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 62 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 6 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: 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 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: 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: We will continue funding police tech despite TechCrunch criticism
“And to Margot at TechCrunch you can write what you want about me, you can say what you will about us, but we're not going to stop, so sorry.”
Horowitz: Attending school to learn will be obsolete by 2030
“I don't know why you have to go to school to learn anything, you know, in 2030. Like, that's not gonna be true. So, like, I think education's gonna reemerge much better than it's ever been.”
Horowitz: Misguided AI regulation will cede US leadership to China
“With kind of misguided regulation You know, we could actually force our way from something that, you know, is open source, open weights. Anybody can build it. We'll have a plethora of this technology. We'll be like, use all of American innovation to compete, o…”
Horowitz: Big Tech monopolies could surpass US government power within five years
“If we don't do that, you know, over the next five years, these monopolies are going to get much, much stronger. Probably some of them will be stronger than the US government itself.”
Horowitz: Memory, not NVIDIA chips, will be the next AI bottleneck
“NVIDIA will make enough chips, but then we won't have enough memory.”
Horowitz: Blockchain will be essential infrastructure to verify real content vs AI deepfakes
“Are you gonna trust Google? Are you gonna trust Meta? Are you gonna trust the US government? I think you wanna trust the kind of mathematical game theoretic properties Of the blockchain. So I think that's going to be just a very, very important part of the inf…”
Horowitz: Crypto will be the native currency for autonomous AI agents
“You need a bare instrument on the internet. You need internet money for these AIs to be economic actors, and I think that's very likely to be crypto.”
Horowitz: a16z is abandoning traditional PR for direct media distribution
“You have to kind of commit to, we're gonna really care about what goes down through the old channels, or we're not gonna give them both. Sorry to use language. And we're just gonna, you know, say interesting things and flood the zone. And we're doing the latte…”
Horowitz: Tech M&A will shift toward IP transactions over traditional acquisitions
“I think M&A will happen, but it may happen more in the form of IP transactions and that kind of thing than as traditional M&A.”
Horowitz: Patchwork of 50 state AI laws will cripple startup innovation
“Every state wants to have their own set of AI laws, which will basically make it impossible for new companies to innovate, because you can't comply with 50 different laws from 50 different states, so we're trying to get that done.”
Horowitz: AI cycle will yield more $1B+ companies than internet era
“I think in AI the products are having even bigger economic impact. And so I think there are going to be more things certainly more companies that are worth You know, over a billion dollars and over ten billion dollars, and then the last era, I mean, from what …”
Horowitz: Lack of enforcement creates lost generations driven by criminal pay
“If you don't enforce crime, what you end up is with lost generations because you, like, it's a pretty, I mean, look, if I can become a criminal and make, like, 10 X what I can work, make in a minimum wage job as an entry thing, like, Right. You know, like, and…”
Horowitz: AI will not face a demand problem in five years
“We don't have a demand problem right now, and like, the idea that we're gonna have a demand problem five years from now, to me, seems quite absurd.”
Horowitz: Power or cooling bottlenecks will trigger an AI chip glut
“Yeah, and even if the bottleneck within the infrastructure moves, so if it becomes power, if it becomes cooling or anything else, then you'll have a chip glut for sure, yeah.”
Horowitz told Ghodsi he will never have an idea this good again
“I guarantee you, you'll never have an idea this good again as long as you live.”
Horowitz predicts specialized sector firms will dominate venture capital
“And I think that that's the future of venture capital. Like when we think about. Who's really an interesting competitor. It's the pure crypto firm, the pure games firm, the pure AI firm, more than the generalist firm that's trying to cover all of that with the…”
Horowitz predicts 100x improvement in crypto infrastructure within a year
“I think we're gonna see a hundred X improvement of the kind of base infrastructure in the next turn in the next year.”
Horowitz: Andreessen Horowitz will never expand into private equity
“So there, there's nothing about what they do that would make them good at what we do. And there's nothing about what we do that would make us good at what they do. So like, I think, you know, we'll never get into that realm.”
Horowitz: AI will eventually outperform human VCs at picking investments
“AI, like, I think it might eventually definitely be kind of better at us than picking”
Horowitz: AI Leadership Will Determine World Economic and Military Dominance
“The leader in AI is very likely getting to be the economic leader in the world, the military leader in the world, the cultural leader in the world”
Horowitz: Current frontier AI models use the wrong architecture for future progress
“Even these very, very large companies, models, et cetera, You know, are very likely the completely wrong architecture for what's going to happen next.”
