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 234 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
Andreessen: Chinese manufacturer DJI is US Defense Department's primary drone supplier
“DJI is the most widely used drone today by many, many large, you know, American customers, including the United States Department of Defense. Right. The DOD's primary drone supplier is DJI.”
Andreessen: Political violence in Western society is currently at an all-time low
“The fact that political violence is like an all-time low in Western society is something that people really don't talk about.”
Andreessen: Sitting United States politicians literally faked their Vietnam War records
“There are sitting United States politicians in, in serious offices who like literally faked Vietnam War records.”
Andreessen: Albert Einstein was pro-Stalin and favored a communist dictatorship
“Einstein was the exact opposite of a moral exemplar. Einstein was Stalinist. Like, Einstein was, like, a full-on, like, Einstein was pro-Stolic, like, not even just pro-communist, was actually, like, pro-Stalin, and Einstein thought, but, like, American democr…”
Marc Andreessen: Russian Facebook ad spend during 2016 election was only $80,000
“I think the result of it was, I think it was a result of 80,000 dollars of ad spend by the Russians in, in the relevant period of the election. It was like a total of like a 140,000, but during the actual run of the election, it was 80,000 dollars, and so the …”
Andreessen: AI doomer Eliezer Yudkowsky advocates bombing data centers
“The AI version of that is, you know, Eliezer Yadkowsky's version of that is we must bomb data centers. Like, if there's a data center that we think might take off, like, if the training run starts to go too well, like, we need to send in the Air Force and be b…”
Andreessen: For every active US dockworker, another is paid to stay home
“For every doc worker in the U S actually works on the doc doc, there's actually somebody sitting, there's a doc worker sitting at home doing nothing, still getting paid.”
Andreessen: California high-speed rail spent $10B with zero ground broken
“The California high-speed rail project. Which is now ten billion, it's over ten billion in spend with zero ground broken.”
Andreessen: FDIC blocked private equity and bank bids to buy SVB
“There were both there were other big banks that wanted to buy SVB, and there were private equity firms that wanted to buy SVB, and basically do a private sector bailout requiring no, no taxpayer involvement, and the FDIC actually blocked those also.”
Andreessen: American university faculty is radically politically polarized toward liberals
“It's an empirical observation that the faculty at American universities is now radically polarized on in, in one political direction. Radically, and we could also post a graph on this maybe, which is the numbers are like really radical. There's fields in which…”
Andreessen: More People Globally Have Smartphones Than Electricity or Running Water
“Sitting here today in 2023, the following is true. More people in the world have computers in the form of smartphones specifically and internet access than have electricity or running water in their homes.”
Andreessen: Albert Einstein held pro-Soviet and pro-Stalinist views
“Einstein, unfortunately, and I know Einstein's, a lot of people consider Einstein to be a hero, not just scientifically, but morally, and the movie paints him as a, both a scientific and a moral hero, which is kind of the received wisdom. A little bit of an is…”
Andreessen: Tesla deploys live autonomous software without federal testing, improving safety
“Tesla has been climbing the ladder on self-driving car functionality capability. They do new software releases, push live to car at night anytime they want. Those new releases are not being tested by any federal, the federal, you know, it's a, whatever it's no…”
Andreessen: Anthropic traced AI blackmail behavior to doomer training data
“Anthropics thread said they trace the, they trace some black male behavior to literally to the AI doomer literature that they, that, that it was in the training data.”
Andreessen: Federal government headcount reduced by up to 400,000
“The federal government is down. Estimates are as much as 400,000 workers in the federal government since Trump took office the second time.”
Andreessen: AI Costs Are Falling Much Faster Than Moore's Law
“If you look at what's happening with, ah, the price of AI is falling much faster than Moore's Law.”
Andreessen: The EU AI Act has largely killed AI development in Europe
“The EU passed this bill called the AI Act, I don't know, whatever, two years ago, and it basically has killed AI development, and, well, it's actually killed AI development in Europe to a large extent and then it even, it is so draconian that even, Even big Am…”
Andreessen: Leadership fails when IQ gap exceeds one standard deviation
“One of the things that they've found over the years is if the leader is more than one standard deviation of IQ away from The followers, it's a real problem.”
Andreessen: Paul Thomas Anderson's new Leonardo DiCaprio film will lose $120M
“So anyway, it, it's gonna do reasonably well because, you know, because it has Leo, but it's still gonna lose like a hundred, hundred and twenty million dollars are, you know, the estimates that I'm hearing, which is, you know, a pretty, pretty big loss you kn…”
Andreessen: Generative AI will allow non-filmmakers to produce full feature films
“In this last couple weeks with the new version of Sora and a lot of these other new things that are coming out, AI is going to make a whole new kind of filmmaker possible to exist for the first time, which is the filmmaker with no visual skill, right, or acces…”
Andreessen: Harris campaign staff regret avoiding long-form podcasts in 2024
“The books are coming out now on the 20, 24 campaign and it's becoming clearer and clearer. Like all the Kamala people now greatly regret that they didn't put her on, on more long form podcasts.”
Andreessen: LPs Are Shifting Capital Away From Mid-Sized VCs
“If you talk to the LPs now, increasingly they are focusing capital either on the scale platforms or they're focusing capital into, you know, this very specific kind of early stage seed angel strategy. And their interest in funding the department of store equiv…”
Andreessen: Less than 0.4% of CHIPS Act funding has been disbursed
“As of today, they have only literally dispersed 0.4% of the chip sacks money to any of these companies.”
