a reboot. I think the path that I set everybody on, and fundamentally an algorithm called backpropagation, I think that's a dead end. I think if we want general intelligence, we're going to need to invent a new technique. We're going t…”
Pande: Cancer could easily not exist in 10 years
“Cancer could easily just not exist in 10 years, and that's due to this change in how we think about things, and there's all these things on the back end.”
Verdian: Only 20 of 3,000 US VC firms consistently returned 3x net
“Like, we've looked at the data of 3000 venture capital firms in the U.S. Only 20 have achieved consistent three X net returns over the last two decades.”
Chi: Meta Llama 4 Underperformed on Private Benchmarks Despite Public Scores
“One of the early indications of that you saw was when Meta released Lama four that was a bit of a disaster, and interestingly, what we saw is that on our held out private benchmarks, the model is actually underperforming, but on all of the major public benchma…”
Chi: AI data vendors create gimmick benchmarks to sell data
“And actually a lot of that industry has now Built these gimmick style benchmarks as a mechanism to sell their data. And so that, that's become kind of their go-to-market as well.”
Bancel: Moderna's mRNA shot is the first cancer vaccine that works
“Here it's the first time there is a cancer vaccine working. The field, as you know, has been doing that for 20 plus years. I think more than a thousand clinical trials that have all failed.”
CCP Launders Anti-Data Center Campaigns Through TikTok, Asserts Gavin Baker
“Like there is an organized CCP funded campaign. I think against data centers here in America. Like I think a lot of it gets laundered through TikTok and it's just tragic because the other thing that's happening is this is re-industrializing America.”
Starship Reusability Drops Orbital Compute Launch Costs Under $1B per Gigawatt
“What you have to compare it to is the cost of launch, and with Starship reusability, that goes to under a billion, so the economics just instantly flip.”
Musk and Huang Co-Designed an Orbital NVIDIA Rubin Rack for 2027
“Elon said that he and Jensen have co-designed a Reuben rack. And there, it's gonna launch in the fourth quarter of 27.”
Microsoft Failed to Build Competitive In-House Frontier AI Models
“They clearly tried to make a frontier model. They failed. You know, Satya said, we're gonna have our own models that are very competitive. Like, I think he said that 18 months ago. They don't have their own models that are competitive.”
Acharya: Early-stage AI startups can productively deploy $100M
“There is a case for a company that raises a hundred million dollars, uses it productively and in a focused way, and is able to deliver a different value proposition than the very same team would be able to do with 20.”
Casado: Google's AI models are getting trounced by OpenAI and Anthropic
“Google is Google. They have all the data, they have all the intelligence and like their models are getting trounced. By open AI and by anthropic.”
Gaybrick: Global Software Engineers Will Increase Despite AI Efficiencies
“And so I think there will be more software engineers in the world.
we will need few of that, fewer of them to do the things we're already doing.”
Gaybrick: AI Agents Review Code Better Than Humans Did
“But even then agents are doing code review even better than humans did before.”
Horowitz: Uber's post-Kalanick culture became much more milquetoast
“The culture they went to, which was a reaction to the resistance, just ended up being a much more milquetoast culture than the original Uber culture was a special very pronounced culture.”
Tan: Companies can reach $15M ARR in four months with two people
“Literally, you can go from zero to 15 mil ARR in about four months with, like, two or three people and, like, hundreds of agents. Like, you know, a few hundred skill files.”
Garry Tan: AI startups will not replace incumbent giants like Microsoft
“There are real motes to these things. Like, there are structural reasons why a Microsoft isn't going anywhere. And then, I guess, This is sort of a little antithetical to what most, you know, most people in Silicon Valley would say, like, I want to start up to…”
Tan: San Francisco ABC affiliate refused to cover anti-Asian hate crimes
“ABC News you know, literally the mainstream media TV channel of San Francisco and the Bay Area would not cover anti-Chinese and anti-Asian crime.”
Massa: Kavak AI sales agents convert 2.1x better than human teams
“And it, at first it converted, like, 50% more than our human team, and now it's converting over that, like, 2.1 x more.”
Massa: AI will likely be capable of CEO roles by 2035
“Is, is AI going to be able to do this job, like even the CEO job or jobs where the leadership is? And the answer honestly is probably yes. Like in 2035 with a rate of improvement, it will be able to do so.”
Massa: Kavak Uses AI Agents as Managers Over Human Workers
“And then if you look at Kavak now, any process, it's really a collaboration of, Agents and humans, and sometimes like agents are the bosses or of humans, and sometimes humans are designing the agents.”
Massa: Multi-Agent Graph Harnesses Constrain Advanced Model Intelligence
“The intelligence now doesn't need like the graph and the multi-agent lattice work and harness because it will constrain this level of intelligence.”
Ayrey: AI alignment should prioritize cyber threats over nuclear weapon creation
“I think when it comes to alignment issues, no one needs to worry about these models making it materially easy to build nuclear weapons, because you need to procure fissile material to do that. It's not going to make it easier to build weapons. Everyone needs t…”
Moe: Developers abandon proprietary models due to false-positive safety guardrails
“A lot of our developer within Infrax and for VLM are like retreating from using Fable five because you have a two hour job and you trigger the red line, which is false positive. And then you have to lose all of your work. And so a lot of our developer are usin…”
Moe: Open and closed AI models have no capability gap today
“In the end, there's not much differentiation. It's more about the distribution strategy and go-to-market strategy. And the capability wise, I don't really see a big gap, not even today, because for how these models are coming to being, they're really starting …”
Moe: Model distillation is not the primary driver of Chinese AI progress
“So I really don't think from currently what we're seeing this is a big cornerstone of what's powering the progress today. In the end, what's powering the progress is still just really smart people with very interesting algorithms, data environment, and they wi…”
Sreenivas: AI startups relying permanently on FDEs become glorified consultancies
“Once you know what the workflow is, you should not be relying on forward deployed engineers anymore, because once you know what the workflow is, If you can productize it, you should productize it and then become, you know, typical company with these scaling pr…”
Zhang: Decagon's most recent customer churned from competitor Sierra
“Our most recent customer actually turned off of Sierra to come to Decagon”
Kalanick: Uber's 2017 board battle would differ with Andreessen or Horowitz
“That wouldn't have gone that way if Ben or Mark was on the board.”
Kalanick continues to stand by every decision he made at Uber
“I continue to stand by every decision I made at Uber.”
Kalanick: Uber ran internal program 'shoplifting' to recruit Lyft drivers
“We had this thing where we would, against Lyft, we would we would recruit the drivers on Lyft to bring them over to Uber, so that it was hard for Lyft to build supply. And we would aggressively do it, and we had a program for it internally, which we called sho…”
Horowitz: Big AI labs stumble due to employee addiction to public validation
“Why did the big labs, you know, smack themselves in the face? Well, it's because they need that external validation for their employees, because their employees are addicted to it.”
Kalanick: Uber declined to acquire Lyft over cultural integration challenges
“That's why I didn't buy Lyft.”
Horowitz: US lost manufacturing skill outside of Elon Musk's companies
“We were the best in the world by far. We taught the world how to do was manufacture, and now we've basically forgotten how to do it as a country other than like Elon. Like if you need somebody who knows how to manufacture, you literally have to get them from E…”