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
Brown: Capitalism collapses unless the middle class is forced to work
“The reason capitalism works is you have people at the top of the heap that have already made it, probably because they killed themselves to get there, and then you have people who want to be where they are and are willing to do the jobs that are necessary in o…”
Brown: The Fed sought a recession to push people back to work
“They never said it, but that was the explicit policy aim. We need to crash this economy to get people back to their jobs. It's crazy. I mean, it didn't work. They weren't able to do it, thank God. We got inflation down anyway despite their efforts”
Bosworth: Mobile Gatekeepers, Especially Apple, Stifle Meta's Application Development
“Strategically, we have just been at the mercy of platforms for since the start of the mobile era. And we were a web company, right? We were born of the web, and the web was this, like, amazing, unowned platform that you just, like really had a lot of control o…”
Bosworth: Apple's ATT Self-Preferencing Slowed Down the Games Industry
“We built a app install business and then Apple came for that with ATT, you know, a tremendous amount of kind of self-preferencing for themselves there. And in doing so, they really put a, you know, the brakes on what was a really rapidly growing part of the ga…”
OpenAI Board Fired Sam Altman Because He Was Consistently Untruthful
“Well, the real reason was that the board was concerned that Sam was not telling the truth. He was He just was not a reliable source of information, and it wasn't just the board members who felt that, there were top executives who felt that as well.”
Silicon Valley Executives Report Growing Discontent Over Sam Altman's Disorganization
“Last week I talked to some people in the valley and A couple of times it came up that there are the, there's growing discontent about Sam Altman's general lack of focus and people are saying he's disorganized and they're trying too many things.”
Roy: Antitrust pressure will stall Apple's lucrative services revenue growth
“Tim Cook and Apple are quietly one of the most aggressive monopolists in terms of how they build the ecosystem and juice that services revenue and that kind of growth, I think will stall out. I think we're going to start to see some kind of pressure on bundlin…”
Russian Funders Pressured Tenet Media to Blame Ukraine for Moscow Attack
“There's also the Russians pushed them to create a video tying the terror attack in Moscow to Ukraine, even though, like, ISIS was claiming responsibility at that time.”
Roy: Audiences View Influencers Like Tim Pool as Entertainers, Not Journalists
“And I think a Tim pool or a lot of these people, yes, you could somewhat, a small group of people might consider them serious commentators or even quote unquote journalists. But I think most people are just like, they are entertaining and they kind of validate…”
Roy: Russia Is Almost Certainly Funding Far-Left US Influencers Too
“Well, no, but I am positive that there's also very left wing influencers who are also receiving whether directly or indirectly money from Russia.”
Hari warns of opioid-scale death toll from GLP-1 eating disorder misuse
“I think we get an opioid like death toll of young girls who use these drugs to starve themselves.”
Bostrom: AI slowdown activism creates pressure to abandon open inquiry
“Once you start to engage in activism, then
There is kind of mimetic pressures to simplify our message and to close ranks and to try to beat the people with opposing views down in the marketplace of ideas.
and I think we are seeing some of the beginnings of th…”
Diamandis: Smarter AI systems naturally become more benevolent and supportive
“Truly believe that as systems become more and more intelligent, they get more abundant minded, more loving of life more supportive.”
Wood: Claude 3.5 Haiku Outperforms All Other Models on the Planet
“Claude III.V Haiku outperforms all other models on the planet.”
AWS's Wood: Foundation AI models will diversify rather than become commodities
“My guess is that these models will not, you know, kind of commodify. My guess is that they will diversify increasingly over time, and that the idea that there's, these models will become commodities Defined as, you know, you can hot swap them and that their ec…”
Saunders: OpenAI prioritizes shiny products over safety like the Titanic
“OpenAI claimed that their mission was to build safe and beneficial AGI, and I thought that this would mean that they would prioritize, you know, putting safety first. But over time, it started to really feel like the decisions being made by leadership were mor…”
Lessig: Ex-OpenAI Staff Remained Silent Fearing Equity Clawbacks
“I mean, I've spoken to ex-employees who've said, look, I've not done X, Y, and Z because I feared the club acts. So they can say, and they never enforced it. They didn't need to enforce it to have the effect, which it had for a significant number of people”
Clark: Advancing AI will probably require few complex breakthroughs beyond simple scalable ideas
“And I guess my naive view is the amount of things we'll need to do that are extra special will probably be quite small. And the challenge is coming up with simple ideas like next token prediction, but scale for probably other simple ideas we need to figure out…”
Clark: AI sentience could become a field of study with systemic risks
“I'm saying that we may enter the weird zone where that becomes a thing that people study. And I think that if like sentience is a thing, you could imagine like weird versions of it leading to certain types of misuses or problems in the system as well.”
Swisher: Musk dropped the ball on Tesla innovation and alienated buyers
“I think he dropped the ball on innovation at the company. I think he alienated most of his natural buyers by being such an asshole.”
Swisher: Tech platforms will never handle news well without liability to lawsuits
“I think everyone should be able to be sued, because then you do a lot better at your business if you have the threat of lawsuits, essentially. So that's not happening, and so they're never going to be good at it until they can be sued”
Swisher: Larry Page and Sergey Brin running Google would be a disaster
“I mean, he's certainly better than Larry and Sergey, that's for sure. I mean, those two. Like, okay, that would be a disaster.
Why a disaster?
Because they're just, they've lost the narrative, the two of them.”
Swisher: Elon Musk taking credit for everything is Trumpian
“Just like Elon taking credit for everything, like, you can't do anything without taking credit. It's so Trumpian, like, I, Only I can do this”
Swisher: Tech companies scraping content for AI training are shoplifters
“They're shoplifters, they've been shoplifters forever. So no, they're not just pointing to me, they're taking my things.”
