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 125 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 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: 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: 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: 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: 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”
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: 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?”
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…”
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.”
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: 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…”
Frank Chen: AI image classifiers are now more accurate than humans
“In fact, the most accurate image classifiers, as these are called, are basically better than humans at classifying the objects in a picture.”
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: 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: Robotic furniture requires no tech breakthroughs and exists today
“Actually, no technology breakthrough needed at all. You can actually go buy this today if you wanted, so we know how to make robotic furniture.”
Chen: Cows cause 17% of global greenhouse gas emissions
“17% of all greenhouse gas emissions are caused by cows burping and farting.”
Frank Chen: Average founder-investor relationship lasts 8 to 12 years
“As Scott will point out, the average length of time that you will work with a venture investor, eight, 10, 12 years, is longer than the average marriage.”
Chen: 78% of organizational customer interactions still happen via voice
“It turns out that when you interact with an organization, 78% of those interactions still occur over voice, which is pretty surprising in the era of text and websites.”
Chen: 90% of global factory work is still done manually by humans
“Despite our massive investment in robotics technology worldwide, something like 90% of all factory work is still done by human hands.”
Chen: Doxel AI helped Kaiser Permanente finish San Diego project 11% under budget
“Customers like Kaiser Permanente that are using this technology are finding almost, ah, incredible, 38% increases in labor productivity, and they recently finished one of their buildings in San Diego, 11% under budget, by noticing things like, uh-oh, the elect…”
Intuit boosted chat conversion rates by 20% using Cresta.ai
“Customers like Intuit who've deployed the system found that they get as much as a 20% increase in conversion rate on those chat sessions on 66% less training time.”
Chen: Director of AI Ethics is a brand-new role in tech companies
“One of the hot new jobs in companies that are taking machine learning very seriously is the job at the bottom. This is a brand new job that didn't exist last year, and it's called the director of AI ethics and policy.”
Chen: AlphaGo Zero used 4 TPUs and 3 days, crushing prior versions
“It was 48 TPUs versus four. It was three days versus 40. It was thirty million trained games versus 4.9. So Order of magnitude improvement on all of those dimensions.”
Chen: Japan's 1980s AI industrial policy project was a complete failure
“In the late eighties, Japan tried to organize their entire industrial policy around creating artificial intelligence. The fifth generation. The fifth generation supercomputer. Built around expert systems, optimized all the way down into silicon, so you can ima…”
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.”
Chen: Incumbent automakers project initial autonomous vehicle rollouts between 2019 and 2024
“Well, if you look at the public estimates given by the auto manufacturers, I'm talking about the incumbents now, you'll see a range anywhere from 2019 to 2024 being the year where they first introduced their autonomous vehicles.”
Frank Chen: George Hotz built a self-driving car single-handedly at Comma.ai
“George at Comma.ai who built a self-driving car by himself, like one person.”
Chen: Differential privacy guarantees inherently reduce AI prediction accuracy
“So there's a trade-off between how much security you can guarantee and then the accuracy of their predictions.”
Chen: Full applications will eventually run directly inside Apple's iMessage
“It's only a matter of time before you get a full on application in there.”
Chen: Google powers DeepMind algorithms using commodity x86 PC hardware
“Like if you look at an x-a-t-e-s server in a data center, exactly the servers that Google is using to compute deep mind algorithms, they're PCs.”
Chen: Neural networks are trivially fooled by subtle noise in images
“So one really interesting thing is if you feed Pictures into a neural net and you tune in. You can defeat the categorization fairly trivially by introducing noise in the data, and the really interesting thing is you introduce the noise, you look at the resulti…”
Chen: Climate Corp's weather insurance experiments were not a great business
“And I think of the weather company Climate Corp did a series of experiments where you could buy insurance on weather events, right? So if I'm a farmer in Iowa and I want to say, look, if it's a hundred degrees seven days in a row, that's very bad for my corn. …”
Frank Chen: Carriers know your home zip code from phone sleep locations
“Controlling the smartphones, you know exactly who your users are, where they go to sleep, which means that wherever your cell phone went to sleep is probably where you live. So they know the zip code of where you live. So they do know a lot of things about you…”
Chen: Oil majors will acquire EV charging networks to hedge demand
“So expect to see many more deals like this where Shell buys an electric charging network as a hedge against future petroleum demand dropping.”
Waymo Partners with AutoNation to Service Autonomous Vehicle Fleets
“AutoNation has an agreement with Waymo to service their self-driving cars at a bunch of the AutoNation locations around the country.”
Chen: Cobalt, not lithium, is the scarcest EV battery raw material
“It turns out that if we use the existing battery chemistries, which is a lithium ion battery, the most scarce raw material is not going to be lithium itself, but cobalt.”