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 2,795 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
Acharya: Humans feel real emotional responses when conversing with AI companions
“Look, it's like our lizard reptilian brains. We are wired to have these sort of emotional chemical responses when you're engaged in a human-like conversation. We intellectually understand that these are computers on the other side, but you still feel the feeli…”
Andreessen: Generative AI will allow non-filmmakers to produce full feature films
“In this last couple weeks with the new version of Sora and a lot of these other new things that are coming out, AI is going to make a whole new kind of filmmaker possible to exist for the first time, which is the filmmaker with no visual skill, right, or acces…”
Keith Rabois says Vinod Khosla intervened to stop Sam Altman joining Microsoft
“Or like, yeah, for like, 24 hours until Vinod and some other friends intervened a fair amount.”
Kupor: 99.7% of federal workers receive performance ratings of three or higher
“So fours and fives, so the very, very top, is roughly 65 to 70% of people get a four or five. 90, when you add threes, fours, and five, that's 99.7%, ok? So 99.7% are a three or higher. 0.3%, therefore, is a one or a two.”
Schimpf: Russia outproduces NATO in 155mm artillery munitions after two-year ramp
“Russia today is outproducing NATO on one five five munitions and took about two years.”
Schimpf: China has legally banned the export of magnet-making technology
“China has strategically kind of strangleholded that, you know, not only did they have the processing of those rare earths, but now they've exported, controlled, so they don't allow the export of magnet-making technology. That is now a restricted national techn…”
Casado: AWS has never put a startup out of business
“I can't think of one company AWS has ever put out of business by launching a service, and you know what, they've all been fine.”
Bhattacharya: NIH shifted from funding fresh ideas to older research projects
“Look, if you look at back in the 19 eighties and 19 nineties, the NIH was funding ideas that were like zero, one, two years old. The typical scientific project funded by the NIH in the 2000 teens, it was about 2002 thousand, early 2002 thousand teens was like …”
Bhattacharya: NIH is capping grant applications to block AI-generated submissions
“I'm just to put a new policy in place where I'm limiting the number of new public applications you can have, like to, we can have, you know, six a year, six a cycle or something. We have people writing 60 applications. And very clearly AI-generated. And then w…”
Patel: Huawei Sourced 2.9 Million TSMC Chips via Shell Entities
“They were able to acquire three million chips, 2.9 million chips from TSMC through these other entities, right? Roughly five hundred million dollars worth of orders”
Patel: AWS year-over-year revenue growth will re-accelerate above 20%
“This is the lowest AWS revenue growth will be on a year-to-year basis. For at least the next year, right? And it's re-accelerating to north of 20% again because of all these massive data centers they have online with Tranium and GPUs, right?”
Patel: Musk bought a Mississippi power plant to bypass energy constraints
“His facility's like a mile away from Mississippi, and he bought a power plant in Mississippi and he's putting turbines there. Yeah. The regulation is completely different, right?”
Dixon: California AI bill would have effectively killed open source
“California had a bill that would have created unlimited downstream liability for software developers, which would have effectively killed open source.”
Mark Cuban claims a major health insurer did $161B in intercompany transfers
“One of the biggest insurance companies had a 161 billion dollars of intercompany transfers.”
Perault: Government and industry previously proposed nuclear-style licensing for AI models
“There were ideas being proposed by not just the government, but industry to require a license. To build frontier AI tools and for it to be regulated like nuclear energy.”
Horowitz: A large share of crypto VC has moved overseas
“Look, we've already seen, like, a pretty large percentage of the crypto venture capital go overseas.”
Patel: OpenAI will soon monetize free users via shopping affiliate fees
“And OpenAI makes nothing off of that. But they very, they really, really will soon, right? And partially that's because Amazon blocks chat, but like, you know, there's a way to make money from shopping decisions, whether it's Booking flights or looking for ite…”
Patel: Top Google TPU hardware engineers have left to join OpenAI
“The TPU team's next-gen designs are pretty non-aggressive, partially because a lot of the TPU team has left to go to OpenAI, the best people that I knew.”
Smith: Radiologist wages and employment rose after Hinton's automation prediction
“You also got Jeffrey Hinton's prediction that radiologists would be unemployed within a certain time frame, and by that time, radiologist wages were higher than ever, and employment was higher than ever.”
Dwarkesh Patel: Study found AI slowed senior developers down 20%
“The media uplift paper, contrary to expectations, they found that whenever senior developers working in repositories that they understood well used AI, they were actually slowed down by 20%. Yeah. Whereas they themselves thought that they were sped up 20%,”
Balaji Srinivasan: Apologists for Stalin and Castro worked at The New York Times
“Stalin's apologist worked at the New York Times. Castro's apologist worked at the New York Times.”
Ulevitch: Almost all spent nuclear fuel can be recycled and reused
“We should stop calling the spent fuel nuclear waste, because it's really not waste. Almost all of it can be recycled and reused.”
Yahya: Federal stablecoin regulation will likely pass in 2025
“We strongly believe it likely, it'll likely happen this year.”
Cohen: Ohio State and other universities mandate AI in curriculum
“There's some schools that are like mandatory AI usage like in the curriculum. I think Ohio State is one of them.”
Olivia Moore: Studies show Replika AI app reduces depression and anxiety
“Actual studies were showing depression and anxiety and kind of suicidal ideation were going down in users.”