Horowitz: Next-gen military technology will include autonomous soldiers and robotic weapons
“And then, of course, we've seen you know, this also, it's very, very important geopolitically because the kind of next generation of weapons and you know, drones and autonomous aircraft, autonomous submarines, and so forth are all kinds of, some kind of robot.…”
Horowitz: Bad government policy is on track to block AI-crypto progress
“The biggest inhibitor, the only thing that's going to stop it is bad policy. And by the way, we're very much on track for that, for the bad policy part as well.”
Horowitz: Energy startups, especially nuclear, will capture market over incumbents
“Energy is very likely to go to new companies, particularly in the area of nuclear.”
Horowitz: AI Will Suffer Infrastructure Overbuilds in Boom-and-Bust Cycle
“And that doesn't mean there's no like boom and bust and all that, because that's just the nature of technology. You know, people get too excited and then they get too depressed. So there'll be some of that, I'm sure. There'll be over build outs, you know, pote…”
Horowitz: AI models will get 100x better at factual accuracy
“Well, that I think is for sure going to get a hundred times better like that. I mean, they're on a path for that.”
Horowitz: AI boom will cause massive investor losses and chip gluts
“Something like that's probably pretty likely to happen in AI where like, you know, every company is going to get funded. We don't need that many AI companies. So a lot of them are going to bust. There's going to be a huge, you know, Huge investor losses. There…”
Horowitz: a16z commits significant funding to tech policy for next decade
“And then we're deploying a, you know, a really significant amount of money to basically pushing innovation forward, making, you know, getting to the right regulation on tech that preserves America's strength, and we are not only committed to doing that this ye…”
Horowitz: AI will experience a Cambrian explosion unless small startups are outlawed
“So I think what we will, we're likely to see kind of a great kind of Cambrian explosion of innovation across all sectors, you know, big companies, small companies, and so forth, provided that the regulation doesn't outlaw the small companies. But that would be…”
Horowitz: A four-year college degree will eventually cost $1 million
“If you can continue on the current trajectory, you know, you're gonna have a place where it costs, you know, a million dollars for four years, four year degree, which is. Just you know, it's very hard to earn that back.”
Horowitz: AI will disrupt laptop jobs but cannot replace physical trades
“I think if you're kind of just chinning above the bar and you go to four year college to become part of the laptop class, which was a huge employer that, that set of jobs is kind of under a pretty aggressive attack by technology. Interestingly you know, these …”
Horowitz: In-house employment testing will replace university degrees as the norm
“So I think that I think that's gonna become much more of the norm where companies do their own testing.”
Horowitz: AI will let anyone produce high-quality movies within several years
“I do think that that is coming and probably in the relatively short term, I would think in the next several years where anybody with a very interesting creative ideas will be able to basically produce a fantastic, movie, or a song, or a kind of piece of art an…”
Horowitz: AI will shift Hollywood economic power from studios to creatives
“The most likely is it's going to shift the economic power from the distributors and the kind of the studios to the creatives in a really major way that probably hasn't happened, you know, since the kind of rise of CAA and the kind of the bargaining power that …”
Horowitz: Deepfakes will be perfected for the 2024 presidential election
“It's gonna be a huge thing going into the presidential election of twenty-twenty-four, for sure, because by October, they're gonna be working perfectly.”
Horowitz predicts more diseases cured in 20 years than past millennium
“The, we'll probably cure more diseases in the next 20 years than we have in the last, you know, thousand.”
Ben Horowitz: a16z will not back third-party regional affiliate funds
“We're not raising money for somebody who's not part of our firm, our culture, our mission, and having them go run a play. That, that, that's just not us.”
Horowitz: AI Product Tools Will Multiply total Number of Entrepreneurs
“We think the number of entrepreneurs is going to multiply as well. Because the kind of the ease of going from an idea to a really fantastic solution and a fantastic product is just going to be so much simpler.”
Horowitz Predicts AI Threat Will Drive Wave of Tech M&A
“AI is such a disruptive phenomenon that every company, every incumbent is under threat from like AI in general. And so a lot of the ways that You deal with the threat is you just acquire the DNA of the future. And so I think it's, I think there's gonna be a lo…”
Horowitz: VCs who mistreat LPs will struggle in high-rate environments
“And I think what we're going to find out in this kind of Particular interest rate change environment is that like the VCs who didn't treat their LPs like investors are going to be in for what that means in bad times.”
Horowitz: Energy and cooling are the next major AI bottlenecks
“There are bottlenecks that are moving around. So there's a data bottleneck. Now it's going to be followed by an energy bottleneck. You know, it started with a chip bottleneck, you know, then we went to data bottleneck, then there'll be an energy bottleneck, pr…”
Horowitz: Capital gains tax rates directly impact the affordable housing supply
“So if you're building new, we have a huge homeless problem. So You know, we want to be careful about, you know, people who build buildings and what they pay on these capital gains rates because it's going to affect how many kind of, how much affordable housing…”