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 259 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 5 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
Chen: Deep learning will outperform trained radiologists within five years
“It takes five years to train a radiologist, and in five years, deep learning will get better results than a trained radiologist, so we should stop training them right now.”
Geoffrey Hinton: Backpropagation is a dead end for reaching general intelligence
“He says, I think we need a reboot. I think the path that I set everybody on, and fundamentally an algorithm called backpropagation, I think that's a dead end. I think if we want general intelligence, we're going to need to invent a new technique. We're going t…”
Chen: AI models predict suicide risk years ahead with over 80% accuracy
“Study one basically looks through electronic health records and based on the data in electronic health records is able to predict people who are likely to commit suicide. And these people might be two or three years away from that event, but they are able to p…”
Chen: Most AV Experts Require LiDAR, With Tesla as Key Outlier
“Most people that I talk to think definitely LiDAR. There's a couple of big outliers. I think Tesla is trying a system without LiDAR, but we'll see.”
Chen: Society Must Deploy Autonomous Cars Immediately Despite Temporary Accident Increases
“Morally, from a social point of view, we should try to get self-driving cars on the road as soon as possible, even if we get this small tick up in new types of accidents that we've never seen before due to the interaction, because the self-driving algorithms w…”
AI diagnosis will make empathy the primary reason patients choose doctors
“And I think as we introduce machine learning into the doctor's office, two things will happen. One, most doctors will get very good at diagnosis because we're going to use machine learning algorithms to figure out what's wrong with you. And then most doctors w…”
Having gambling apps on your phone correlates with higher loan repayment rates
“So being a gambler or using gambling apps actually makes you more likely to repay a loan, which might be counterintuitive.”
Chen: Effective crisis intervention skips rapport-building to directly address root solutions
“One of them is that the most successful counselors get right to the core issue and begin working with the person on a solution, which is a little counterintuitive. You might expect that you want to develop rapport so that they trust you. The data shows the exa…”
Chen: AlphaGo Zero proves reinforcement learning succeeds without labeled data
“Right, where there's so much momentum right now that says, basically, we're one labeled data set away from glory. Right, and this result basically shows you, wow, there's a lot of mileage that you can get out of reinforcement learning where there's no data, no…”
Chen: Automakers will shift to Boeing-style B2B fleet sales
“Well, one of the big changes, especially if we're going to switch to fleet ownership, is the car manufacturers will start being a lot more like Boeing and Airbus than they will be like Ford and BMW today.”
Chen: The introduction of ATMs actually increased total U.S. bank teller jobs
“After the introduction of the ATM for banking, the total number of bank tellers in the country increased, right? Because what we did was we built banks with ATMs in convenient places and put tellers in them. So we expanded the reach of banks so that you're, yo…”
Chen: Deep learning represents the triumph of data over algorithms
“So the big trend is the triumph of data over algorithms. Which is you try to make more and more sophisticated edge detection algorithms, feature recognition algorithms. The big advance with deep learning was, screw all that. I'm not going to try to figure out …”
Chen: Deep learning generates non-human insights that humans cannot debug
“So I think maybe this is the vector, which is these deep learning techniques, which we can't completely characterize and describe, much less debug, are leading to these flashes of insight, and they might not be human insight.”
Chen: Legacy insurance data will lose value against real-time IoT streams
“The way to think about it is the data that insurance companies had will become less and less important over time as these new data streams get unlocked.”
Chen: Autonomous vehicle ethical programming choices will affect insurance rates
“And I, one of the really interesting trends is this is going to extend to algorithms. In other words, there are going to be ethical programming that we have to do for our cars, right? So the protocol example is, look, you're building the self-driving car, and …”
Chen: Insurance sales will move to Amazon, Costco, and Facebook Messenger
“Why aren't I buying more insurance products at Costco or Amazon or through Facebook Messenger? And so, like, that will come.”
Chen: Apple's single wallet model will outperform fragmented Android payments
“And if you contrast what's happening in Apple land with what's happening in Android land, if you've tried NFC payments in Android land, you have lots of stakeholders with their own applications clamoring to be your wallet. So you have ISIS now known as soft ca…”
Chen: Apple will never make an Apple Watch compatible with Android
“So you're never, you're not going to see watch that works with an Android phone, right? Like, they're just not going to do that.”
Chen: Normal historical grid expansion rates can support an all-electric fleet
“So if you added 15 gigawatts every year for 30 years, you could get to 450 gigawatts, which is just about the forecast capacity needed. So it looks like we don't have to do anything incredibly unnatural to get to the electricity production levels that we're go…”
Chen: Traditional car dealerships will vanish as autonomous fleets take over
“If most of us are driven around by fleet operators, we don't buy our own cars, which means, of course, that the car dealerships will vanish.”
Chen: Autonomous EV fleets will drive most global miles within years
“In particular, I believe that in a handful of years, we're gonna be driven around in electric cars rather than driving around in our own gas-powered cars. In other words, most of the miles driven on the planet will shift to self-driving electric car fleets as …”
Chen: Electric vehicles are expected to last up to one million miles
“As a result, most people expect electric cars to last for 500,000 to a million miles compared to internal combustion engine cars which have an expected lifetime of closer to 200 or 300,000 miles.”
Andrew Ng: Worrying about Super AI is like worrying about Mars overpopulation
“Andrew Ng, who is one of the foundation researchers in this area, said, I worry about super AI in exactly the same way that I worry about overpopulation on Mars.”
