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 299 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 45 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
Gerstner: AI will be bigger and more important than internet, mobile, and cloud
“I think AI, or I like to talk about augmented intelligence, will be more important to humanity. Then the first three super cycles I've lived through, which are internet, mobile, and cloud. I think it'll be bigger, and so I don't buy that thesis.”
Gerstner: More compute will be deployed in 2024 than all previous history
“We're gonna deploy more compute in twenty-twenty-four than in all previous years combined.”
Gerstner: 2024 will bring AI deployments without mass layoffs
“2024 is going to be the year of deployments. We're going to start seeing those gains. You will not see mass layoffs. And then, 20, 25 and beyond, I think you're really gonna see those transformations kick in.”
Gerstner: 10-year yields are peaking and rate cuts are coming in 2024
“We're nearing the top of tenure, if not at the top. We're gonna see rate cuts next year, and importantly, we're at the beginning of what may be the most important super cycle, accelerant, to our economy in a long time.”
McGrew: AI scaling will keep working without hitting an asymptote
“The way I think about it is that we are still pretty far away from the level of scale that is the human brain. And so there's no reason for there to be an asymptote. I think it just keeps working.”
McGrew: Human-level multi-agent AI will create its own civilization
“When you push this to the level where AI is at the human level, I mean, they're basically going to be creating their own civilization.”
McGrew: GPT-5 will render current AI infrastructure solutions completely obsolete
“I'm always a little worried about the infrastructure work, because I think, you know, you're solving the problems as they exist today, and when GPD 4.5 and GPD five come out, you know, they're gonna have fundamentally different use cases and fundamentally diff…”
Andreessen: AIs will not get certified as doctors or lawyers anytime soon
“And my, the point in that essay is what Joe just said, which is like, it will be illegal to do that. Like, it's not going to happen because it's going to be illegal. Like AIs are not going to get certified as doctors and lawyers anytime soon. Like that, that I…”
Andreessen: AI will favor defense over offense and reduce violence
“Arguably this swings AI swings very much the advantage of the defender over the attacker, and I think maybe we're already seeing that play out in Ukraine... My guess is this tilts in the direction of defense and therefore in the direction of probably actually …”
Alex Karp: Adversarial hardware cultures will inherently struggle to build software
“One of our advantages in software is that we like the hardware cultures are really struggle with software because these things are true for tanks and they're true for other things and big metal things. They're not true for software, but again, it's also true t…”
Karp: China and Russia's software pivot will let them catch up
“China and Russia realize this. They didn't realize it before. And that is going to change where they invest their money. And we'll give them ability to catch up if we're not on top of this.”
Chambers: Nile will transform networking like AWS transformed cloud
“Think about what Cisco did to all the networking companies. Think about what Amazon did in the cloud. Think what Apple did in terms of ease of use. That really is what now is going to do this industry if we do it right.”
Chambers predicts India will outgrow the world for the next decade
“You watch, ah, one economy that's gonna outgrow the rest of the world for the next decade, It'll be India. Wouldn't surprise me to see him grow in the nine to 11% range for a decade.”
Aboyeji: Africa will have the majority of the global workforce by 2035
“In fact, just in the next 15 years, Africa is already majority of the world's working population.”
Berdichevsky: Autonomous EVs will be an order of magnitude cheaper than gas
“And as you can imagine, with the cost of recharging an EV being almost nothing compared to the cost of refueling a car, you know, autonomous EVs are going to be not just a little cheaper than gas powered EVs, but they're going to be an order of magnitude.”
Berdichevsky: Automotive scale will make lithium-ion dominate electrical grid storage
“Being somebody who's in lithium ion, I actually think the scale of automotive will also lead lithium ion to dominate most of the grid.”
Berdichevsky predicts most fossil fuel use will disappear by 2050
“I think by the middle of the century, I'm very, very confident that most fossil fuel fuel use will go away.”
Berdichevsky predicts battery costs will reach $50/kWh by 2030
“And so you can plot that out and you can see the costs. If technology improves trending to kind of 50 bucks a kilowatt hour, which would have been unthinkable to people, you know just a few years ago. I mean, a hundred seemed like a real stretch for everybody.…”
Gimenez: More biotechs will commercialize drugs independently instead of selling
“I would say my sort of falsifiable prediction would be that we're going to start seeing more and more biotechs make drugs that they try to commercialize themselves as opposed to selling to pharma to do the commercialization.”
DeWitte: 15MW Oklo reactors can generate power below 4-5 cents/kWh
“It's a little more expensive, but if you move that to the 15 megawatt size range, then yeah, you can get the prices down to sort of below four, four or five cents kilowatt hour.”
Esper: Putin Cannot Accept Defeat and Will Continue Shelling Ukrainian Cities
“Can Putin walk away with a loss? I don't think so. He's gonna have to find a face saving way out. I think folks are gonna try and help him do that. At this point, I think his tactics will continue to be the indiscriminate shelling of Ukrainian cities.”
Cowen: Clean Energy's Big Challenges Are Legal and NIMBYism, Not Science
“Batteries, solar, wind, the big problems will end up being the law, the NIMBYs, the regulators, not the science.”
Cowen: Higher education will shift to modular GitHub-style credentials
“In an ideal world, I don't think we would have college as a four-year experience. It would be more like a GitHub page where you've been certified in different ways, online, offline, University of Austin. You took two classes at Princeton over the summer. You l…”
Craft: China is watching Ukraine and Taiwan could be next
“We obviously have China watching very closely because my fear is Taiwan will be next.”