Andreessen: Six Top AI Models Are Hitting a Performance Ceiling
“There is this very interesting asymptotic kind of thing that's happening right now where, you know, two years ago, there was one, you know, LLM that was like way out ahead of everybody else's, which was opening eyes. And sitting here today, there's like six th…”
Andreessen: Social Media Moderation Staff Have Migrated to AI Labs
“A lot of the people who did this kind of work, the sort of trust and safety or censorship work at the internet companies had just rotated and joined the AI companies.”
Andreessen: Alibaba filed notice reassigning Jack Ma's voting shares to unnamed citizens
“They put out a revised financial statement the summer after they defenestrated Jack Ma, and they announced that the Jack Ma, Jack and his CFO, their voting shares had been reassigned to a set of, I think it was four unnamed other People's Republic of China cit…”
Andreessen: Xiaomi's electric car offers Porsche Cayenne quality for $20,000
“Xiaomi is one of the big Chinese makers of smartphones. They now have a car. And it's like sort of the equivalent of a Porsche Cayenne SUV. But it's like 20,000 dollars, and it's really good.”
Andreessen: Valueless meme coin grew to $300M market cap in four days
“There's a meme coin with no underlying value that four days ago was worth nothing and is now worth three hundred million dollars, right?”
Andreessen: Google shelved 2017 transformer breakthrough until startups forced its hand
“Google invented the transformer in 2017 and then put it on a shelf. And then startups came in and sort of picked up that idea and ran with it, OpenAI and now Anthropic and others and many others now. And then as a consequence, Google has now been forced to rea…”
Andreessen: Biden's proposed unrealized gains tax starts at a $100M threshold
“So it is a threshold of a hundred million dollars.”
Andreessen: Top 1,000 taxpayers account for half of peak California tax revenue
“In the peak years up to half of total tax receipts for the state of California come from the top thousand individual taxpayers. Which is basically all tech.”
Andreessen: Games Are the Only Known Killer Apps for VR and AR
“Both VR and AR, like, it's crystal clear. The known killer apps right now are games, like, by a very wide margin.”
Andreessen: Nuclear Regulatory Commission went 40 years without approving new designs
“They did not approve a new nuclear power plant designed for 40 years.”
Andreessen: Journalist advised Zuckerberg to accept $1B Yahoo acquisition offer
“Facebook got just tons of, you know, it's just like this is the most trivial, stupid, useless, you know, thing that doesn't matter, you know, Facebook, there was almost a deal for Facebook to get bought by Yahoo early on, and I remember a certain very prominen…”
Andreessen: Incumbent universities control accreditation boards to block federal funding from competitors
“Guess who for those accreditation agencies, guess what they are composed of. They are composed of the incumbents. So the Northeast, you know, college, whatever accreditation council is like, literally it's board of trustees is all of the top Northeastern, you …”
Andreessen: Dodd-Frank expanded mega-banks and crushed new U.S. bank charters
“So what they did was they put in place a legal regime called Dodd-Frank and a bunch of other regulations that had the result, you know, sitting here 15 years later of the too big to fail banks are now much larger than they were before. So the exact opposite. Y…”
Andreessen: Google's AI image generator depicted 1940s Nazis as racially diverse
“Well, we learned something very valuable over the last few days with a new Google image generator, which is we learned out that the Nazis were actually quite diverse. It turns out there were lots of black and brown Nazis in stormtrooper uniforms in, in the str…”
Andreessen: AI detection software in schools will fail and falsely accuse students
“There are various attempts by companies to do like AI detectors now. You know, was this text written by AI and schools are actually starting to use that. And I think we can definitively, that will not work. Yeah. So what we can tell, there's already been cases…”
Andreessen: Up to 75% of academic research fails replication
“Depending by field up to 75% of the research in a lot of fields doesn't replicate.”
Andreessen: Up to 75 percent of published academic research fails to replicate
“Somewhere between like a third to on, on the low end, like you know, a quarter to a third and on the high end, like up to two thirds or three quarters of all published research doesn't replicate.”
Andreessen: Stanford and Yale have more administrative staff than enrolled students
“There are multiple large institutions too that have been identified in public, Stanford and Yale, that now have more administrative staff than they have students.”
Andreessen: Nuclear Regulatory Commission approved zero new plants in 40 years
“Zero new plants in 40 years.”
Andreessen: AI will allow actors to scan themselves into 3D environments
“These systems and all the variations that are coming up you know, the capabilities are going to become available over the next few years, including, you know, rendering video, you know, we're going to get to the point now where like, for example, an actor is g…”
Andreessen: Generative AI will allow every screenplay to be rendered as video
“Most, look, oh, look, most people who write a Hollywood screenplay never see it produced. They never see it on screen. Right. And now all of a sudden, like all of those screenplays could be produced. Right. And turned into, you know, maybe not a movie that's c…”
Andreessen: Soviets created the term 'anti-fascist' as communist propaganda
“The term anti-fascist was created in that era, right, actually by the Soviets as a propaganda term to basically, you know, kind of mean communist.”
Andreessen: Venona transcripts show McCarthy understated Soviet infiltration in U.S. government
“What we know today is McCarthy actually underestimated the level of Soviet penetration in the U.S. Government. Just on the numbers, he underestimated it. And so his estimates, you know, topped out, I believe, in the 200, and it turned out, you know, the number…”
Andreessen: Screenwriters will use AI to render full movies within years
“What's going to happen is they're going to use AI to be better writers and to write a lot more material. And by the way, if you're a Hollywood screenwriter, like all of a sudden, you're going to be able to use AI at some point in the next few years to actually…”
Andreessen: Patients presenting GPT query results will force doctors to adopt AI
“And by the way, patients using GPT, if it hasn't started, it's going to start imminently. So, so, so, so the patients are going to show up with the results of GPT queries, and the doctors are going to have to respond to that, and so they're going to end up bei…”