Frank Chen predicts hundreds of billion-dollar AI augmentation startups will emerge
“And I'm convinced over the next 2030 years, dozens if not hundreds of billion dollar companies will get created building Jiminy Cricket.”
a16z Thesis: Every Moving Object Will Eventually Become Autonomous
“Our thesis is actually that everything that moves will eventually go autonomous. So if there's a reason for a plane or a truck or a toy or a shopping cart to move by itself and get from destination A to B, it will because the cost will collapse and It'll be us…”
Chen: Handoff UX is a Major Challenge for Semi-Autonomous Vehicles
“Having a mixed mode, where sometimes a car drives itself and sometimes you drive it, is how do you design that user experience? How do you get the car to say, hey, I'm uncertain about what to do in this situation. You need to take over. And if you look at the …”
Chen: Accident Rates May Rise During Mixed Human-Autonomous Transition Period
“In the short term, though, when we don't have full autonomous and we have a mix of self-driving and human drivers, the accident rate might actually go up.”
Chen: Human Driving Should Be Banned Once Autonomous Vehicles Prove Safer
“So if it were true that the algorithms are demonstrably, measurably, statistically better than a human driver, then we should not let human drivers on the roads, and so if you wanted to go drive, then go to Legoland.”
Frank Chen: Hundreds of startups will outperform human experts using AI
“We're going to see Hundreds and hundreds of startups over time getting to better than human performance on things that we used to think only the most trained humans could do.”
Frank Chen: All serious future software applications will require AI inside
“All the serious applications from here on out need to have deep learning and AI inside in exactly the same way that all serious computing systems needed to have Intel chips inside them.”
Frank Chen: Deep learning is the biggest AI breakthrough since 1956
“Deep learning is the most fundamental advance in artificial intelligence research since we started since that summer of 1956.”
Chen: Quantum coherence times are improving faster than Moore's Law
“In particular, the quantum coherence time seems to be progressing very, very quickly these days, and in fact, faster than Moore's Law”
Chen: Influencer coins let fans capture upside from creator growth
“So, if the fans are convinced this influencer is only going to get more popular over time. And her influencer coin appreciates over time, we've basically given the fans a way to participate in the upside of an influencers rising popularity.”
Chen: Autonomous micro-pods move more people during rush hour than trains
“And it turns out that if you do the math, packetizing mass transit in this fashion is an excellent idea, just like packetizing data for the Internet was. You can actually move more people from point A to point B, even during rush hour in these private one and …”
Chen: Neuromorphic computing chips may shortcut AI coach development
“Now, it's certainly possible that we can get to the smart coach on our current trajectory, which is more data fed to better machine learning algorithms, but this might be a shortcut. On the hardware side, this is called a neuromorphic chip, and it basically ex…”
Chen: Effective AI coaches require three core infant cognitive traits
“The ability to form what psychologists call a theory of mind. In other words, a prediction that of other people's desires and goals and emotions. The ability to break a task down into sub tasks without seeing thousands of similar examples. And third, and maybe…”
Machine learning will enhance human capabilities rather than replace them
“The robots aren't coming for your jobs. Skynet's not coming for your children. Machine learning is actually going to make us better humans.”
China set official goal to lead global AI by 2030
“China has a national top-down goal to be the number one country in AI by the year 2030.”
Chen: 90 voice fraud attacks occur per minute in the United States
“90 Voice fraud attacks happen every minute in the United States.”
Indoor robotic farms yield 15x more than open fields using 95% less water
“These farms are generating 15 pounds of lettuce for every single square foot of growing space. Compare that to seven pounds in a greenhouse, which is already a controlled environment, and one pound in an open field. So 15 X the yield from the same space, and a…”
Human pathologists using AI detect nearly 100% of cancers in biopsies
“And in that study, the algorithms find 92% of the cancer. Then we show them to the human pathologists who find 96% of the cancer. Go team human. But the fascinating thing is if we let the humans use the algorithms together, they find almost all the cancer.”
Mentioning "ibuprofen" predicts suicide 14x more accurately than the word "suicide"
“The word ibuprofen is 14 times more likely to per, to predict suicide than the word suicide.”
The crying face emoji predicts crises 11x better than expected trigger words
“The crying face emoticon is 11 times more likely to predict that somebody is truly in crisis as opposed to any one of the words the human people had guessed.”
Chen: AlphaGo Zero discovered 1,000 years of human Go strategies in days
“Thousands of generations of games playing each other sort of arrive at places that maybe humans would have gotten to if we played another thousand years, but like, you know, it figured out in three days.”
Chen: Regulators prohibit black-box AI models in lending without explainability
“The super active area of research right now, right, which is how do I make the deep learning models more transparent so that I can debug them, I can verify them, I can make sure there's no systematic bias in them, right? Because until that, you couldn't do imp…”
Chen: Apple will spend unlimited money defending platform complements like Xcode
“So if you think, hey, I'm going to create a better development tool, I'm going to create a better Xcode, like, think again, because Apple is going to spend as much money as it needs to defend the complement universe.”
Frank Chen: The next generation will never drive cars
“I definitely believe they're not going to be driving. They'll be picked up and you know, whether it's, the big question will be two D or three D, right, getting you from .1.”
Chen: A Cisco-class company will emerge to route autonomous physical transportation
“I actually think, here's another interesting thing, which is if there were self-driving cars, trucks, robots, shopping carts, there will probably be a Cisco routing service on top of that that can calculate the best way to get object A from point A to B, which…”