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
Marcus: OpenAI's Project Orion failed and became GPT-4.5
“So OpenAI tried to build GPT-V and they had a thing called Project Orion and it actually failed. And eventually got released as GPT four and a half. So what they thought was going to be GPT five just didn't meet expectations.”
Marcus: Models like o1 are not systematically better than GPT-4
“Models like O-I are not systematically better than GPT-IV. There's, they're better in certain use cases. Especially ones where you can create data in advance.”
Marcus: 'Reasoning' AI models only mimic patterns without genuine abstractions
“Now, the reason I wouldn't call them reasoning models, though you're right that many people do, is what I think they're doing is basically copying patterns of human reasoning. They're getting data about how humans reason certain things, but the depth of reason…”
Marcus: AI scaling laws are no longer true
“So the scaling quote laws were empirical guesses about how these models work and they were true for a little while, which was amazing. And they're not true anymore, which is also amazing in a way.”
Marcus: OpenAI is not worth $300B and won't IPO at $3T
“I don't think LLMs will disappear. I think they're useful, but this, yeah, the valuations don't make sense. I mean, I don't see open AI being worth three hundred billion dollars. And you have to remember that venture capitalists have to like 10 X to be happy o…”
Marcus: No AI lab has a technical moat; OpenAI has users
“Nobody has a technical mode. OpenAI has a user mode.”
Marcus: Gen AI's core business model will be surveillance and ads
“The business model of gen AI will be surveillance and hyper-targeted ads, just like it has been for social media.”
Amazon Will Not Display Tariff Charges on Listings or Amazon Haul
“You know, it's, this is an incredibly dynamic situation, and never and always are difficult questions, but this was considered for our ultra-low-cost store alone, Amazon Hall. It was considered. It was not approved. It's not happening. It was not considered fo…”
Kantrowitz: Regulators will likely break up Google and potentially Meta
“The vibe here is that we're going to see breakups very likely of Google and potentially of Facebook.”
Petersen: Chinese cars are far ahead of Western, Japanese, and Korean vehicles
“They're so fricking good. They're so far ahead of anything that the West or even Japan and Korea are making”
Roy: One-Third of OpenAI's Projected $28B Revenue Comes from SoftBank
“They're expecting next year, 12 and a half billion. That's gonna then go to twenty eight billion dollars, and a third of that revenue is going to come from SoftBank. SoftBank spending on OpenAI for all of its own companies and portfolio companies.”
Hendrycks: Superintelligence race will incentivize preemptive sabotage of rival AI projects
“I think that form of competition would be very dangerous, and because there's a risk of loss of control, and because it might incentivize states to engage in preventive sabotage or preemptive sabotage to disable these sorts of projects.”
Hendrycks: Russia and China may threaten US data centers over superintelligence progress
“If the US were pulling ahead both Russia and China may have a substantial interest in saying, hey, cut this out. Pulling ahead to develop super intelligence, which could give it a huge advantage and an ability to crush crush them. They'd say, you don't get to …”
LeCun: Large language models are incapable of inventing new things
“We also know that they can hallucinate facts that aren't true but they're really, in their purest form, they are incapable of inventing new things.”
LeCun: Breakthrough scientific AI will not be an LLM
“No, not, not in the current form. I mean, and whatever form of AI would be able to do that will not be LLMs. They might use LLMs as one component.”
LeCun: Chain-of-thought prompting does not produce genuine reasoning in LLMs
“One simple way of
getting NNMs to kind of appear to reason is chain of thought, right?
So you basically tell them to generate more tokens than they really need to in the hope that in the process of generating those tokens, they're going to devote more computa…”
LeCun: Nobody knows how to build agentic systems beyond regurgitating plans
“Everybody's talking about agentic systems. Nobody has any idea how to build them other than basically regurgitating plans that have, the system has already been trained on.”
LeCun: Scaling up LLMs will not produce human-level AI
“We are not going to get to human level AI by just scaling up LLMs. This is just not going to happen.”
LeCun: Digital superintelligence 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. The, you know, the idea that we're going to have, you know, a country of gen…”
LeCun: AI cannot reach human-level intelligence by training on text alone
“And it tells you clearly that we're not going to get to human level AI by just training on text. It's just not a rich enough source of information.”
LeCun: Pixel-level video generation will not solve AI world understanding
“Is the right way to approach this problem to train better and better video generation systems? And my answer to this is absolutely no. The problem of understanding the world does not go through the solution to the, to generating video at the pixel level.”
LeCun: Open source AI innovates faster than proprietary models can match
“Open source progress is faster and you know, a lot more innovation can take place in the open source world, which the proprietary world may have a hard time catching up with.”
Albergotti: Apple's heavy marketing focus on privacy crippled its AI development
“And also, you know, another, another BS thing that Apple pitched, which this is privacy thing, which honestly, like, I cannot believe how much mileage they got out of that. They kind of just painted themselves into a corner because, you know, all these other c…”
Baszucki completely disavows Hindenburg Research's allegations of inflated Roblox user metrics
“On this point in particular, you know, on TV, publicly on earnings call, we completely disavow the whole allegation. And the interesting thing is investors can look at the ratio of the time on Roblox to the hours on Roblox to the bookings on On Roblox, that th…”
Hayes: X Serves Elon Musk's Political Project Rather Than Pure Attention
“X very clearly has an objective other than attention, which is the political project of its owner. You know what I mean? So like, there's a place where like, yes, that attention is being aggregated for a specific political process. Project. That political proj…”
Hayes: Musk's Twitter takeover converted political power into financial gains via Trump
“What it did was it created a kind of political power That then created financial rewards on the backside, because once you get Donald Trump elected, all of a sudden everyone wants to be your buddy, and your stock price goes up.”