Khanna: Fleeing Silicon Valley over a wealth tax is a dumb bet
“And if someone is foolish enough to go take their money outside America and not invest in Silicon Valley because of a one or two percent tax, do it. America is going to still, it would be a dumb bet. Like, we still have the largest growth possibility. And so I…”
Rep. Khanna: Broad school choice will further deteriorate public schools
“If I thought that you could have that and have this choice fine, but the challenge is you're going to have a few people who take advantage of it, and then there would be even a further deterioration. Of the place where 90% of people go public school.”
Mackey: Unchecked progressivism will destroy modernism
“Because if progressivism is allowed to continue without being checked, it will destroy, it'll destroy modernism.”
Ferguson: Biden Administration Policies Will Deepen Entitlement Poverty Traps
“And it seems like the Biden administration is just going to add to these systems of entitlement that end up, in fact, trapping people in the bottom quintile.”
Ferguson: The fiat system is being driven to a breaking point
“It's obvious that the fiat system is reaching some kind of critical threshold. Massively rapid monetary growth, the explicit financing of government deficits that are running in trillions of dollars every year, as far as the eye can see, you sense that the sys…”
Srinivasan: The 2020s will be startup cities and 2030s network states
“The 2000 about tech companies. The 20 tens, crypto protocols between 20 startup cities, the 20 thirties network states, right?”
Balaji Srinivasan: Bitcoin will be 10x PayPal and may be 10x gold
“I think Bitcoin will in the fullness of time, it's certainly 10 X, it will be 10 X PayPal. It may be 10 X gold.”
Srinivasan: 'Woke' movement will prove self-destructive due to inflation
“Well, I think it's going to be self-destructive because of inflation, but not necessarily because of its internal.”
Balaji: Next crisis will be inflation, especially in physical goods
“The next crisis is very obvious. It's going to be inflation. I think or at least inflation in a lot of physical goods. I think digital goods will be fine because their marginal costs are so low.”
Balaji Srinivasan: Intra-city political divisions will decline as inter-city competition rises
“Political divisions within cities, I think will start to decline, but economic competition between cities will rise. Right. So Democrat versus Republican within cities will fall.”
Balaji Srinivasan predicts startup cities will form Hanseatic League-style online alliances
“I think we're going to see them forming like Hanseatic league type things like the Hanseatic league of, you know, the I forget it was the 1413 hundreds with a bunch of cities that unite together against pirates. These startup cities will find each other online…”
Harper: Post-pandemic inflation will force central banks to hike interest rates
“Now you're getting consumer inflation, and what happens, Joe, I mean, let's say we've been through this movie before, what happens is, at some point, this requires interest rate hikes. And as soon as you have interest rate hikes, you have impacts on investment…”
Harper: US borrowing trillions at zero percent will end quickly
“The people believe the United States can continue to borrow countless trillions of dollars at zero percent. Not only do I believe that's not true, I believe that's actually coming to an end much quicker than people think.”
Palmer Luckey: Virtual reality will be humanity's final dominant media platform
“The final media platform, not just the next one, but the final one. I wasn't sure if it'd be the next one or if it was ready, but I knew that in the end, virtual reality was going to be the dominant media platform.”
Luckey: High-training neural interfaces will launch in military before consumer tech
“I think the most powerful uses of these types of Human and computer interfaces are going to be ones that do require many hours of training. You know, imagine if I could, let's say, wear a band that is detecting a lot of the, Electrical activity in my median ne…”
Klausner: Next breakthrough will be curative T-cell therapy for solid tumors
“So I think the next big breakthrough in, in curative therapy is going to be curative therapy for any solid tumor by getting these T cells to have the properties that allow them to stay active even in solid tumors, which have the ability, maybe why they exist, …”
Klausner: Upcoming Patient Trials Could Signal Beginning of End of Cancer
“It's going to be tried in patients over the next year or so. If we were right scientifically, I think we can be thinking about seeing the beginning of the end of cancer.”
Lonsdale: Robotics will become important to the world in late 2020s
“If you would have asked me, like, in, like, last year, frankly, I would have said, well, yes, I do think these things are going to be really important to the world in the twenty-thirties, and now just understanding what's going on, it seems like they're going …”
Levie: Security Incident Response Will Become Entirely Agentic
“So imagine a security incident. You obviously would want to respond to it as quickly as possible. So that'll become entirely agentic.”
Levie: Top US AI labs will remain neck-and-neck at the frontier
“So you've got at a minimum five leading US labs that at a minimum within a very relatively narrow band are gonna all be following each other at the frontier, which is fantastic.”
Levie: Consumers will notice AI model progress less and less
“We, as consumers, are probably gonna start to experience this model progress kind of almost less and less.”
Six-second voice clones will automate social engineering attacks against help desks
“You're gonna start seeing social engineering automated, where six seconds of Joe Lonsdale's voice is gonna be used to get a help desk to do something.”
Defensive teams will run offensive AI agents to train defense systems
“There is no question that In the future, you'll have AI agents on offense run by the good guys to train the AI on defense run by the good guys.”
Coordinated AI agent cyber swarms are coming at inhuman speeds
“That drone swarm in cyber will be coming, and the difference with that total recall it has that humans don't have, the instantaneous communication between different agents that have different objectives so they can coordinate at a speed humans cannot, this has…”