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
Peter Thiel's rule-breaking ethos dominates Facebook and major tech companies
“That ethos, Thielism, if you want to call it that, is Basically the main ethos of Facebook, of, you know, of most of the bigger companies in Silicon Valley. This idea that the rules yeah, just aren't that important and maybe it's best to cast them aside from t…”
Silicon Valley's disruption culture roots in 1980s right-wing campus activism
“I think a lot of the kind of some of this kind of cult of disruption stuff that we see in, in, in Silicon Valley, probably best epitomized by like Uber or something, I think kind of has its roots in right wing activist politics, the right wing activist politic…”
Peter Thiel designed the Thiel Fellowship to troll his liberal critics
“It was totally designed to like, to you know, for lack of a better word, like troll the libs, right? Like they slate did a slate, you know, did like a hit piece on On the, I'm using the builder language here... They use it in their marketing. They loved it. Yo…”
Chafkin: Mark Zuckerberg's politics prioritize Facebook's growth over authorities and rules
“I think he's a libertarian and I think, which I think, you know, a hundred percent influenced by Thiel there. But I also think to some extent he has no left right politics. His politics are Whatever is going to be required to allow Facebook to grow as big as p…”
Peter Thiel is positioning himself as the patron of radical populism
“Peter Thiel's attempting to be the inheritor of that movement and to be the patron of that movement, to be the person who is behind the scenes for the 20 to 30% of the country that wants the guy who says the craziest shit in the room.”
Peter Thiel acted as patron to pro-dictatorship blogger Curtis Yarvin
“He's, you know, been a patron to this guy, Curtis Yarvin, who is you know better known as a mold bug, but you know, this blogger who is whose big idea basically is, is a dictatorship.”
Sorkin: AMC CEO is selling shares at vastly overvalued prices
“And I don't want to say he's taking advantage of them, but if they're taking advantage, he's taking advantage by selling shares to them at prices that I think he knows full well are vastly overvalued.”
Sorkin: Large charitable stock transfers by billionaires should be taxed
“I very unpopularly would probably tax great philanthropy, meaning most philanthropists, including Warren Buffett or Bill Gates, effectively are transferring shares Typically founder shares into their foundations or to a charity, which means that those shares, …”
Callaghan: Social platforms are removing almost a majority of Trump conservatives
“No, they're removing almost a majority of Trump conservatives off of social media platforms, pushing them further into deep internet holes where they only see each other and they only talk to each other.”
Ramaswamy: A $2T monopoly claiming 'Day Zero' status is dishonest and stupid
“When you're a monopoly with a two trillion dollar market cap for you to pretend that it is day zero is A, not the truth, B, positively stupid.”
Ghonim: Western Democracy-Promotion Agenda Is Naive and Dysfunctional
“I do think that at the end of the day, this agenda is a naive one. And it's and, you know, I don't need much to prove its naivety because at the end of the day, even the democratic solution in the West is being kind of like in a mess right now. It's not where …”
Ghonim: Traditional VC cycles incentivize startups to grow into toxic products
“You can't just build something right in, in that kind of cycle. You're going to build something that grows into cancer. In this cycle of, like, trying to, series A, series B, what is happening? You know, we need to improve this number because the investor is l…”
Ghonim: Social platforms adopted content moderation due to advertisers, not public pressure
“Facebook YouTube did not want to be the ministry of truth until the advertisers decided they're not happy. And then the ministry of truth was launched you know, which is fine. I mean, I guess I guess at the end of the day, it's their platform, but I'm just say…”
Kantrowitz: Human-level AI will not cause mass unemployment
“Even if we get AI at human level capabilities, we're not going to see mass unemployment.”
Sharp: 8 to 10 Frontier AI Labs Are Building Equivalent Cyber Capabilities
“The reality is, is that the, this same weapon that's being invented is being invented by eight to 10 different frontier organizations all at the same time. And so you can't non-proliferate when that many people are building the same thing at the same time.”
Institutions are to blame for AI cheating on outdated take-home exams
“To do stuff in the exact same way you've always done, and then say it's a problem given how much things have changed. I think that reflects more on the institution and the teacher than the students. Of course they're gonna do it. I don't think it's cheating in…”
Kantrowitz: Microsoft went from leading AI to flailing in two years
“They are, they have gone, I've never seen a company go from confident and leading to like behind and flailing in, what was it? Two years?”
Roy: Anthropic's Fable safety warnings are largely a marketing strategy
“I feel there's, like,
A large element of marketing into the way Anthropic has kind of communicated around Mythos and now Fable Five.”
Kantrowitz: SpaceX renting data centers to Anthropic signals giving up on AI
“Well, SpaceX has basically given up on the AI project, and I know that might sound extreme, but when you're renting data centers to Anthropik, you've given up.”
Plouffe: California's field of gubernatorial candidates is depressing
“Look what's happening in California. Look at your gubernatorial field. It's depressing.”
CBS Sports criticized for embedding betting odds in gambling addiction story
“Get a fucking grip, CBS Sports. Don't do this. This is just a, you know, it is a, it propels people into the situations that Sorosby finds himself.”
Cuban: Michael Jordan would decisively beat LeBron James one-on-one
“Jordan.
