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 75 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 4 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.”
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…”
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: 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: 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: 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.”
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…”
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: 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: Non-autonomous vehicles will soon seem odd to future generations
“The technology will become pervasive and it will seem odd to our children or our grandchildren that something moves but can't move itself and can't get itself from point A to point B all by itself.”
Frank Chen: Vision AI will shift farming to plant-by-plant fertilization
“And so when AI makes it cheap for us to see and understand what's going on in the world, we won't fertilize fields anymore. We will fertilize individual heads of lettuce.”
Chen: Real-time earpiece language translation is near commercial deployment
“We're very close to the time that we can just pop something into our ear and hear another language being translated in real time.”
Chen: Self-Driving Cars Will Blend Deep Learning and Rule-Based Code
“And so I think we're going to see some blend of these techniques, but it's a tribute to the power of deep learning and how effective those techniques that we're even having this conversation that you could build an end to end deep learning car.”
Chen: Tesla Gigafactory will surpass pre-2013 global battery output by 2020
“When it's in full production in 2020, this Gigafactory will produce more batteries each year than were produced in the entire world cumulatively through 2013.”
Chen: Smart toilets in the 2030s will monitor health via urine analysis
“Now, it doesn't look like it's changed much, but like most other things in her house, this has become a smart toilet. It measures 10 properties of her urine, including glucose, and it looks for health problems before they become actual health problems.”
Chen: Kitchen and delivery robots will automate personalized meal services
“Once they've built the meals, they'll deliver them to her autonomously via delivery robot, and we're going to use kitchen robots inside the kitchens to keep the cost of all this personalization down.”
Chen: Future dietary protein will be supplied by bioreactor-grown cultured meats
“Now, one intriguing place where she could get protein, because she needs protein, she's training for the marathon, is with something called cultured meats, meats that we're going to grow in a bioreactor.”
Chen: AR contact lenses with built-in projectors will display real-world overlays
“So we'll have tiny projectors and cameras built into contact lenses so she can just pop into her eyes and they'll work in conjunction with nearby computers to basically give her a heads up display on the real world. As people come into her field of view, she'l…”
Chen: Custom apparel design research will be automated within hours by 2030s
“In the 20 thirties, this is going to be automated with software in a matter of hours.”
Chen: Real-Time Translation Will Become Mainstream in VR Rooms
“But the VR room, like all VR rooms, will do real-time translation, so they all hear each other's native languages. This is the product that the CIA director was hoping for. It's going to be mainstream in these VR rooms.”
Chen: Software will automate global A/B testing within hours by the 2030s
“But in the 20 thirties, all of this software automates this process. So we can literally run the process the same afternoon.”
Frank Chen: Inverted supply chains will allow influencers to launch custom apparel brands
“We've seen a flipped supply chain that allows people with big fan bases to actually make their own lifestyle brands, make clothes for them.”
Frank Chen: Drone racing in malls and glowing pets will emerge by 2030
“And we've seen a set of new experiences, going to a mall to watch drone racing or having a glow in the dark pet.”
Chen: Scaling IoT devices to hundreds will require UX design breakthroughs
“And so we're going to need a breakthrough in usability design that makes the experience of upgrading software for all of the devices in our house, every light bulb, every plug, every shirt, so that we're not getting prompted all the time. And we're definitely …”
Chen: Patients will soon be horrified if doctors lack AI companions
“I think it's only a matter of time before we walk into a doctor's office or a lawyer's office where that isn't the fundamental interaction, and we'll just be horrified, like, where's your AI companion? Why are you trying to do this Yourself with your biases.”
Chen: AI could create a new genre of music within ten years
“What I'm looking forward to is could an AI create a brand new genre of music that people find desirable, which is, it doesn't sound like anything Today, but it's just this breakthrough new genre. And so, in 10 years, I think we have a shot at doing that.”
Frank Chen: Self-driving safety will be judged by accidents per million miles
“And at the end of the day, what we're gonna judge cars on is Accidents per million miles driven, right? Just like you drudge humans.”
Frank Chen: Autonomous vehicles will be managed in centralized fleets outside cities
“So think of all the infrastructure that supports these cars, because we're going to have centralized fleets to get the cars fixed and maintained, not my problem. So all of this space is going to free up.”
Frank Chen: Future generations will never experience parking anxiety
“And how far will I have to walk? That will just disappear. There'll be generations of people who will never know that anxiety.”