Hayes: Regulating and capping screen time or attention consumption is not crazy
“I don't think that's a crazy idea. I mean, I don't want the Chinese model for a lot of things, but you know, there are some, certain things the Chinese are pretty good at. I think that we can, if we can regulate, you know, the argument I make in the book about…”
Enjeti: Zuckerberg, Pichai, and Bezos Political Flip-Flopping on Trump Is Cartoonish
“And so, in a weird way, I really respect the way that Tim Cook has handled the entire Trump era. It doesn't seem as dizzying as the Mark Zuckerberg, or the Sundar Pichai, or even Bezos. I mean, it's just cartoonish, you know, in my opinion, to see these people…”
Enjeti: A Future Democratic Administration Will Cancel Musk's Federal Contracts
“Yeah, if you're whoever, if you're Gavin Newsom administration, you're done. Like, it's, I'm gonna use the exact executive order precedent, and all of those contracts are getting canceled.”
Enjeti: DeepSeek Model Cost Over $1 Billion to Train
“This idea that it's six million dollars or whatever to run is ludicrous. It obviously cost over a billion dollars to train the model before it eventually got to the point where it could run off of that six million.”
Kantrowitz: Open-source models are poised to surpass proprietary AI labs
“It put the whole proprietary model industry, the OpenAI's and the anthropics of the world On their back feet, understanding that they are about to be passed by open source, and they have to embrace it.”
Hoffman: OpenAI meant open API access, not open source models
“In terms of being open, there's lots of different parameters of open, and open AI has been, you know, working to have, like, open, you know, kind of you know, with, obviously, identity and registration for safety, but open AI, API access. It wasn't called open…”
Hoffman: Elon Musk approved OpenAI's closed-model strategy as co-CEO
“Elon was part of that decision for you know, as kind of co-CEO in terms of making that decision. And so that's how open AI has always operated.”
Hoffman: FTC Chair Lina Khan's tech M&A crackdown concentrates Big Tech power
“You know, she misunderstands, like, kind of the role of how to stop the aggregation of power in large tech companies, because she says, well, if she stops large tech companies from buying small startups, what that means is venture capitalists, like myself, and…”
Demis Hassabis expects Google spinout Isomorphic Labs to cure all diseases
“One is curing all diseases one day. Which I think we're going to do with isomorphic and the work we're doing there or our spin out, our drug discovery spin out.”
Kuyda: Solving Tech Isolation Requires More Powerful AI, Not Less Tech
“So the only way to solve it is by creating the tech that's even more powerful than the one that came before. And I do think AI is that”
Newton predicts Grammarly will be dead by the end of 2025
“Oh, can I give you a prediction? Grammarly dead by end of 2025.”
Newton: Google's AI models are trained to 'teach to the test'
“Well, I have a conspiracy theory, which is you know kind of not great to be sharing on a podcast, but I'm gonna do it anyway, which is, I think Google is teaching to the test. You know what I mean? Yes. Like, I think that they know what the benchmarks are, and…”
Arbaugh: Consumer products will require Neuralink compatibility to sell
“And so one day I think everything is gonna be, like, neural link compatible. Like, companies will have to put that in their product in order for it to sell. If it's not neural link compatible, people will be like, well, why, why are we even using this?”
Wang: Military AI will function as deterrence and prevent conflicts
“My hope certainly is that while AIs Application into military is something that is, is very concerning and potentially extremely powerful. It is the sort of same overall effect, which is to ultimately deter more conflict than create it.”
Benioff: Microsoft will likely fast-follow Salesforce into agentic AI
“Maybe Microsoft will pivot like they usually do and fast follow us, you know, into this new agentic world because I think that's really where all the action is going to be.”
Benioff: Prompt engineering was invented at Salesforce
“Even prompt engineering was invented at Salesforce, which we're very proud of.”
Benioff: Musk is unprecedentedly running multiple companies and the US government
“He's a great guy. He's doing incredible things. He's brilliant. He's running like 2000 companies and the US government all at the same time. So, you know, it's like, we've never seen anybody like this in my, in our careers, right? It's just like, this person c…”
Gomez: AI will never cause mass unemployment of humans
“Well, because I think that we will never see mass unemployment of humans. I think that this technology is going to unlock more opportunities. It will let us do more as opposed to Scaling back what we do.”
Gomez: AI Models Are Less Capable and More Controllable Than Feared
“As more and more evidence emerges that these models are much more controllable than we may have thought that they're a little bit less capable than we may have thought it's harder and harder to make that narrative.”
Gomez: AI Self-Improvement Plateaus and Won't Cause Intelligence Explosion
“Not happening. It's not happening. It improves for, it can self-improve for a while, and then it tapers off. And so, yeah, you get some good improvement out of it, which is why we use it, but then it plateaus. It doesn't just keep going forever.”
Gomez: AI Can Reach AGI Through The Internet Without Physical Embodiment
“I actually take, I think the less popular view, which is The internet is enough, and by observation, you can actually learn enough to be extremely, extremely compelling. I think that's if we're talking about AGI and doing things as well as humans do, I think t…”