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 249 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
Army CTO: Mission Command Enterprise Had 17 Redundant Mapping Programs
“We had 17 programs of record in this mission command enterprise, and each one did sort of similar things in the fact that each one of them had a map. Humans like pixels. We're really good at seeing pixels. They make us happy. So we looked at maps. Well, each o…”
Moore: AI video will eventually create full-length movies
“AI video right now can generate great three or five or six second clips, but hopefully years from now we have AI video that can generate minutes long or, you know, even hours long movies.”
Kumar: Next Sesame AI models will feed audio natively into LLMs
“And so the kind of next versions of our models that will take audio and natively into the kind of LLM component will hopefully more and more pick up on those things.”
George: Waymo autonomous vehicles are 7-10x safer than human drivers
“Well it turns out it's like, Seven to 10 times safer than a human driver.”
Dolgov: Waymo Driver will expand into deliveries, trucking, and personal vehicles
“We envision a future where our, the Waymo driver will deploy, be deployed in other commercial applications, right? There's deliveries, there's trucking, there's personally owned vehicles.”
Dixon: Major AI copyright rulings will take three to five years
“Similar thing with like New York times open AI lawsuit, you know, you're going to have potentially copyright important decisions that have effects on huge economic effects. Decided by judges three to five years from now who are interpreting, you know, hundred …”
Andreessen: Research output, not teaching, determines academic tenure and hiring
“Professors get hired and get tenure in large part of the basis of their research in contrast to their teaching.”
Electric aircraft gain one hour of flight time per 30-minute charge
“That turnaround time typically takes about half an hour. You can charge your batteries for one hour of flying time, 30 minutes.”
Healthcare technology will create new medical specialties like radiology did
“And I think one of the most surprising things we'll see is the emergence of new specialties that come from the use of technology in healthcare, much like radiologists, of course, came on the backs of the ability of the availability of x-ray technologies.”
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: 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…”
Andrew Chen: Sandbox VR will eventually transform into a VR game publisher
“The company's gonna be a publisher one day.”
Andrew Chen: Sandbox VR will eventually require thousands of retail employees
“This is going to be like a retail, you know, large retail like chain that is going to need to employ one day, Many, many, many thousands of people on the ground, and it was going to be extremely operationally complex.”
Casado: Nicira's NSX passed $100M run rate via direct sales
“And we probably got to, Oh, you know, well over a hundred million dollars in actual run rate revenue.”
Snyder: Cancer will affect over 40% of Americans and rate will rise
“40% of Americans will get cancer, and that number is only going to go up.”
Shankar: Post-Oculus acquisition VR forecasts were wildly hyper-inflated
“Back when Facebook bought Oculus, that's when expectations of VR started to get wildly away from reality. Oh, by 2016, there's gonna be 20, fifty million headsets out there. There might be a hundred million headsets by 2017. Some analysts definitely blew a lot…”
Kleinman: North Texas population will double in 50 years
“We are facing doubling of the size of North Texas in population in the next 50 years, and we cannot build enough roads.”
Younis: Fully autonomous cars will be available at dealerships by 2028
“And I think when the CT-Six launches with Super Cruise or the Tesla Autopilot, and then maybe 10 years from now we'll wake up and you have that option to go to the dealership and buy a car that does everything we think autonomy does.”
Smith: Ancient Romans possessed steam engine technology without mass deployment
“And the Romans had all the technology for steam engines. They even did some mining with steam. A Roman inventor had a little steam engine on his desk called the alio pile, but they never really deployed it on mass.”
Smith: US Workers Displaced By 80s Trade Found Equal Or Better Jobs
“When economists around in the late nineties and early 2000 went back and looked at those episodes, what they found is that the displaced workers Almost all found new jobs in doing very similar things for same or higher pay.”
Bell Labs math researchers had total autonomy over problem selection
“He joins the mathematical research group, and they basically go around cherry-picking the problems that they would like to solve, and they don't have to do anything they don't want to do.”
Rogers: Global food demand will increase 50% in 30 years
“We're going to need 50% more food in the next 30 years to feed the world's growing population.”
Stromberg: Dedicated 30-to-40 seat VR motion-seat theaters will emerge
“There's lots of talk of that, and we're talking to people about that, and I think you can very realistically see you know, 30, 40 seat theaters pop up with seats that, motion-based seats that are synchronized to the experience itself.”
The Stanford Dish can detect one-microwatt radio signals 1,000 kilometers away
“The dish has a sufficient aperture and sensitivity to see a millionth of a watt at a thousand kilometers.”
