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
Keith Rabois predicts multiple countries will make peace with Israel within months
“You're gonna see lots of countries You know, make peace explicitly with Israel, which is great. Whether they join the Abraham Accords directly or indirectly, it's all gonna happen in the next six months.”
Keith Rabois predicts 4% US GDP growth will render national debt irrelevant
“We're gonna have four percent or more growth all of next year. That will make the debt irrelevant. You can grow your way out of deficits.”
Keith Rabois claims half of the non-military federal government can be cut
“I actually believe you could probably cut 50% of the federal government ex-military easily.”
Keith Rabois predicts AI will enable 4% to 6% inflation-free GDP growth
“Well, I think you can run four to six percent durably without inflation, which is magic.”
Rabois: Anthropic and rivals present no real competition to ChatGPT
“But ChatGBT alone, there is no competition for. It's not like Anthropic or all these other companies have any competition for that.”
Alex Rampell asserts Google is artificially inflating Gemini daily active user metrics
“And I think the metrics that they're kind of faking right now is it's like what percentage of our users are using AI and that's not using Gemini as a DAU. I'm sure of that. It's just like they have like an AI summary, something, something in there, but they're…”
Keith Rabois predicts people will stop using Microsoft Word within five years
“Do people draft documents in Word in three, four, five years? Probably not.”
Rabois: Promoting CFOs to CEO Is Almost Always a Mistake
“Promoted this completely mediocre CFO, which is almost always a bad idea, to be CEO. And she went from mediocre to, like, the worst CEO in the planet.”
Rampell: Traditional banks will never be able to build software
“Well, and that's the thing, it's like, you know, software, like I'm very confident that all of the banks Cannot build software, will not be able to build software, will not build software.”
Rabois: Reinventing an industry requires non-experts rather than domain specialists
“So I think if you're going to reinvent an industry, you don't want experts.”
Horowitz: Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi's competitors are pseudo-technologists
“He is a real technologist, like not a, you know, pseudo technologist like his competitors.”
Horowitz: Operational knowledge lives with ICs and customers, not executive staff
“All the knowledge in a company is with the individual contributors are doing the work and the customers that like, there's no There's no knowledge with the people who are talking to you as CEO who are on your staff.”
Horowitz: CEOs should never try to fix underperforming executives
“Don't try and fix them. They can't be fixed. It's not going to happen.”
Labenz: Tool-Equipped Next-Gen AI Models Will Resemble Superintelligence
“When we start to give the next generation of the model these power tools, and they start to solve previously unsolved engineering problems, I think you start to have something that looks kind of like super intelligence.”
Labenz: GPT-4 to GPT-5 capability leap matches GPT-3 to GPT-4
“And if you look back to GPT three, you know, there's a huge leap. I would contend that the leap is similar from GPT four to five.”
Labenz: AI will outperform average developers on standard apps within five years
“But I would be very surprised if you can't get your nuts and bolts Web app, mobile app type things spit out for you for far less and far faster than, and probably honestly with significantly higher quality and less back and forth with an AI system than, you kn…”
Misra: Current LLM architectures cannot recursively self-improve into new paradigms
“That kind of self-improvement is not possible with these architectures. They can refine these. They can fill out these rows where the answer already exists.”
Altman: Video AI models capable of deepfaking anyone will arrive soon
“So like, very soon, the world is going to have to contend with incredible video models that can deepfake anyone or kind of show anything you want, and that will mostly be great.”
Altman: AI models will make important scientific discoveries in two years
“So in two years, I think the models will be doing bigger chunks of science and making important discoveries.”
Altman: Current LLMs can advance enough to automate AI research breakthroughs
“I think far enough that we can make something that will figure out the next breakthrough with the current technology. Like I, it's a very self-referential answer, but if LLMs can get, if LLM based stuff can get far enough that it can do like better research th…”
Altman: AGI arrival will not transform the world as radically as expected
“AGI will come, it will go Wuxian Bai. The world will not change as much as the impossible amount that you would think it should.”
Altman: AI regulation should strictly apply to superhuman frontier models
“The one thing I would like is as the models get, the thing I would most like is as the models get truly, like, extremely superhuman capable. I think those models and only those models are probably worth some sort of like very careful safety testing as the fron…”
Horowitz: Falling Behind China in AI Development Is Extremely Dangerous
“China's not gonna have that kind of restriction and you getting behind in AI, I think would be very dangerous for the world.”
Rampell: Zillow's lead gen model is terrible and deserves -100 NPS
“And what Zillow and others do is they just do lead generation. It's a terrible business model from a consumer perspective. Like it should have like negative a hundred NPS because they're just, you're just getting called all day by real estate agents.”
Nejatian: Opendoor launches home return policy in Dallas, Texas
“Which, by the way, we launched this yesterday at Opendoor in Dallas, Texas. You buy a home from Opendoor, you don't like it, you can return it. Like, you can move it early, try it out, don't like it, return it.”
Kaz Nejatian: Real estate agents routinely fabricate competing offers
“Your agent has said something along the lines of this. Oh, they just turned down an offer exactly like that. Or, oh, they have another offer coming on Tuesday. They never have another offer coming on Tuesday. They didn't just turn down an offer like that.”
Nejatian: Federal Reserve interest rate hikes were deeply irresponsible
“The place at which interest rate increased were I mean, I think we can say in hindsight, this was, like, deeply irresponsible for the country.”