Alex Kantrowitz: Jordan.
Mark Cuban: Yeah, no question.”
Albergotti: Tech reporters let political bias skew coverage of Tesla
“Tech reporters allow their personal feelings and, you know, political feelings, emotions to kind of like skew their analysis of these companies.”
Roy: Huang's Lobbying to Sell Chips in China Undermines National Security Rhetoric
“Jensen is not shown. I mean, he he's lobbied hard to sell chips into China. So if this was really an issue and you really cared about it, you would not be doing that.”
Roy: Tesla is no longer a car company; vehicle sales are secondary
“Tesla is no longer a car company in any way. Elon is not pretending it's a car company in any way. We should all stop looking at actual vehicle sales. That should be an afterthought. That should be like the least important part of the overall business, and peo…”
Roy: OpenAI Prioritizes High Compute Usage Over Efficiency
“Open AI, they're building things that just, they're not worried about efficiency. They're worried about actually, does it use more compute? Cause that's going to look great to the market. As counterintuitive as it shows, or as it may seem, it'll look good to t…”
Kantrowitz: Concentrated LLM investment is probably slowing AI progress
“In aggregate, what's happening now is probably slowing down the AI field, which is really interesting, and let alone what would happen if this actually goes bust.”
Ranjan Roy: Apple should acquire Snapchat and make Evan Spiegel CEO
“They should buy Snapchat and make Evan Spiegel CEO. I said it, and I said it. I want some product vision at the company again.”
Roy: AI should completely eliminate real estate brokers from the economy
“AI certainly helping you quickly evaluate should you buy something, trying to like streamline the document process between counterparties and buying real estate. Like that should completely remove real estate brokers from the economy.”
Amodei: Anthropic articulates AI benefits better than accelerationists
“I feel in fact that I and Anthropic have often been able to do a better job of articulating the benefits of AI than some of the people who call themselves optimists or accelerationists.”
OpenAI holds no technological advantage over competitors besides scale
“OpenAI isn't ahead of everyone else other than scale.”
Kantrowitz: An AI researcher will secretly work at both Meta and OpenAI
“Mark my words, this is going to happen. We will see this happen. Be sure as day. We're gonna see it. Soham is the leader of a trend, honestly.”
Noah Smith: Mass deportations will not significantly raise native workers' wages
“The reason why a flood of immigration does not really actually reduce wages is that immigrants are also buying things and the demand from buying things creates labor demand for native born people. And so, so immigrants really don't do much to wages. And what t…”
Anugas: Advanced AI will inevitably lead to dangerous warfare applications
“Yeah. I do. War, warfare is permanent. And you know, humanity is, is a war-torn species. I think that we invent incredibly dangerous things, and I do think that those incredibly dangerous things will keep it interesting for quite a while.”
Albergotti: Anti-Musk Bias Seeps Into Coverage of Tesla Robotaxis
“I think there's a lot of anti-Elon stuff that sort of, I think seeps into the coverage of this stuff. Unfortunately, it was just hard to do as a reporter. Like you know, it's hard to take your, to take the emotion out of the reporting, but I think it does kind…”
Patel: Meta treats Llama as a toy rather than approaching AGI correctly
“I think they're treating it as like a sort of like toy within the meta universe. And I don't think that's the correct way to think about AGI.”
Roy: OpenAI's business model depends on not negotiating with every publisher
“They feasibly cannot talk to every single publisher and have a conversation, have a request. Like, their business model is dependent on not having those conversations”
Wikipedia is effectively finished now that ChatGPT has eclipsed its traffic
“To me, that's basically like Wikipedia is done.”
Bender says large language models are parlor tricks exploiting human perception
“Right down at the bottom, you've got the fact that especially large language models are a technology that is, that's a parlor trick. It plays on our ability to make sense of language and makes it very easy to believe there's a thinking entity inside of there.”
Bender argues AI bioweapon risks are speculative fiction distracting from real harms
“Bad actors could use it to, you know, more quickly design, you know viruses and stuff like that. That's still speculative, right? So anytime we are taking the focus away, it's like, has that happened? Right? This is still people writing science fiction, fan fi…”
Patel: Most AI models lean left due to Bay Area origins
“Most AI models are made in the Bay Area, so they tend to just be left leaning, right? But also the internet in general is a little bit left leaning because it skews younger than older.”
Kurian questions Microsoft's AI contributions beyond supplying OpenAI with GPUs
“Whether that's how much of credit goes to Microsoft outside of providing them a bunch of GPUs, time will tell.”
Parker: Jensen Huang knows more about healthcare than most healthcare companies
“I think Jensen knows more about healthcare than most healthcare companies.”
Kantrowitz: OpenAI cares more about winning than safety
“Open AI, I think above safety wants to win. And this is, again, their attempt to win.”
Hendrycks: Elon Musk's X successfully reduced self-censorship in US discourse
“I think that overall in terms of cultural influence and people being more disagreeable and doing less self-censoring has been has been successful. I think that was the main objective of it. And so I think I think that X had a large role to play there. So I don…”
Albergotti: Rival AI demand is surging while Apple's AI remains terrible
“These other companies now can't even keep up with demand for their AI products. And meanwhile, Apple's is terrible.”