The Golden State Warriors went 50-1 when exceeding 325 passes per game
“Our number was the amount of passes we had per game. When we had 325 more Pat, 325 passes or more, we were like 51. It was something crazy, and then when we had less than 300 passes we were like, I don't know, you know, 20 and 10.”
Lending Club operates similarly to Chase but with 1,500 employees versus 250,000
“But really, Lending Club behind the scenes, exactly as you said, is doing the same thing as Chase, but Lending Club has, I don't know, 1500 people, and not 250,000 people.”
Evans predicts mobile penetration in sub-Saharan Africa will reach 70 to 80%
“You look at sub-Saharan Africa, it's already at 40% population penetration of mobile phones, and that will go up to the same 70, 80% that you have in Western Europe.”
Evans: iPad sales are trending down with record low average prices
“For the iPad numbers and sales, it's not a record low, but sales have been trending flat to down for the last 18 months to two years, and it's a record low ASP, record low average selling price.”
Evans predicts up to 90% of the global population will own smartphones
“Mobile and therefore smartphones is a product that 70, 80, 90% of people on earth are going to have”
Levine: Flash storage costs will soon reach parity with spinning media
“We can literally see in the not too distant future the cost of flash storage devices being the same price as, you know, spinning media, and that's going to be very compelling.”
Dixon: VR headsets will eventually shrink to normal glasses size
“They'll probably end up looking like regular glasses at some point.”
Li Jin: Only 7% of consumer services are digital
“I think the Bureau of Labor Statistics has a statistic that only seven percent of the services that we purchase are digital.”
Chen: Society will shift to electric self-driving vehicle fleets
“I believe we're at the very beginning of a very rapid transition, and that transition is this one. We're gonna go from a world in which we mostly own and operate our own cars to a world in which we're mostly driven around in electric self-driving fleets.”
Conde: U.S. healthcare spending as a share of GDP will double
“Today it accounts for about 20% of our GDP, and that number is going to double over the course of the next three decades.”
Rampell: First-gen financial managers lack level three transaction data
“The reason why you can't answer that query today using existing PFMs is PFMs do not get level three transaction data. They don't know what you bought at Starbucks. They don't know what you bought at Walmart. They just know that you spent 19 dollars at Starbuck…”
Evans: Apple is the world's 10th largest retailer by revenue
“Apple is the 10th largest retailer on earth by revenue, with over fifty three billion dollars of sales last year”
George: US economy spends roughly 40x more on labor than software
“If you just look at like how much of, you know, dollars are spent in the U S economy on labor versus software, it's like something like 40 times more.”
Verdian: Nearly 2,000 sub-$150M seed funds currently operate in the US
“Pre-seed seed, so think sub-one-fifty funds. There's thousand, thousand, close to 2000 today in the U.S. Alone.”
Evans: Global advertising is a $1T market while retail is $25T
“Advertising is a trillion dollars and retail is 25 trillion dollars.”
Marc Rowan: Hybrid capital is Apollo's fastest-growing business
“We call that hybrid for us. That's our fastest growing business.”
Stoica: Users grading answers to their own questions is the gold standard
“This is now from information retrieval field for decades, and it's called gold standard, when people evaluate the answer to their own questions. When an expert evaluates someone else questions, and the answer is called the silver, if I remember correctly.”
US government launched barely over 200 satellites in 2024, says Ian Cinnamon
“The US government launched barely over 200 last year.”
Miller: U.S. Army Will Form a Consortium for Vehicle Autonomy
“We are going to Put together a consortium for autonomy.”
Bootstrapped family business RockAuto entered the top 10 of 2023 Marketplace 100
“We had six newcomers in the top 20 this year, and we had one newcomer actually in the top 10, which is called Rock Auto. It's a bootstrapped Family business around selling car parts, which is so exciting to see.”
US out-of-pocket health spending projected to reach $800B by 2026
“There's a recent report estimating nationwide out-of-pocket spending on health, i.e. Not reimbursed by insurance, is set to hit almost five hundred billion in the U.S. In 2021 and projected to grow to about eight hundred billion by 2026.”
Strange: Uber and Lyft spend hundreds of dollars to acquire each driver
“Uber and Lyft both spend hundreds of dollars acquiring drivers, and then they have to make up that cost through margin on rides.”
Chen: Bioengineered smart clothing will track health and guide runners by 2030
“This shirt is made out of spider silk, engineered by DNA. It's got sensors and actuators right in it, so the sensors pick up her health stats like temperature and EKG and heart rate, and it's got actuators so it can bumper on the wrists, right?”