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 835 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 8 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
Horowitz: Donald Trump is the right choice for startups and Little Tech
“For a little tech we think Donald Trump is actually the right choice”
Horowitz: Big Tech's startup cloud deals involve illegal roundtripping accounting
“The big tech companies have done this thing which we thought was illegal because we observed it occur at AOL and people went to jail, but what they've done is they invest in startups, you know, huge amounts of money. Microsoft and Amazon and Google are all doi…”
Horowitz: Google and Microsoft push for centralized Chinese-style AI control
“Like we go to the China model that Google and Microsoft are advocating for this Chinese model of only a few can control AI. We're going to be in big trouble.”
Horowitz: Scientists absolutely knew COVID-19 originated from a lab leak
“The lab leak was a great example of that. The, you know, people absolutely knew as a lab leak, the scientists absolutely knew as a lab leak, but for the greater good we're going to say it was not.”
Horowitz: Defunding the police effectively terrorizes poor communities
“When you go defund the police, we're not gonna enforce law, you're basically terrorizing the poor community.”
Horowitz: Anthropic has the worst code security practices in AI
“Their reputation is they have the literally the worst security practices in the entire industry with respect to their own code.”
Horowitz: Anthony Fauci is a sociopath completely divorced from the truth
“I think Fauci, you know, whether you like him or not, he is, I think he's, he, he's a bit of a sociopath. I mean, he is completely divorced from the truth. And he feels no guilt about it. The, you know, he never felt any guilt about the whole AIDS thing, despi…”
Horowitz: Gensler and Warren refused to meet with a16z on crypto policy
“They didn't, ah, even say anything out loud, but they would not take a meeting with us, like, you know, none of the people in charge of those agencies, Gary Gensler, wouldn't meet with us, Elizabeth Warren, wouldn't meet with, like, nobody to even hear why we …”
Horowitz: SEC aims to destroy crypto industry rather than protect consumers
“The SEC has been against that because they're not really for protecting consumers. They're you know, just for wrecking the industry.”
Horowitz: The SEC has sued over 30 a16z portfolio companies
“So they've sued, I think, over 30 of our companies.”
Horowitz: Excusing October 7th violence reflects a return to tribal morality
“You can kind of see some of that tribalism coming back. Back in America where people like, well, you know, it's kind of a race. Well, we see it a lot right now in the Israel-Palestinian conflict where they think there's a certain set of people that say, oh, Oc…”
Horowitz: Google and Microsoft use safety rhetoric to lobby against open-source AI
“And they do it like the really kind of nasty thing is they claim, oh, it's for safety. You know, we've created an alien that we can't control, but we're not going to stop working on it. We're going to keep building it as fast as we can. And we're going to buy …”
Horowitz: AI economic value will accrue to tools, not base models
“The actual layer where the value is gonna crew is gonna be like tools, orchestration, that kind of thing, because you can just plug in whatever the best model is at the time. Whereas the models are gonna be competing, you know, in a death battle with each othe…”
Horowitz: Coercing banks to debank legal industries mirrors fascist operational methods
“This is exactly how fascism worked. This is how Nazi Germany worked. They use private corporations to kind of confiscate people's stuff and you know, do these kinds of techniques to them.”
Horowitz: 50 years of affirmative action failed to help African Americans
“I think, look, I think it's clearly not working also in the, yeah, I mean, they were there, you know, with the kind of ruling on affirmative action, there were so many studies that showed that It didn't actually help African-Americans. 50 years, you know, forg…”
Horowitz: Rejecting Roland Fryer's police research led to a spike in murders
“What happened subsequently is his recommendation or his kind of ideas were not taken by society. What was taken were people who were kind of, who did far worse or no research. And, but were experts and, you know, kind of the result was the defund the police mo…”
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.”
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.”
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…”
Horowitz: Saudi Arabia is transitioning from a tribal society to a modern ally
“Saudi Arabia is going from this, ah, kind of tribal, ah, different kind of society, I would just say, to kind of a modern, you know, like, highly civilized, you know, player in the modern world and full ally of the United States.”
Horowitz: Norway's unrealized capital gains tax ended its tech ecosystem
“And so I think Norway introduced a unrealized capital gains tax, and that, that kind of effectively ended the tech ecosystem there.”
Horowitz: Anthropic's defense deal collapsed because they wanted out, not philosophy
“If you understand deals, particularly software deals, you realize that that deal did not fall apart because of philosophical differences. It fell apart because anthropic wanted out of the deal.”
Horowitz: Employees who refuse to support US defense work can leave a16z
“You're gonna decide that those people who are sacrificing their lives, putting their lives on the line to protect us, don't get the best technology? Like, I'm not doing that. I'm not doing that. So, like, you don't have to work here if you want to do that.”
Horowitz predicts AI will cure cancer, end traffic deaths, and eliminate poverty
“Not just we can, we're gonna end traffic deaths. We're gonna cure cancer. We'll, we're gonna end poverty, as we know it.”