Swisher told Andreessen Horowitz its media publication would suck and fail
“You remember when Andreessen Horowitz was doing his media up or whatever. When they did that, they're like, one of them called me, and they're like, we're going to beat you. It's your own game. I'm like, one, you'll suck. Two, it's a shitty business. Enjoy. I …”
Doshi: Search engine traffic will drop over 25% before 2026
“I mean, I think there's a very high probability it is greater than that number in a shorter span of time.”
Petersen: Flexport Offers Better Fulfillment Proposition Than Amazon Logistics
“So if you want to say we compete with Amazon, I think we're a strictly better proposition other than the fact that we don't own amazon.com and have all the demand that that drives.”
Petersen: Amazon does not treat sellers as tier-one customers
“Amazon does not treat the seller on their platform as a tier one customer. Their job is to help the customer, the consumer at the end of the day.”
Srinivas: AI outside Google is now higher quality than Google's internal AI
“So the first time, for the first time, we have had intelligence outside Google, like artificial intelligence outside Google, that's of higher quality than what is inside Google.”
Srinivas: Perplexity AI summaries constitute fair use of publisher content
“I think that's very fair use of other people's content. We're not stealing it. We're actually, like, just being a middleman between them and the end reader, and we're giving them more visibility, right?”
Pineau: Halting open-source AI now prevents developing vital model safety practices
“My worry about closing the doors down now is that the models are only getting better. And so if we don't release them now, we really miss an opportunity to develop the muscle we need to make these models safer. And I don't think today's model are the ones that…”
Gelsinger: Nvidia got lucky on AI because AI workloads resemble graphics
“Yeah, and it very much is that way, and Jensen and I, you know, we've known each other for 35 years, you know, this general purpose workload, and we always are adding more capabilities to the CPU, but over here, it was always just go really fast for graphics, …”
OpenAI is not maximum-profit seeking or controlled by Microsoft
“You know, we're definitely not maximum profit seeking, although you could talk to Elon about some of his ventures for that one. And we open source a lot of stuff, we'll open source more in the future, and we're certainly not controlled by Microsoft.”
White: EA and e/acc rebrand Silicon Valley wealth accumulation as heroic
“Effective accelerationism and to an extent effective altruism are really just sort of a rebranding of a lot of the same philosophies that have existed in Silicon Valley for a long time where people really want to feel good about themselves. Like they're, you k…”
Kantrowitz predicts OpenAI will lose its AI market leadership position
“My first prediction is that OpenAI, which is the leader in the field today, is going to lose the throne. That's right. OpenAI will lose the throne. It will still factor in, but it's not going to be the leader in the field that it is today.”
Kantrowitz: Broad AI chatbots will not achieve long-term success without AGI
“It's just not a model for a product. That has long-term success if we don't reach general, ah, generative, ah, sorry, general artificial intelligence.”
Ray Dalio predicted an economic crash virtually every year since the 1980s
“What we found was nonstop since the 19 eighties, Ray Dalio has been predicting economic calamity. Every, virtually every single year he has predicted a giant crash.”
Ray Dalio was the only Bridgewater employee who never humiliated himself
“There's only one person at Bridgewater who never really humiliated themselves to get the truth, and he's Ray Dalio.”
Bridgewater forced employees to hit a daily quota of negative peer ratings
“What Bridgewater starts doing is it starts telling employees, you have to rate a certain number of incidents per day. You have to put in dots. And not only that, but a certain percentage of your dots must be negative.”
Internal HR memos warned Ray Dalio of continuous employee fear at Bridgewater
“I went and I got the internal HR emails. I got their own memos, people telling Ray, this is a self Defeating loop. That people are scared that at any moment they may be fired. And the real scary thing for me about Ray Dalio and Bridgewater is that he knew, he …”
Bridgewater's Dot Collector tool was a metaphor with no connection to investments
“I believe the dot collector is, is my research would tell me is just a giant distraction that it all had to do with nothing to do with investments, but it was a metaphor.”
Nemade: Sundar Pichai's politically correct leadership lacks needed candor
“Versus I think I felt that Sundar's responses a lot of time were like very politically correct. I don't blame him. It's like his management style in some way, but I feel that the honest, the brutal honesty and candor, I think was something that I miss. And I f…”
Crypto VC Model Lets Firms Like a16z Dump Tokens on Retail
“Well, I mean, I think sadly Andreessen Horowitz probably came out of this financially kind of okay because with the, well, the crypto venture capital model is very slanted towards the venture capitalists where they can invest money in a firm. They receive thes…”
Albergotti: Post-Cambridge Analytica studies show social media disinformation doesn't sway elections
“We've seen so many studies that have come out since Cambridge Analytica that have basically backed up that point of view, which is like, you know, even though there's tons of information on, so disinformation on social media, people are not really ultimately s…”
Vogt: Human-driven ridesharing will be remembered as a flawed social experiment
“I think we will look back at, you know, right now is kind of like a flawed social experiment, you know, gone wrong with human driven ride share.”
Vogt: Data volume is not the primary bottleneck in building autonomous vehicles
“Well, look, if data was the only constraint to making a driverless car, I think there would be a lot more driverless cars out there than there are. It's a lot more than data. Like cruise is not data starved, even with, you know, hundreds of vehicles on the roa…”
Vogt: Driver assistance and robotaxis share no parallel and cannot be compared
“But again, like there's no parallel. They're not the same thing, like a system that's driver assistance where you have to take control. Versus one where you have cars driving around without a driver. And that really doesn't come to light until you actually try…”