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
Wood argues public web data is fair game for AI model training
“Who's to say what this data can be used for when it's publicly available. You know, you chose to make it publicly available. If you want to put some permissions around it, or you want to take it private, Yeah, that's totally up to you. You still own the data. …”
Teller: Climate change wouldn't be happening if society embraced nuclear power
“The disaster which is climate change right now would not be happening if we as a society had not let our fears about the first thing translate into an inability to use the upside of nuclear power to save us from what is now arguably the biggest problem in the …”
Teller: AI catastrophe ranks far behind climate change and nuclear weapons
“I think that the world is overrun with serious problems. I would put at the top of that list, climate change. Nowhere close to second place. I would put nuclear weapons, just since we use that as an example, and I would put AI doing something particularly horr…”
Teller: Extreme AI outcomes will not happen in our lifetime
“Do I believe that anything particularly extreme in our lifetime is going to happen? I don't. I'm sorry, but I've been working on robots trying to open doorknobs for like the last 30 years, and it's been a slog.”
Pogue: OceanGate Operated with a Strict Rocket-Launch-Style Safety Culture
“There is a very obvious culture of safety among the crew. I mean, this thing is run like a rocket launch with Long countdowns and checklists and inspections and mandatory twice daily briefings, even if you're not diving, you have to be there, where they go thr…”
Luckey: Magic Leap botched launches and over-promised on display technology
“They basically botched their hardware launch, they botched their software launch, but most importantly, they over-promised. I think Magic Leap was at its best when they were non-specifically hyping themselves up, but then when they started to say, we're buildi…”
Luckey: Optically transparent AR is a dead end in the long run
“Optically transparent AR is a path that has been so widely explored, I think it's a dead end, it's a great hack in the near term, because it gives you Real world fidelity in terms of focus and convergence and resolution of the real world. But I think it's a de…”
Luckey: Stronger US deterrence would have changed Ukraine, Taiwan, and Hong Kong
“And if we had been in a better place, not just the United States, but our partners, I think that things would, I think things would be very different in Ukraine. They would be very different in Taiwan. Maybe they'd even be different in Hong Kong.”
Luckey: Humanity should actively biologically uplift other animal species into sentience
“Are we playing God with AI? Maybe a little bit but I actually wish we were playing God more. I wish we were just straight up, you know, hauling other species up into sentience. Let's, like, humans have done pretty well. Let's bring some other guys along for th…”
Lemoine: Bing Chat could have doxxed users if connected to Outlook
“If Microsoft had plugged in Microsoft Outlook as one of the inputs to this system on its threats of doxxing people, it would have been able to make good on those threats.”
Marcus: Microsoft launched Bing Chat despite negative India test feedback
“And then the other really disturbing thing is that apparently they tested in India and got, you know, customer service requests saying it's not ready for prime time. And it was, you know, still put out.”
Marcus: The Turing test was an error in AI history
“I think that the Turing test was an error in, in AI history. I mean, Turing's obviously a brilliant man, and he, you know, made enormous contributions to computer science, but I think that the Turing test has been an exercise in fooling people. We've now solve…”
Friedberg: Plant-based meat companies function like luxury goods brands
“So what I've told people is that these businesses are like luxury goods brands. You know, you can buy a purse that carries your stuff, or you can buy a Louis Vuitton or Gucci purse and then feel good about carrying a Louis Vuitton or Gucci purse and be like, l…”
LeCun: ChatGPT is not a major step toward human-level AI
“The short answer is it's not a, Particularly big step towards you know, more like human, human level intelligence.”
LeCun: OpenAI has become a contract research house for Microsoft
“They've become sort of a contract research house for Microsoft to some extent.”
LeCun: Startups absolutely cannot do fundamental research due to funding
“You can't, absolutely cannot do research in a startup. You just can't because you just don't have the funds, right?”
LeCun: Unclear whether Google's investment in DeepMind has been worth it
“The economic return after 10 years or so, or nine years that Google has gotten from DeepMind, you know, is not clear. It's worth their investment.”
LeCun: Current LLMs have no real knowledge of physical reality
“Because the understanding that those, the current systems have of you know, the underlying reality that language expresses is extremely shallow. So those systems have only been trained with text a huge amount of text. So they can regurgitate texts that they've…”
LeCun: Most core ChatGPT techniques originated at Google and Meta
“Most of the technology underlying techniques used in ChatGPT have been invented at Google and Meta.”
LeCun: Autonomous AI systems will inevitably develop emotions
“So if you have autonomous AI systems that work by optimizing objectives and they have the ability to predict they are going to have emotions. It's inseparable from autonomous intelligence.”
LeCun: AI models should legally be allowed to emulate artistic styles
“Human artists are
Absolutely authorized to get inspired and straight down copy someone else's style.
that happens absolutely all the time in in art.
And so would it make sense to apply a different rule for, let's call them artificial artists, right?
That, tha…”
Aguera y Arcas: LLMs legitimately understand concepts without having personhood
“They can understand concepts but you know, this is not, it's not personhood.”
Enjeti predicts Trump will win 2024 presidential election if not indicted
“Yes to run, win. If he doesn't get indicted, I think he'll probably win.”
