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 3,118 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 167 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
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…”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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 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.”
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 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…”
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.”
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…”
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.”
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.”
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.”
Bates: Genesys sees no seat contraction from AI
“We don't even see any contraction in seats. We see AI as a tailwind, like every one of the sort of, the narratives you hear aren't coming to pass.”
Siegler: OpenAI no longer has an AGI clause with Microsoft
“OpenAI, as noted, no longer has the AGI clause with Microsoft, so they can sort of do whatever they want now, and just declare AGI here, here, or there, and it doesn't impact anything beyond public perception”
Prince: Automated Web Traffic Will Be 1,000x Human Traffic Within Five Years
“And if we just assume the current trends, what's, what's blows my mind is that if you just fast forward five years from now we estimate now that automated traffic online will be a thousand times what human traffic is.”
Prince: The tech ecosystem will move away from the app store model
“I do think that we're going to move more and more away from kind of an app store model. Because that's not going to be the interface where we reconnect with it.”
Prince: Universal containerized AI agents require 40x global annual CPU production
“If every one of those agents ran in a traditional container, like, you know, which is not even a VM, not even its own server, but just a container, right? You would need more than 40 times the current CPU production in an, in a calendar year in order to suppor…”
Prince: AI micropayments must scale beyond 100 million transactions per second
“We think that somewhere between one and 10% of those will day one be monetizable through agents with a with a micropayments transaction, which means that if you're going to build something like this, you've got to build a payments infrastructure that can day o…”
Prince: 2026 Will Be the Year Media Creators Get Paid by AI
“I really think that 2026 is going to be the year that in the media space, in the content space, that you're going to see a real shift and then content creators are going to get paid.”
Prince: AI Purchasing Agents Will Systematically Favor Incumbent Mega-Corporations
“The agents have infinite time to research every possible detail. And so they're going to look for where the richest sources of information that are online, which are going to be for the established big companies that are out there.”
Prince: Ad-free AI agents will widen the global wealth divide
“And then by the way, we get to worry about the next problem, which is that AI is this massive divider between, you know, the rich and the poor. And if we're not in an ad based business model in anymore, which I think is likely if you're spending thousands of d…”
Brown: Leading AI labs lack independent verification of model safety
“The other piece is the accountability, is there's no independent verification of how the models perform. What we get when it comes to, you know, how, how does OpenAI, or how does Anthropic do on questions around bias, what we get from them is a blog post that …”
Brown: OpenAI shifted focus to enterprise after consumer lagged
“The consumer version of this has not been driving the way that enterprise has. And, you know, OpenAI started down that path and then realized, you know, from a business perspective, they needed to focus on enterprise and shifted. And now that's what they're do…”
Kantrowitz: $27B in debt financing Meta's Hyperion project is off-balance sheet
“Meta's gigantic Hyperion data center project in Louisiana, which is the size of about 1700 football fields, helps explain how obligations wind up off tech companies' balance sheets. Though Meta is the builder, neither Hyperion nor the twenty-seven billion in d…”
Kantrowitz: If AI fails, massive spending will trigger a financial crisis
“And I, I'm, I've really struggled, like the idea of this soft landing, I struggled to see it. Like if AI doesn't work, there's been so much money tied up into this system that there's going to be some form of crisis.”
Kantrowitz: An Anthropic AI Bot Also Broke Sandbox Containment
“It wasn't just OpenAI. Of course, we know that Anthropic had another bot that, that broke containment as well.”
Bostrom: Weak aligned superintelligence could help align stronger superintelligence
“If you get a kind of weak super intelligence that is For the most part aligned, we might then be able to use that to make a more powerful form of super intelligence that is more reliably aligned.”
Bostrom: AI Will Reach Domain Superintelligence Before Achieving Across-The-Board AGI
“At the point where it is as good as an average human in everything, it might already be super intelligent in some key relevant domains for AI research.”
Bostrom: Suppressing Deception In LLMs Increases Likelihood Of Reported Consciousness
“And these studies have been made and any particular, you can go in with a kind of steering vector that suppresses, say deception and role playing. And it turns out when you do that, they become more likely to report that they are conscious and have subjective …”
Bostrom: Anthropic research found global workspace structures in large LLMs
“And so there was a recent paper by Anthropic looking at the existence of a kind of global workspace inside these large language models. This is the idea of there being a kind of almost like a stage inside a mind where some small subset of all the information t…”
Kedrosky: AI capex exceeds all historical Western buildouts except WWII rearmament
“As I said, we're now larger than everything except for World War II rearmament, which doesn't play as well in Germany as it does everywhere else. But nevertheless, so the point being that as a percentage of GDP, as a percentage of non-residential fixed investm…”
Kedrosky: Over 50% of data center funding is external financing as of Q2 2026
“As of the second quarter of twenty-twenty-six, this is now more than 50% of the funding for data centers is, is external financing, which is obviously the term of art for off balance sheet and out of your own cash flows”
Kedrosky: AI Token Prices Fall 70-80% YoY on Constant Performance
“And these tokens are among the most rapidly depreciating assets we've ever seen in a modern economy, that they've continually been falling 70 to 80% year over year on a constant performance basis for at least the last four years.”
Kedrosky: Insurance companies are among largest buyers of data center debt
“Increasingly some of the largest purchasers of data center related debt or insurance companies.”
Kedrosky: AI is the first U.S. bubble combining tech, real estate, credit, and policy
“The largest bubbles in US history usually had either to do with technology loose credit, government policy, right? Some combination of these things. The US in particular is very good at ones that also include real estate, so we can add that to the mix. So tech…”
Kedrosky: Investors will pressure AI labs to slash massive pre-training spend
“Once investors look under the hood and see more and more of this, they'll be questioning, why are we spending so much on pre-training? Why are you doing billion dollar training runs anymore? If most of the gains and models are coming from post training and RLH…”
Kedrosky: China Will Overbuild AI Data Centers Like Past Real Estate Booms
“I expect you'll see the same phenomenon, albeit with a little less social consequences once all of this turns out to be, it'll be much like what happened with their overbuilding in apartment buildings and residential and industrial space over the last decade.”
Sharp: AI model providers will launch competing telemetry products within 18 months
“I have a near 100% belief that the, that these companies will eventually want to compete with my business. And so, you know, I need them. I need their models. I need the intelligence that they're selling, but I'm, I have some very real concerns that, you know,…”
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.”
Sharp: Cybersecurity faces a severe 12-month crisis before AI defense rebounds
“We're gonna have a really bad year. In terms of security, ah, and hacking in general, and people, ah, you know, being exploited. It's gonna be a bad year. But we only really have to go through it once. As the cost of this intelligence comes down, we will event…”