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 77 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
Amodei: AI training costs will hit $1B in 2024 and up to $10B in 2025
“I think that next year we're probably going to see from multiple players models on the order of one billion dollars, and in 2025 we're going to see models on the order of Several billion, I don't know, perhaps even ten billion dollars.”
Dixon: Sugar will be the biggest killer of this generation
“Sugar is the new smoking. It's going to you know, kill, it's going to be by far the biggest killer of this generation.”
Ashatosh: Azure and IBM will beat AWS in enterprise cloud within two years
“In fact, we predict that the number one enterprise cloud in the next two years is probably going to be Azure, and not AWS, just because they are sucking up a tremendous amount of footprint of applications. And number two actually might be IBM, and not AWS, as …”
Patrick Byrne predicts a 2008-level economic crisis within two to three years
“I also think there's going to be quite soon a big, in the next two or three years, a big disruption in our economy. I think in oh eight or worse is going to happen, and with each disruption, people will shift farther into online, and then it ratchets.”
McMaster: Apple faces margin pressure and negligible emerging market share
“I believe over time, Apple's even going to have products. You know, problems, because they're not going to be able to sustain these margins, and in these markets where Android is dominant, Apple's market share will be negligible. Right? As these markets contin…”
Sinofsky predicts cars sold in 2019 are the last requiring human drivers
“If you, I look at the automobiles today, and I think that the ones that are being sold today are the very last cars that are going to basically require a driver.”
Paul Krugman predicts only one or two cryptocurrencies will survive
“There will not be 1600 cryptocurrencies out there. There will be one or two.”
Evans: On-device AI models will fail as capability gains outpace compression
“Will we have small models running on devices? No, because the small models, the capabilities are moving too fast for the small models to shrink the small model onto the device.”
Schmidt: Decentralized training of 400B parameter AI models is solvable by 2025
“I think it still is, it would still be, you know, like a next year sort of environment thing that we would have to do. There are some scaling problems, or not scaling problems, but technical things about how you shard the model, because at that point you get t…”
Aviation could account for 50% of global CO2 emissions by 2050
“But our own industry projections are that by 20 50, that's going to be anywhere up to 50% of all CO two emissions everywhere.”
Hefets: US home prices will decline 10% to 15% by Q1 2023
“Our view at Divi is that we're gonna start to see heading into Q-one year-on-year declines in home prices across Economist. That is likely to be somewhere around 10 to 15% year-on-year home price declines.”
Stephenson: Lamina1 will require node operators to purchase verified carbon credits
“The system's going to be designed in such a way that in order to participate, to operate a node, you need to demonstrate that you've acquired, you've bought a certain number of carbon credits from a legitimate company”
Riccitiello: Viewers will walk inside 3D movie scenes within three years
“I am certain within the next two to three years, you'll be able to freeze the frame put on a set of VR or AR glasses or look through your phone and walk into the scene and go anywhere.”
Sarandos predicts sports leagues like the NFL will go direct-to-consumer
“I think the winner will be NFL.com. That they'll just go direct to consumer, and there's plenty of people who pay an outrageous amount of money for a subscription for NFL, or NBA, or MLB, and ultimately the winners will be the league anyway, so.”
Pope: The autonomous vehicle transition could be complete by 2025
“So it might start a little later than the optimists think. Might start in 2022, but it might be over by 2025.”
Pope: Driving is the largest U.S. profession and will be automated away
“We're going to lose the largest profession in the United States, which is driver.”
Srinivasan: Generic blockchain hype will crash in late 2016
“I think the blockchain stuff is actually right at the top of the Gardner hype cycle, and I think it's gonna crash down, like, towards the second half, you know, of this year when people actually try to implement it.”
Srinivasan: Everyone will wear VR headsets within five to ten years
“So that's going to be kind of interesting in like five or 10 years, everyone's wearing these kind of things.”
Evans: Smartphones will eat mass-market virtual reality
“Well, I think the basic story here is smartphones eat VR.”
Evans: There are even odds Windows Phone disappears within a year
“It's, that, that, I would be, I think there's even odds that that product won't exist in a year.”
Evans: Smartphones will dominate VR hardware within five years
“On like a five-year view, it seems to me that this is all going to be about smartphones, because just Moore's law will drive this, and the graphics and the sensors will get there”
Evans: Wintel Platform Share Will Decline to 10% of Computing Market
“The Wintel ecosystem now, as a percentage of total computing, so including tablets and smartphones and everything else, is now sort of 15% of unit sales, and it's going to go down, it's going to go maybe not 10%, but you know, it may go down to 10%”
Markoff predicts semiconductor scaling will permanently stop at 5 nanometers
“I believe, you know, based on talking to all the wise men I've been able to talk to in Silicon Valley, that there are three more turns of the crank. We go from 14 to 10 to seven to five. The industry can see its way to five.”