Sinofsky: Restricting rural migrant movement enabled China's economic system to work
“In the factories in Shenzhen, there are the rural people, and they're not allowed to just move. Like, they can temporarily relocate for work, and then the state sort of requires them to go back, and in a sense, they are forced to repatriate what they earned as…”
Sinofsky: Only Apple and Elon Musk's companies do hardware well in US
“We have really only two companies doing a good job on, on hardware, which is the constellation of Elon companies and Apple. And after that, we run out.”
Wang: China will not implode; US-China competition is a long-term grind
“There is no implosion. When one side is ahead, the other side will overstep, and then the, then, and then they'll need to catch up. And so I want to say that there is no winner here. There is no loser here. It's not a race. Nobody gets to hit the win button. A…”
Kupor: OPM introduces forced distribution, capping top executive ratings at 30%
“So one of the things that we're doing, we just put out guidance on this, at least with respect to what are called the SES, which are the most senior level people in government, is we are effectively doing a modicum of a forced distribution. And so we put out g…”
Schimpf: Small numbers of exquisite weapons cannot win modern wars
“A low number of really exquisite weapons is not gonna win a conflict, and I think Ukraine kind of definitively showed that to the world, that that is not a winning strategy.”
Schimpf: Anduril found virtually no American-born tier-one manufacturing executives
“Looking for a great head of manufacturing. There's basically no like tier one execs we could find that were American born. We ended up finding someone who was from Canada, but everyone I found who was like great thinking about this differently, like really nov…”
Schimpf: Government grants to Intel are the worst form of industrial subsidy
“Grants are, in my opinion, the worst possible form of this. It's like, you know, giving Intel an outrageous amount of money to build a facility that they didn't believe they had demand for. It's like, why would they not take the money to build a facility? They…”
Schimpf: China possesses 250 times the shipbuilding capacity of the US
“Where there's something like 250 times the shipbuilding capacity you know, massively, massively, probably thousands of times on the weapon side. You know, it is just on drones. It's massive. Like, you just, kind of look category by category, massively outpacin…”
Catherine Boyle: Parents and Schools Face Systemic Incentives for ADHD Diagnoses
“The incentive systems around a lot of these things are, like, if you go to the doctor, parents, one, want these ADHD, you know, Want, want, want these diagnoses. And the reason the parents want them is because it gives you extra time, it gives you extra resour…”
Casado: Replacing H-1B lottery with pricing helps startups beat big tech
“This system has been gamed for a very long time. It's very hard for startups. To hire because of the lottery system. It's locked up by the large companies, the consultants, Amazon and Google and like that has to change, and I think a very reasonable way to do …”
Casado: H-1B consulting firms squeeze out $80k to $120k US IT jobs
“It's very, very tough to get a job between like 80 and a 120 K in, in much of the United States because of this, right? And so this isn't about like a new grad being a software engineer, because the reality is, is the expected value of a software engineer over…”
Bhattacharya: Leucovorin restores speech in 20% of autistic kids with folate deficiency
“You know, for kids who have this folate deficiency in their brains, that, it actually works. And 20% of the kids, I think, restore speech. Up to 60% of the kids, they get much better.”
Bhattacharya: FDA will issue updated pregnancy guidelines for acetaminophen use
“There will be, yeah. So that's something that Dr. McCary, the FDA commissioner is working on. And there'll be also you know, changes in, in like how Medicare pays, Medicare, CMS, Medicare, and Medicaid pay for Leucovorin. So it's a cross-agency collaboration f…”
Bhattacharya: COVID plexiglass barriers and restaurant masking lacked scientific backing
“You remember the plexiglass that was everywhere? There's still, every time there's see a plexiglass, it makes me, fills me with rage, but that's another story. And there was no science behind that, right? There was the, there was like the, you wear a mask when…”
Bhattacharya: Weak pandemic school closure policies set children back years educationally
“Closing schools, where again, the science was so weak that it, that and now kids are like years behind in their education as a result, and they'll be paying the price for that for years.”
Bhattacharya: Scientists destroyed public trust by falsely claiming certainty during COVID
“The problem is that scientists conveyed certainty about things they had no business conveying certainty about, and then changed people's lives for the worse as a result of it during the pandemic.”
Bhattacharya: Disparity in MMR and COVID child vaccination rates reflects evidence strength
“So, the uptake of MMR in this country, the MMR vaccine is like, 95% of American parents vaccinate their kids with MMR. The evidence is, and, I think it's like, 13% of American parents vaccinated their kids for the COVID vaccine. I think that reflects the scien…”
Dylan Patel: Intel is crawling to NVIDIA in a full-circle reversal
“It's kind of poetic that everything's gone full circle and Intel's sort of crawling to NVIDIA.”
Appenzeller: Intel-Nvidia partnership means AMD is 'fucked'
“I think AMD is fucked, right? I mean, they're, you're just, If your two arch nemesis suddenly team up, that's the worst possible news you can have, right? They were already struggling, right? Their cards are good, their software stack is not, right? They were …”
Patel: China Will Pause NVIDIA Bans During AI Chip Capacity Gap
“I think they'll be able to ramp. I think it'll take a little bit longer and there will be, like, a sort of a gap in between where China probably backtracks and says it's fine.”
Patel: Apple has lacked visionary innovation under Tim Cook for a decade
“The reason why Apple hasn't done anything interesting in like, you know, nearly a decade is, is, you know, they've got a not visionary at the head. Tim Cook's greatest supply chain. And they're just plowing the money into buybacks.”