The Ledger
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why aren't all 14 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
Holding LLM creators liable is like holding Microsoft liable for Windows misuse
“Let's make the LLM creators liable for every bad thing that happens with an LLM. To me, that is the exact equivalent of saying, let's make Microsoft Liable for every bad thing that someone does on a Windows computer, right? They're fully general, and so these …”
99% of Dodd-Frank was unnecessary red tape, except for CCAR rules
“That was the history of Dodd-Frank. Like, we don't really know what went wrong in the financial crisis, so let's just go regulate everything, and I think 99% of it was red tape that did not make the world a better place, and some of it Such as the CCAR regulat…”
Goldman Sachs didn't predict the 2008 crisis, they just hedged their risk
“We didn't know that the financial crisis was coming. Of course, you know, we got in the press and elsewhere accused of all kinds of crazy things. Like they were the only ones who hedged so they must have known it was coming. We were just predictors of the pres…”
AI regulation must focus on external API boundaries, not internal model thoughts
“That's going to be an important principle for LLMs and AIs generally as they start agenting and causing change in the world. We have to care a lot about those boundaries.”
Generative AI struggles with non-stationary distributions like financial markets
“It all depends on the training set, and it also depends crucially on on a stationary distribution, right? So, you know, the reason all this works on is it a cat or not a cat Is that cats change very slowly in evolutionary time. They don't change from day to da…”
Goldman delivered 47 Lehman closeout claims within an hour of bankruptcy
“We had our courier show up, At Lehman's headquarters within an hour of its filing bankruptcy protection for the 47 entities, and we had 47 sheets of paper with our closeout claim against each of those entities rolled up from wide across all the businesses, and…”
Chavez: Most enterprise companies have done a terrible job with data engineering
“Getting your single source of truth right, that data engineering problem, I think a lot of companies have done a terrible job of it.”
Million-token context windows will make hard RAG problems easy within months
“And I think over the next few months, you're going to see a lot of those changes, problems that were really hard are going to become really easy.”
Chavez: AI software simulations will eventually map biology
“I'm gonna bet that we will map biology in this way.”
Chavez: Post-crisis stress testing made the banking system significantly safer
“So this, that caused a massive change and made the system massively safer and sounder. We saw that in the pandemic.”
Chavez: Digital twins enable safe counterfactual testing for complex systems
“And the amazing thing about a digital twin is you can You can do all kinds of experiments, and you can ask all kinds of questions that would be dangerous or impossible to ask or perform in reality and then you can change your actions based on the answers to th…”
Medical diagnosis requires calculating a massive joint probability distribution
“The actual problem of diagnosis in general internal medicine Is you've got about a thousand disease categories and about 10,000 various clinical findings laboratory findings or manifestations or symptoms. And the joint probability distribution that you have to…”
Chavez: 10,000 trillion organic compounds exist vs 4,000 approved drugs
“There's about 10,000 trillion possible organic compounds, and there are 4000 approved drugs globally.”
Chavez ran nuclear simulations on a Cray-1 supercomputer at age 16
“My very first summer job when I was 16 was at the Air Force weapons lab. In Albuquerque, the government had decided that blowing up bombs in the Nevada desert was really problematic in a lot of ways. And some scientists had this idea crazy at the time that we …”