Cheney: Starbucks will be entirely barista-less by 2024
“I would likely suggest that Starbucks will be like barista-less in five years.”
DoD will soon stop launching traditional GPS satellites
“Pretty soon we'll, I won't be launching any more of those satellites.”
Smith: Amazon will restrict same-day delivery to groceries and next-day elsewhere
“I don't buy that there's a lot of product demand for same day. I think that Amazon will do same day for grocery because it makes sense on fresh. I don't, I believe they'll do next day on everything else.”
Andreessen: Every person globally will own a smartphone by decade's end
“So the big thing happening in the world right now is the smartphone, and the significance of the smartphone is, for the first time in human history, we're going to get a computer in everybody's hands, and by everybody, I mean everybody on the planet and by eve…”
Andreessen: 5 to 7 billion people will own smartphones by 2020
“And this is the thing I've been talking a lot about that people occasionally get angry about, because they think it won't Can't possibly come true, but I'm convinced it's going to come true, which is I think everybody on the planet by the end of the decade is …”
Dixon: Enterprise applications will lead consumer adoption in wearable tech
“I think there's a reasonable chance that you'll see the corporate use cases leading Like, unlike what we've seen over the last 15 years in technology, which is the consumer has led the enterprise. You know, the stuff you have at home on your iPhone and Gmail i…”
Dixon: Almost all smartphones will capture 3D imaging within two years
“I think within two years for phones, almost all smartphones will be able to take three to three D imaging.”
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 …”
Levine: Total connected computing devices will expand into the trillions
“I can imagine a world where there will be trillions of devices out there. So if you think about the challenges of management, security, data, all of the issues of distributed computing, that's now going to, it's the opportunity and the challenge of what we're …”
Patel: NVIDIA will hold over $100B in cash by late 2025
“The cash on their balance sheet keeps growing, and they're gonna have north of a hundred billion dollars of cash on their balance sheet by the end of this year, I think.”
Other US states will not replicate Illinois' AI mental health therapy ban
“I don't expect we'll see the other states go in the direction of Illinois, partially because it's just so hard to regulate.”
Kumar: Sesame will build a unified audio-text transformer within months
“The path that we're going to take, I think, over the next few months is making a single transformer that does both audio understanding, content, text content generation, and speech generation.”
Postma: Social media will integrate AI clothing try-ons within years
“And I wouldn't be surprised if any social media is going to do this soon, because Instagram already has photos of your face, right? They could already train a model on your face in that kind of sense. And you could put the clothing on it that they put in their…”
Fielding: Privateer is launching its own satellite constellation
“For that we're putting up a constellation of our own satellites, which I hope doesn't sound too hypocritical.”
Zhao: Sandbox VR will expand from 14 to 50 rooms by year-end
“And soon, by the end of summer, the end of this year, we will go from, we have 14 rooms now, to over 50 rooms.”
Fortney: Small molecule longevity drugs will likely emerge first
“I guess I'm expecting small molecules to come first because that's what pharma is used to. You know, that's what the, we have all the models to make that work. And the space of chemicals has been so unexplored. So I think there are going to be other repomycins…”
Sensor and machine data volume will expand by orders of magnitude
“It will be literally orders of magnitude and in the exact mathematical sense, orders of magnitude, more data that needs to be stored in process.”
Zipline's first non-medical drone delivery will likely be livestock sperm
“The first thing we do that isn't medicine will probably be sperm.”
Dixon: A $300 standalone 4K VR headset is four years away
“We're seeing, I think it's accelerate, it's accelerating to the sort of Holy Grail headset, which is whatever, let's call it a 300 dollar standalone device with positional tracking and hand tracking and four K per eye or something like, let's call that the Hol…”
Dixon: Virtual reality will enter a hype-cycle trough in two years
“We're in the Gartner hype cycle and we're at the peak and there will be a trough of despond and that'll be in two years.”
Evans predicts Apple VR and cars are two to four years away.
“The two big things that are next for Apple are on the one hand VR, or potentially AR, and then on the other hand cars. But just from looking at the state of the technology, but those are both basically two, three, four years away.”
Bahl: India's retail market will hit $1 trillion by 2019
“In India India's retail market is about six hundred billion dollars. Going to a trillion dollars in the next three years.”
Khanna: Tech and telecom firms will spend $4 trillion on infrastructure by 2020
“These telecom and technology and kind of, you know, data industry companies invest about, you know, it's estimated that between now and twenty-twenty, let alone all the trillions that have been spent so far, will spend another four trillion dollars just on the…”
Rhinehart: Soylent is developing a therapeutic food paste for $1 daily
“One thing we are working on is what's called an RUTF, ready to use therapeutic food, which is kind of like a paste. So it's between the powder and the drink so that it is ready to consume, but it's cheaper to ship because it doesn't have as high moisture conte…”