Dixon: People will make AI-generated feature films within two years
“In two years, you'll have people making feature-length films.”
George: Google's Gemini models are currently state-of-the-art across multiple domains
“They actually have the best models right now. Like, they have the leading, you know, the state-of-the-art models in Gemini across a bunch of different domains.”
Wolf: Curing all cancer would only extend American lifespans by three years
“But the reality is, if you cure all cancer, you extend American's lifespan by three years.”
Topol: Age reversal therapies like senolytics remain unproven in humans
“Where you get reversing of aging, so you keep people healthier body-wide, and that's where we see all this remarkable investments in companies like Altos and with reprogramming, Senolytics, and a long list. But they're really focused on a monumental task, whic…”
Acharya: DeepSeek's rapid release disproved claims China was years behind
“Just a year before DeepSea came out, you had a number of, like, tech leaders in Washington testifying that China was, like, five to six years behind the US, with confidence, on the record. And then DeepSea comes out 26 days after OpenAI puts out the frontier.”
Younis: Chinese auto dealerships offer assisted parking capabilities nonexistent in the West
“You can go to the dealership and try, you know, assisted, assisted parking in a way that does not exist anywhere in the West.”
Erasca claims its ERAS-15 molecular glue outperforms Revolution Medicines' RMC-6236
“And so we actually have our own cyclophiline A molecular glue called ERAS 15 that we just in-licensed, and we're really excited about that with Even higher potency than RMC six two three six”
Andreessen: LPs Are Shifting Capital Away From Mid-Sized VCs
“If you talk to the LPs now, increasingly they are focusing capital either on the scale platforms or they're focusing capital into, you know, this very specific kind of early stage seed angel strategy. And their interest in funding the department of store equiv…”
Horowitz: VC is the only asset class with decade-long top persistence
“Venture capital is a little bit unique you know, from our point of view in that it's the only asset class where the top managers tend to persist for decades.”
China gives port management software to allied nations for free
“Our adversaries are actually trying to deploy their software into allied ports. Like, the Chinese are really good in making sure their software runs in ports. They're giving it away for free, and there's a reason why they do that.”
Burgum: Department of Interior has a larger balance sheet than Saudi Aramco
“If interior was a standalone company, it would be the largest balance sheet in the world, ah, bar none. I mean, you know, Saudi Aramco, no, no one would come close to it.”
Bry: U.S. Drone Procurement Lags Demand by Three Orders of Magnitude
“The U.S. Military, I think to their credit, has programs generally pointed in this direction but those programs are operating at the scale of thousands, like single-digit thousands. So we're literally off by, like, three orders of magnitude, I would argue, rel…”
Bry: U.S. Army Quadcopter Requirements Originally Omitted Electronic Warfare Capability
“Had built the system largely informed by the US Army's requirements for what they thought was important for a quadcopter in this space. And electronic warfare was just nowhere on that list.”
Tseng: Shield AI Updated Software in 24 Hours for HIMARS Strike
“In the span of 24 hours, the engineering team re-architected the stack to not use GPS at any point in the mission. We validated it at our Texas facilities, and then we pushed it forward, and 24 hours later the team took off and then conducted a demonstration t…”
Miller: Program Executive Offices are not mandated by federal law
“PEOs are not actually in statute anywhere. They don't exist in law. We made them up because the rule is that the sec def gets to determine what that looks like.”
Huang: More people program using ChatGPT today than C++
“The fact is there are more people who program computers using ChatGPT today than there are people who program computers using C++.”
Batniji: Standard Medicaid algorithms identify high-cost patients too late to help
“If you look at those high cost claimants, and you look at the algorithms that are used to identify them, there's a couple of very common ones, By the time they identify a patient, that patient's cost, and this is according to the National Medicaid Database, wh…”
Batniji: Waymark's ML model boosts acute care prediction accuracy to 90%
“If you didn't have signal, you'd have about 30% accuracy in identifying Future acute care use. I mean, seven out of the 10 patients that you reach out to, you're not going to actually benefit in a way that changes the outcome. With Signal, you have 90% accurac…”
De la Garza: Foreign hackers infiltrate Silicon Valley via remote jobs
“You've got active groups of foreign, probably foreign state sponsored hackers Getting employment at Silicon Valley tech companies showing up for day one and, you know, walking away with all the secrets and then disappearing, right?”
Ayrey: LLMs generate security vulnerabilities at rates matching junior developers
“And in fact, there's been research into how often a code spit out from an LLM has security vulnerability. And more often than not, if you ask us to develop an entire application, it'll write vulnerabilities at a rate The same as a junior developer, if not a li…”
Webster: DeepSeek is especially vulnerable to basic prompt jailbreaks
“If I had to deploy DeepSeq, I would probably focus on use cases that were not end user facing because DeepSeq is like, especially susceptible to basic jailbreaks.”
Webster: DeepSeek returns CCP propaganda or refusals on Tiananmen Square
“If you ask it about Tiananmen Square or whatever, it will either give you a refusal or it will give you like this long diatribe of The CCP party line, like, you know, nothing happened. We believe in harmony in China and blah, blah, blah.”
Webster: Self-hosting DeepSeek does not remove built-in political censorship
“If you run it locally or if you use any of these US providers, which have, you know, spun it up and are serving it you get the same level of censorship. The only difference there is that the China hosted version has an additional guardrail that looks at output…”