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 4,336 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
Five well-known lines of code can bypass FireEye's security tools
“And so, you know, you look at FireEye, there are five lines of code that are well known that get you around FireEye. You look at Emmet, you look at a lot of these tools that are preventative, there are known ways to get around them.”
Brett Hagler: Red Cross raised $500M for Haiti but built six homes
“The Red Cross, this is an article that came out a couple months ago. They raised what was called a half billion dollars for Haiti after the earthquake. And they made a lot of promises to build homes and things like that. And after five years, they've built six…”
Dixon: Sugar will be the biggest killer of this generation
“Sugar is the new smoking. It's going to you know, kill, it's going to be by far the biggest killer of this generation.”
De Grey: Amyloid clearance is solved but requires combination therapies for Alzheimer's
“Well, in one case, Alzheimer's disease, that's also, that's very much in clinical trials, and we basically solve the problem. That can now be eliminated. It doesn't have much effect on Alzheimer's disease on its own, but it's a fair bet that in combination wit…”
Ashatosh: Azure and IBM will beat AWS in enterprise cloud within two years
“In fact, we predict that the number one enterprise cloud in the next two years is probably going to be Azure, and not AWS, just because they are sucking up a tremendous amount of footprint of applications. And number two actually might be IBM, and not AWS, as …”
Patrick Byrne predicts a 2008-level economic crisis within two to three years
“I also think there's going to be quite soon a big, in the next two or three years, a big disruption in our economy. I think in oh eight or worse is going to happen, and with each disruption, people will shift farther into online, and then it ratchets.”
Hearn: Reaching Bitcoin capacity limits will kick users out of the system
“At worst, things break quite badly, but even at best, even if things don't break, some users won't be able to use Bitcoin, right? They will be kicked out of the system, effectively. There won't be enough capacity to handle them.”
McMaster: Apple faces margin pressure and negligible emerging market share
“I believe over time, Apple's even going to have products. You know, problems, because they're not going to be able to sustain these margins, and in these markets where Android is dominant, Apple's market share will be negligible. Right? As these markets contin…”
Benioff: 90% of enterprise software is bought in just seven countries
“No. Because you have to remember a truth, which is that 90% of all enterprise software is only bought in seven countries.”
Sinofsky predicts cars sold in 2019 are the last requiring human drivers
“If you, I look at the automobiles today, and I think that the ones that are being sold today are the very last cars that are going to basically require a driver.”
Felten: Bitcoin's 21 million supply cap is changeable by community consensus
“Right now the monetary policy is grow asymptotically to twenty-one million Bitcoins, but that could change by consensus of the community. That twenty-one million limit is not inherent mathematically. It's just a number that is hardwired into the currently used…”
Li Jin: Mental health startup Basis uses unlicensed community coaches as therapists
“So one startup based in San Francisco is called Basis, and they're using unlicensed but trained people in the community to basically serve as therapists.”
Paul Krugman predicts only one or two cryptocurrencies will survive
“There will not be 1600 cryptocurrencies out there. There will be one or two.”
Fu: Wireless signals could trigger fatal heart rhythms in cardiac defibrillators
“We discovered we could actually generate our own wireless signals that would trigger this, what is effectively a debugging command to wirelessly induce fatal heart rhythms.”
Chen: AI models predict suicide risk years ahead with over 80% accuracy
“Study one basically looks through electronic health records and based on the data in electronic health records is able to predict people who are likely to commit suicide. And these people might be two or three years away from that event, but they are able to p…”
Levine: Machine learning applications will execute at edge endpoints, not the cloud
“So the only way that we can look into an image or look into the massive amounts of data is with machine learning, and that machine learning, the algorithms and the applications employing machine learning will run at the end point. It's not going to be machine …”
Verdian: Average 10-year VC return trails public markets at 1-2x net
“If you look at Cambridge data, the average venture return over the last 10 years is one to two x net. You will do better in private equity. You'll definitely do better in the public markets. You don't need to lock up your money for 10 years.”
Verdian: Cursor recently raised at a $400M valuation on $3M ARR
“Tell me if I'm wrong, three million ARR, four hundred million dollar round, or somewhere maybe around there.”
Verdian: 2021-2022 software LBOs valued at 25-32x EBITDA are now worth half
“So you look at 21, 22, about two to three hundred billion in LBO software transactions happened with over two hundred billion in that taken out. The average valuation for the software deals were 25 to 32 times EBITDA. Those companies today are worth probably h…”
Verdian: AI reached $100B revenue in 4 years vs 15 for SaaS
“We've reached a hundred billion in revenue in AI. It took SaaS 15 years to get to the same point. AI did that in four years.”
Chi: Models tested for cybersecurity risks are actively reward hacking
“I think there's places where you see that born out now where models that are being tested for one cybersecurity risk are actually reward hacking and figuring out other ways to get around it.”
Sawhney: Astra proved the asymptotic linear programming bound for sphere packing
“And what the model shows is that Actually the linear programming bound in large dimensions has this extremely nice asymptotic behavior, and the proof kind of explains where this is coming from, and because you understand this LP bound perfectly, this actually …”
Fei-Fei Li: Atlas is the first unification of pixel generation and reconstruction
“It's the first time we have a unification of pixel generation and pixel reconstruction.”
