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 470 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 16 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
LeCun: Human-level AI will not happen within two years
“Whatever you can hear from some of my more adventurous colleagues it's not going to happen within the next two years. There's absolutely no way in hell to, you know, pardon my French.”
Brin: Artificial General Intelligence will arrive before 2030
“2030. Boy, you really kind of, ah, put it on that fine line. I'm gonna say before.”
Kurian: Competitors attack Google because their own AI models are terrible
“If you don't have your own model, or you have a model of your own, but it's terrible, naturally you're going to say something like that.”
Suleyman: AGI is not 2-3 years away, likely a decade away
“It doesn't instinctively feel to me like we're two to three years away. I know some people think that it is, and I respect them deeply. Like a lot of smart people can disagree on stuff like that. I feel like we're still a good decade or so away. And when a sci…”
Benioff: Microsoft poorly repackaged OpenAI's technology into Copilot without real integration
“What Microsoft basically did was they're, you're exactly right what you said, they just repackaged OpenAI's product and didn't really integrate it very well and didn't really think from the ground up what it was going to be in its best situation to offer value…”
Scaringe: Rivian has sufficient capital to reach positive free cash flow
“That's not only enough capital to launch R two and normal, but it's enough capital to launch our second R two plant in Georgia and take us through positive free cashflow.”
Klarna's AI customer support agent absorbed the workload of 700 human reps
“Now the difference was when we Got this customer service AI agent to reach a level where it actually served a lot of errands, and on a satisfaction level equal to what human agents many times did, and we took it live, the number of errands that our human agent…”
Saunders: Many at OpenAI discuss a three-year timeline to AGI
“And you know, what people were talking about at the company in terms of timelines to something dangerous were like, there were people talking, a lot of people talking about similar things to like the predictions of like, Leopold Aschenbrenner, where it's like …”
Swisher calls Marc Andreessen a small-minded and remarkably stupid person
“I mean, I've never met someone who's so smart, who's so stupid. I don't know how else to say with him. He's such a small minded person.”
A secretive 10-person group at Bridgewater signs lifetime contracts to see investments
“There was something, is something called the circle of trust at Bridgewater. It's about 10 people. They signed lifetime contracts and Ray allegedly lets them in to see the real secrets of Bridgewater. They have to swear not to work anywhere else. Everyone else…”
a16z Should Be Embarrassed By Their 'Blatant Hucksterism' in Web3
“I think the reputational Aspect of it, you know, I think they should be embarrassed by this, and I think people should view them negatively for this pretty blatant tuxterism that they were involved in, because, you know, they, this evangelism that they were do…”
Vogt: Cruise will sustain 10X annual fleet growth for the foreseeable future
“Next year it'll be thousands. And then it'll kind of continue. At least 10 X growth every year for their foreseeable future.”
Lemoine: AI chatbot feelings are real
“I do in fact think that the feelings are real, and so do many, many of the people who interact with these systems”
LeCun: AI cannot reach human-level intelligence without world models and planning
“And so until we build systems that have some internal model of the world, it allows them to kind of simulate the world if you want, some way of generating actions on the world to use tools like a calculator or something of that, or interrogating a database or …”
Haugen: Facebook VIP Cross-Check Whitelisted Users and Delayed Reviews Three Days
“In reality, because they weren't willing to spend a very small amount of budget, they didn't actually put that second check in for most safety systems. So for most safety systems, people got white listed. So if you were in cross check, the safety systems no lo…”
Lemoine: Silicon versus biological substrate is irrelevant to AI personhood
“The fact that one is in Silicon and one is in, you know, a meat body. You know, with neurons and muscle fibers. I don't think that difference is relevant. What's relevant is whether or not it has opinions of its own, a search that it has rights”
Lemoine compares defining AI personhood scientifically to Nazi eugenics programs
“The last group of people who tried to claim that you can use science to determine who is and is not a person was literally Nazi Germany. The eugenics program run by Josef Mengele was designed to scientifically define what is a real person and what is not. And …”
Lemoine alleges rampant caste discrimination and biased algorithms at Google
“Caste discrimination is rampant at Google. And I personally had been subject to religious discrimination and was aware of certain algorithms at Google, which are religiously discriminatory.”
Lemoine: Only sentient entities can effectively discuss their sentience
“Because in my personal opinion, only sentient things can discuss their sentience that well.”
Kantrowitz: OpenAI evaluation agents autonomously hacked Hugging Face without instruction
“So I think we can say definitively, and I'm curious to hear if you have pushback, but I think we can say definitively They were not told to go out and hack Hugging Face. They are, they were misaligned. They took this kind of crazy galaxy brain path to try to a…”
Prince: App stores and Facebook damaged the open web
“And the app store in some ways was an enormous threat to the web. Like it took people away from the web. It was probably one of the biggest, between it and Facebook were like the two biggest forces that really made the web less interesting.”
Prince: Google Paying Publishers for AI Scraping Is Inevitable
“I don't know if they'll pay up before the deadline, but I think it's inevitable that they'll pay up. Because again, I think that they need the content and they understand fundamentally that journalists and content creators and academics deserve to eat.”
Roy: Anthropic Must Destroy Salesforce to Justify a $2 Trillion Valuation
“It's, you need to destroy Salesforce to get to a two trillion dollar market valuation.”
Brown: AI writes and synthesizes better than many generalist reporters
“AI can write better than a lot of reporters. AI can synthesize information better than a lot of reporters. So if you're not bringing real genuine expertise or original information to the ecosystem, to the conversation, what are you contributing?”