Horowitz: Democracy will fail without proof-of-human identity infrastructure
“Proof of human is a piece of a very important puzzle where we have to upgrade the entire infrastructure or we're not going to be a democracy anymore. I mean, that, that'd just be my guess.”
Horowitz: Balaji Srinivasan temporarily quit a16z over NYT article crisis
“Inside the firm, it was such a big crisis that actually, I'm pretty sure Bology quit, because he thought we were dead, because the New York Times had just, like, ruined the whole firm with that article.”
Horowitz: Corporate boards pick risk-averse, uninteresting CEOs
“When it comes to picking the professional CEO, they're all about what's not wrong with him, not what's right with him, or what's right with her, and so you get these very vanilla characters who definitely could not go on Joe Rogan”
Horowitz: Restricting AI math modeling will forfeit US AI lead to China
“If you ban the technology, which some people are calling for, ah, or ban or kind of infringe people's ability to do mathematics, which is something that a lot of people are calling for then I think we're definitely gonna lose the AI rise to China, which has, l…”
Horowitz: Copyright restrictions on training data will weaken US AI against China
“China absolutely doesn't respect copyrights, even, they don't respect just copying it let alone building a statistical model, and we're gonna have kind of a weaker AI if we can't train on all the data, can't train on the complete data.”
Horowitz: AI Will Eventually Solve Virtually Every Major Human Problem
“There's not a problem that we can think of that you can't, that you won't be able to solve with AI. So like almost every problem in the world and you know, from cancer to transpiration, transportation to massive fraud in the U S you just name a problem in the …”
Horowitz: a16z Has Higher IQ Concentration Than Any Operating Company
“We just have a higher concentration of talent here than that's probably possible in a company in terms of just Sheer IQ.”
Horowitz: a16z replaces venture partners who lose touch with deep tech
“Investing in technology you really have to be in deep in the tech to be good at it. And I think that it's very possible as, you know, people get older, you know, they get less into it sometimes. And so, you know, at that point we got to make a change.”
Horowitz: Memphis police lowered recruitment standards enough to hire criminals
“Because of the shortage many police departments have lowered their standards. So the kind of criticism of the police was, okay, you have, and it really, like, if you looked into it, There were some, like, psychos who joined the police force. They couldn't get …”
Horowitz: Post-Rampart LAPD recruited gang members who killed Notorious B.I.G.
“What happened in the LAPD with the Rampart scandal right after the Rodney King incident They had the same kind of thing. Everybody got fired, et cetera. They had trouble recruiting. They started recruiting people out of gangs and those gang members ended up, y…”
Horowitz: Reallocating police funds to social work has failed
“So you have to have, I'm not against social work, but you can't do it at the expense of crime, you know, law enforcement, and we saw that. I mean, like, we ran the experiment, it didn't work.”
Horowitz: Las Vegas police shootings dropped 75% after tech deployment
“Police shootings of suspects in Vegas dropped like 75% when we first put the cameras and the drones in place.”
Horowitz: Defunding police privatizes security for the rich
“It's defund the police for poor people. It's privatized the police for rich people.”
Horowitz: Declining to enforce laws punishes victims without fixing prisons
“You can't, you're not going to solve the prison problem by not enforcing the law. Like, that's just, you just make the, you punish the victims on behalf of the criminals at that point, which is, I think that's a very dangerous thing for a society to do.”
Horowitz: LAPD corruption and rogue officers protected Tupac Shakur's killers
“Well, in that case, the LAPD was corrupt, and the, well, there were literally criminals in the police force protecting the criminals who killed Tupac, and, you know, thankfully, we kind of reopened the cold case, and we caught the guy, but it's,”
Horowitz: Prosecutors and judges are funded to avoid convicting criminals
“There's a huge push to not criminal, to decriminalize crime, essentially, in this country. And, like, it's still going on, and it's, you know, there are still these, you know, prosecutors and judges that are funded basically for the purposes of not convicting …”
Horowitz: San Francisco's shoplifting policy enabled organized crime, not hungry residents
“In San Francisco, right, like, the whole political movement was, people are hungry, you can't arrest them for shoplifting and so forth, so as soon as we did that, what happened was massive gangs took everything out of the stores. They ended up, right, shutting…”
Horowitz: 'It's Time to Build' sparked the Democratic Party's abundance movement
“Software is eating the world is probably more famous, but I'd say Time to Build is more influential in that People read software is eating the world, and then they didn't do anything. They were like, wow, that's very interesting, and then that was it. But with…”
Horowitz: Refusing to Sell Technology to the US Military Is Illogical
“I'll just say about the kind of anti, you know, we're not gonna sell stuff to the US military and so forth. It's like, well, so here are friends of ours who are risking their lives to protect us, and we're not going to make sure they have the best, safest equi…”
Horowitz: Founder claims of imminent AGI are just talent recruiting tactics
“I think all those claims tend to be like recruiting ideas as opposed to actual predictions.”
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.”