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 214 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.”
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.”
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: 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: 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 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: 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.”
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.”
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.”
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: 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…”
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: 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…”
Chen: 25% of Facebook developers write deep learning code
“If you look at something like FB Learner Flow, which is Facebook's Automation workflow system for artificial intelligence. They've gotten it so good that 25% of their total software developer universe is writing deep learning. 25%, right?”
Frank Chen: Taping out a custom silicon ASIC costs $50 million
“It's fifty million dollars to tape out.”
Chen: Deep learning enables robots to cook from YouTube videos
“There are systems where robots are learning to cook food by watching YouTube videos of people cooking food. There's systems that can take photos and paint them in the style of Renoir or Van Gogh. There's algorithms that can create paintings that are indistingu…”
Frank Chen: Startups will pioneer continuous customer engagement in insurance
“It's gonna need startups to show the way of what insurance companies ought to do in their ongoing customer journey, as opposed to the existing companies doing it.”
Chen: Cyber loss coverage will be a fastest-growing insurance category
“And so this is going to be one of the fastest growing categories of an entirely new type of insurance, which is I will insure you against cyber losses.”
Frank Chen: Most future video content will be crowdsourced
“What we're moving towards is a world in which most of the video content will get crowdsourced, right?”
Chen: Bloomberg forecasts global petroleum demand will peak in 2020
“Bloomberg's forecasts, even off the more pessimistic IEA base, are that we're going to reach peak petroleum demand in 2020 and we're never going to look back. That between efficiency gains for existing gas-powered cars and the introduction of electric vehicles…”
Chen: Autonomous car brands will matter as little as airplane manufacturers
“The make and model of the car will become the least important, and in fact, you don't care about the decision in the same way that most of us don't care about whether we're riding in Boeing or Airbus or Embraer airplane.”
Chen: 'Smartphone-ness' is replacing 'carness' as the primary vehicle buying criterion
“One of the things that's already true about cars is the carness of the car. Has become much less important a buying criteria already, and the smartphone-ness of it has become much more important, and this trend will just accelerate into the future.”
Chen: EV manufacturing costs will match gas cars by 2025 without subsidies
“Most analysts assume that electric cars will be as cheap to produce as gas-powered cars with no government subsidies by twenty-twenty-five.”
Chen: Speech recognition AI error rates dropped below human levels
“Human word error rate is about five or six percent. If you talk to a human, they will get five or six percent of the words wrong. The algorithms are now at four percent and folly.”
Cardiogram predicts sleep apnea and hypertension using standard smartwatch heartbeat data
“Using that exact same data, they were able to predict whether you had sleep apnea. They were able to predict hypertension. And these things, traditionally, you'd have to have dedicated medical devices for. But just off the heartbeat data, we can predict whethe…”