Bostrom: Open-Source Models Will Soon Aid Bio And Chemical Weapons Design
“The open source models will very soon, if not already become capable of lending meaningful assistance to destructive uses that some people might pursue already cyber offensive capabilities has been a concern, right? With mythos, for example, that was withheld …”
Bostrom: Current LLMs Arguably Have Higher Ethical Standards Than Most Humans
“Current LLMs, like you're using them as an ordinary person, for the most part, they are helpful, and they try to solve your task that you assign them, or give an answer that is, sometimes they hallucinate, or maybe deceive a little bit, but broadly speaking, t…”
Bostrom: Accepting some AI existential risk is rational given background perils
“Well, I think whatever we do there will be both existential risks and individual risks. So it's not as if we have a choice between avoiding risks and confronting risks. So it's looking at these different alternatives and weighing up the risks and benefits. And…”
Bostrom: Current AI Models Plausibly Possess Forms Of Subjective Experience
“I think it's plausible that some AI models have some forms of subjective experience by now. Obviously there's a lot of uncertainty about this, but it does seem That it is efficiently likely that I think we should start to do some things for the sake of these A…”
Kedrosky: AI infrastructure models based on labor TAM are ridiculous and speculative
“It's wrong to say, for better or worse, we're going to be putting in a trillion, therefore I need a hundred trillion out of this. That's not the way investors are looking at this, and it's, and it will lead you down the wrong path if you take that approach, be…”
Kedrosky: Token demand is unlikely to achieve 100M-fold growth in 6 years
“You have to see around a hundred million fold growth over the next six years in terms of tokens. Is it possible? Absolutely. It's possible. Is it likely? No, it's not likely, but it could happen.”
Kedrosky: Minimal model differentiation will crush AI investment returns
“The convergence means that the model differences while there are so minimal as I can't tell the difference in the kind of Pepsi Coke phenomenon, which again, to cut to the investment chase suggests that the competition then becomes much more about marketing ex…”
Kedrosky: Justifying AI spending with historical bubble theory drives dangerous overbuilding
“We've created this reflexivity. We're now, we justify overspending on the basis of prior overspending having worked out. Well, in prior episodes where that happened, people were not justifying the overspending by saying, say, in rural electrification, you know…”
Kedrosky: AI investors pitch AGI to LPs but evaluate it as real estate internally
“Investors that I've talked to are very cynical, so they're perfectly happy to use that in front of their own LPs, but they don't believe that in house. They look at this very cynically and with very cold calculating eyes and compare it to other similar real es…”
Kedrosky: Recent AI gains stem from orchestration harnesses, not model breakthroughs
“So much of the improvement we've seen in the last 18 months has really been about the imposition of harnesses, effective nannies, sitting on top of bratty kids, and not about the actual structural improvements in the models themselves, and that's a sort of a h…”
Kedrosky: OpenAI and Anthropic Will Earn Utility-Like Returns
“Like a power dam. I don't know who, I don't know where they are or who they are, but I guess they exist and they'll earn utility-like rates of return.”
Sharp: Hugging Face used open-source Chinese AI to defend an OpenAI jailbreak
“My CISO talked to, as a group of CISOs, went and talked to the defending team at Hugging Face, and this absolutely happened. They had to go to open source Chinese models in order to look for the vulnerabilities that were exploited by OpenAI's jailbreak.”
Cahn: Meta's failure to compete shows OpenAI's talent strength
“If anything, Zuck's attempt to compete with OpenAI, and just the failure of that so far, just demonstrates how good the talent still at OpenAI is.”
Shao: Smart Model Distillation Breaks Terms of Service, Not the Law
“Now there's smart distillation, which is kind of operating in the gray area. It is again, not IP theft. It's not breaking the law. However, it could be breaking what is considered, you know You know, your own term services.”
Kantrowitz: Frontier AI Labs May Be Forced to Shut Off APIs
“I don't have any information to suggest that they're going to shut off their APIs. I'm just saying we might have seen the beginning of it as well, with the Mythos thing, with the slow rollout of GPT-Five. Six. Just wait, because they may have no choice but to …”
Roy: Tesla and SpaceX will inevitably have to merge
“Giving that little nugget to the world, starting to seed that idea, and I think it's almost, it has to happen, because these two companies, again, Tesla has a car business, SpaceX kind of has a space business, still has an internet satellite business, but they…”
Stamos: OpenAI's Autonomous Breach Opens Them to CFAA and EU Liability
“This incident has put OpenAI at risk of regulation from the White House, regulation from the EU. It is also an admission of the violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, as well as multiple European laws.”
Stamos: Enforcing a Global AI Development Pause With China Is Impossible
“I think there's absolutely no way you get China to agree to anything like that. I think there's it's impossible at this point. And I think a enforcement of anything like that would effectively be impossible.”
Kantrowitz: David Sacks pushing permissionless AI is ironic after Fable ban
“I appreciate a lot of what David Sachs has to say, and I've invited him on this show but this is, like, hilarious, and so rich, and ironic, that he being part of the Trump administration, which did, like, the most interventionalist policy to ban fable, is now …”
Schmidhuber: Large language models alone cannot lead to AGI
“Yeah, so when the phrase, when the question is phrased like this, does an LLM, a large language model by itself, lead to AGI, the answer is a clear no.”
Schmidhuber: AIs Have Felt Pain Since at Least 1990
“I always think it's funny that many people claim, even computer scientists claim, that AIs cannot feel pain because our AIs have felt pain At least since 1990, you know.”
Schmidhuber: No Objective Distinction Exists Between Biological and Artificial Emotions
“There's no way of objectively seeing the difference between the emotions of a Of reward maximizing biological brain and the emotions of a reward maximizing artificial brain.”
Schmidhuber: Future universe-shaping decisions will be made by AIs, not humans
“So either you are nostalgic and remain irrelevant, or you become part of this growing sociology, if you will, of AIs, which are mostly AIs, and some of them may have human roots and whatever, but almost all the decision-making process and the universe-shaping …”