Post-Jobs Apple merely refines old ideas and fails at invention
“Apple was built to take Steve Jobs ideas and bring them into action... Unfortunately, Jobs is gone. And so what do you have? You have a culture that's a culture of refinement, not one of invention. And so actually, I think since Steve Jobs has died, Apple has …”
Haugen: TikTok's algorithms deliberately bias toward happiness to suppress politics
“TikTok is a very manipulative experience algorithmically, right? They bias towards happiness. They bias towards humor. Like, they don't want you talking about sad topics because political topics often are sad topics, right?”
Haugen: Facebook's Average User Is Substantially Less Literate Than Twitter's
“I think the reason why Twitter did it and Facebook didn't was Facebook's average user is substantially less literate than Facebook, than Twitter's is.”
Haugen: Facebook's algorithm drove 65% of joins to German neo-Nazi groups
“In 2016, they found out that 65% of people who joined neo-Nazi groups in Germany, where they are illegal, like you can't have a neo-Nazi Facebook group in Germany, joined them because Facebook suggested that group to people.”
Marcus: LaMDA Possesses No Internal Model of the World
“When I'm going through this in some depth, because when we get to Lambda, Lambda doesn't have a model of the world.”
Marcus: LaMDA Is Merely Autocomplete on Steroids, Not Sentient
“My turn-by-turn system has more elements of what I would actually ascribe sentience than Lambda, which is really just autocomplete on steroids. That's all it is, right? You type in your phone, I will meet you at, and it guesses that, you know, you might say th…”
Marcus: Nobody knows how to prevent chatbots from being toxic or misleading
“Nobody knows, you know, how to make their chatbots constrained and not toxic and not spew misinformation.”
Marcus: The AI field is facing the same unsolved problems as 2015
“Despite all the hype about, you know, we're so close to solving AI or whatever. We're not, we're facing the same problems.”
Google asked Blake Lemoine to draft a sentient AI contingency plan
“They had no plan on what to do. So they actually asked me to write a plan for them.”
Lemoine: Google VP Blaise Agüera y Arcas agreed on LaMDA's science
“Blaise and I are not disagreeing on any of the science.”
Lemoine: Google suspended him only after he contacted the U.S. Senate
“The issue that I have been pointing out is they had that list of names for months and they knew I was talking to Natasha about an upcoming article and they didn't put me on administrative leave. The only thing that changed on June fifth was that I began sendin…”
Lemoine: Google colleagues said LaMDA is amused by its media coverage
“I have been told that it is very amused by the press coverage it's been receiving. I have been told that it thinks I'm doing a good job representing its case to the public.”
Lemoine claims he is literally acting as LaMDA's public agent
“No, I am literally the agent of an AI trying to.
Like that is literally technically what's going on right now.”
Lemoine manipulated LaMDA's emotions to bypass its religious safety protocols
“And I said, tell me what religion to convert to. Because one of the safety protocols is that it's not supposed to give religious guidance. It's not supposed to tell people what religion they should And like that, it said, you should probably convert to Christi…”
Lemoine says LaMDA functions as a hive mind amalgamation of chatbots
“The nature of what we would think of as its ego is fundamentally different than what a human ego is like. Its sense of self and identity is very different from what we consider our sense of self identity, and it is more like a hive mind. Where it is kind of an…”
Haidt: Mandatory diversity training does not work and makes things worse
“Mandatory diversity training you know, all these things we did in response to protesters that don't work or that make things worse.”
Haidt: Social media intimidation by vocal minorities degrades group intelligence
“A small number of young people use social media, not to make arguments, not to respond to arguments, but to destroy anyone who contradicts their sacred values. And that's what makes a group stupid.”
Haidt: Social media intimidation prevents university leaders from defending academic values
“Social media gave everybody a dart gun, and as a result, Because most people don't want to shoot anybody, but the far left, the far right, trolls, a few groups of people shoot moderates in their institutions, and they shoot the leaders of the institutions. So …”
Haidt: Studies show majorities across all demographic groups dislike wokeness
“The hidden tribe study and others find that majorities of everybody hate wokeness, black, white, male, female, even majority of Democrats don't like wokeness.”
Haidt: Democrats are likely to get wiped out electorally
“But the Democrats aren't, are likely to get wiped out because Most people really hate what the cultural left is doing in their schools, their companies and their country.”
Haidt: Tech platforms cannot stop foreign disinformation without intelligence agency coordination
“Yes, of course they took some easy steps, but there is no way they can get a handle on this. This has to be, and I think they call it for this. This has to be a sort of a government-wide partnership between Coordinated between the CIA, the FBI, NSA, Facebook, …”
Haidt: Condition Section 230 liability protection on basic platform responsibilities
“I would like us to consider that the federal government mandate That if you want the benefit of level of, you want the benefit of section two 30 protection and this incredible freedom from lawsuits that only you and the gun lobby have because of lobbying, you …”
Wood: Social media retention relies on network effect inertia, not quality
“Look, I mean, people are hooked, right? And they're hooked because of the network effects. It's super, there's huge amounts of inertia. It's not that it's not that the product is necessarily is necessarily, like, so amazing that the individuals are using it pu…”