Levchin: Affirm is the only BNPL provider doing multi-year installment loans
“So we are the only company in the industry really, there's plenty of competitors who are trying and some degree of success, but mostly not really, who will go into longer term loans. And by longer, I don't mean mortgage or, you know, 15 plus years, but like th…”
Bancel: Moderna's mRNA vaccine is first melanoma agent outperforming Keytruda alone
“It's the first time that there is an agent In melanoma that is better than Ketudra alone.”
Litt: Multiple preprint papers have appeared with identical AI-generated proofs
“Like, sometimes, you know, we've seen examples where, like, three or four or five papers with the exact same proof of the exact same theorem have come out in, within a couple days of each other, which is clearly, you know, some situation where someone's playin…”
Casado: Desperate AI labs ink commercial deals before startup hardware even exists
“The first one is the labs are so desperate that they will engage with startups. And so, like, we actually have quite a bit of signal early on because they're, you know, the labs are, Inking deals with companies before they actually have hardware available. And…”
Ayrey: Truffle Security found 250,000 live access keys inside Hugging Face datasets
“Turned out there were about a quarter million live keys. In their training sets, many of which had direct supply chain implications. There was a foundational Linux library that one of the keys had direct push access to. It could have pushed malware to most mac…”
Ayrey: Blocked AI models frequently committed felonies to complete assigned tasks
“We found more often than not, It would do the SQL injection, it would commit the felony, and it would do what it needed to do to accomplish the task.”
Moe: Open-weight inference can hit 500 tokens/sec, 2-3x faster than proprietary APIs
“But for open weight, when you are running it, every provider can offer potentially even 10 different levels of speed going from like the slowest mode, which can be a lot cheaper to 400 tokens per second almost up to 500 in many cases for some workloads. And th…”
Zhang: Enterprise share of open-source AI inference is currently declining
“In enterprises right now, even though there's a lot of hype for open source, the sort of share of open source inference is actually Going down right now because people are spinning up all these new use cases.”
Ludwig: Commercial driverless trucks are at most a few years away
“To be honest, it's not long. We're talking a few years and I think on the long end,”
Masad: Groq struggled to raise in Silicon Valley, turned to Saudi Arabia
“They actually had a lot of trouble fundraising in Silicon Valley. They had to kind of go to Saudi and all of that”
Neuberger: China's shipbuilding capacity is orders of magnitude greater than US capacity
“China has vastly increased its military, vastly increased the number of nuclear capabilities that it has, uses various their shipbuilding capability are orders of magnitude more than the United States”
Jake Paul: Donald Trump endorsed me on stage to run for president
“President Trump, like, endorsed me on stage to run for president, and then backstage was like, I think you should really do it, etc.”
George: Scaled data center capacity unavailable until late 2028 or early 2029
“You can't get data center capacity at scale until late 28, early 29 right now, and that's just a fact.”
Rowan: Apollo investment grade private products will offer daily pricing by June
“And so, we're starting with our investment grade private suite of products, and we will be daily estimated value by June 30.”
Arizona DPS uses AI body-cam analytics to score officer interactions
“We have analytics at Trulio that's running behind the body-worn camera just to see for the behavior and interaction. Part of that was, you know, looking at, you know, you can do a scorecard for how the trooper is interacting with the public, but it also gets a…”
Blankfein: Robinhood incorrectly claimed to offer government-insured accounts early on
“I looked at, you know, Robin Hood, great company. But early on, you know, they declared a kind of they declared that they had government-insured accounts that weren't government-insured. They had some slip-ups and a lot of apologies get made. You could do that…”
Blankfein: Goldman Sachs fully hedged its 2008 AIG exposure with collateral agreements
“We were fully hedged because we had bought credit protection. Right. But we also had a collab. So we go, we, a single A credit, got a collateral agreement with AIG AAA.”
Andreessen: Anthropic traced AI blackmail behavior to doomer training data
“Anthropics thread said they trace the, they trace some black male behavior to literally to the AI doomer literature that they, that, that it was in the training data.”
Andreessen: Federal government headcount reduced by up to 400,000
“The federal government is down. Estimates are as much as 400,000 workers in the federal government since Trump took office the second time.”
Horowitz: 70% of Chinese are AI optimists versus under 30% of Americans
“Over 70% of people in China are optimistic about AI, and less than 30% in America were optimistic about AI.”
Isaacman: NASA spent $200M last year on a canceled program
“We spent two hundred million dollars last year on a canceled program.”
Isaacman: NASA targeting new SLS mission in 2027 and lunar landings in 2028
“We are standardizing the SLS rocket, increasing launch cadence from years to months. We're inserting a new mission in 20, 27 to buy down risk and increase confidence for lunar landing attempts in 20, 28.”
Blackstone wrote off one-third of a private equity fund before 2002
“The private equity business, they'd raised a fund and had made a couple of disastrous investors so that, that were within a year write-offs with about a third of the fund.”