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 5,477 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
Amodei: Accusations That Anthropic Seeks an AI Monopoly Are 'Bad Faith'
“I've said nothing that, that any, that anywhere near resembles the idea that this company should be the only one to build the technology. I don't know how anyone could ever derive that from anything that I've said. It's just, yeah, yeah, it's just a, it's just…”
Morris: Musk's Politics and Trump Fallout Make Him a Liability for Tesla
“There's no delaying that through his politics and his fallout with Trump, he's become a bit of a liability to the company.”
OpenAI has no viable path to profitability, Zitron argues
“They also have no path to profitability. They don't have one.”
OpenAI effectively operates as a Microsoft subsidiary, Zitron argues
“OpenAI is a Microsoft subsidiary. That's what everyone needs to just accept right now, and what's happening in the news, which I imagine we'll talk in a bit.”
VCs rarely inspect accounts or codebases when investing in AI startups
“I had someone tell me, a source tell me, that there are, it's very rare that venture capitalists see the books, the actual accounts, and they almost never see the code base.”
OpenAI is an asset-light company relying heavily on shared Microsoft IP
“OpenAI is an asset-light business with research and IP that's owned by another company. They don't have much to trade other than their name.”
Perplexity gave $30 million in discounts to reach 50 million users
“Well, first of all, they're an insanely badly run company. They did, like, thirty-five million. They lost, I forget exactly how much they lost, but they did refunds or discounts of, like, thirty million dollars. They're literally giving money away to make peop…”
OpenAI reports weekly users to mask terrible subscriber conversion rates
“They talk weekly. And the reason is, because if you compared what their real monthly active users would be, five hundred million weekly, so I'm gonna guess seven hundred million monthly? Divided by the 15.5 million customers that pay for it. That's a dog's doo…”
OpenAI will not achieve $100 billion in annual revenue, Zitron predicts
“Even if OpenAI was profitable, okay, they're the biggest AI company, cool. Are they going to a hundred billion a year? Bullshit. No.”
There is no scientific evidence that AGI is computationally possible
“AGI, we do not have evidence it's possible. We don't understand how humans think. How the fuck are we meant to create it in a computer?”
Levie: Current AI scaling laws will achieve superintelligence
“And I think what you're seeing with scaling is we will be able to certainly accomplish our collective definition of super intelligence. With the current, ah, the current path we're on with scaling laws.”
Petersen: U.S. trade tariffs will decrease American manufacturing
“What we've seen over the last few weeks is it's gonna decrease American manufacturing.”
Siegler: Apple lacks the internal mentality and cadence for AI
“One of the reasons that I would worry about Apple going forward is they don't have the right internal mentality about doing this stuff, and you can see it in the sort of products that they've shipped to date, specifically, obviously, with Siri, Where they're c…”
Smith: Predictions that AI will replace 40-60% of jobs are 'hooey'
“This is complete hooey, and they all come up with really huge percentage, like, 40%, 60% of your jobs are gonna be replaced by AI, so, you know, every, there's a million groups doing this, and they'll come up with different things, and it's hooey for a number …”
Smith: Government-run grocery stores will drain public funds and crush bodegas
“So if you make government run grocery stores, it'll do two things. Number one It will outcompete all the little indie grocery stores and bodegas, thus like a meager source of capital and wealth accumulation for like poor people in poor neighborhoods... And the…”
Kantrowitz: Zuckerberg Offered $32B for Safe Superintelligence and Was Rejected
“Zuckerberg tried to spend thirty two billion on Ilya Suskever's AI start, startup, safe super intelligence. Suskever ultimately turned Meta down.”
Patel: Individuals will eventually train superintelligences in basements
“The cost of training, the systems is declining so fast that Literally you will be able to train a super intelligence in a basement at some point in the future.”
Roy: Tech industry rebranded to superintelligence to dodge unmet AGI promises
“Clearly the messaging worked. Everyone started saying it. It absolved people from having to achieve AGI or when everyone is saying AGI is already here, yet life doesn't feel significantly different.”
Scaramucci: Trump will never view tech CEOs or donors as friends
“You're not friends with Donald Trump. Let me give a news flash. If you've got a tech CEO listening, kiss his ass all you want, wait for him at the service entrance at Mar-a-Lago, write him checks, do whatever the hell you want. You're not friends with the guy.…”
Scaramucci: Appeasing Trump Will Not Protect Tech Leaders Like Mark Zuckerberg
“Let me give it, you know, Mark Zuckerberg a memo, you can do whatever you want to do, and you lay in front of them if you want, and the Washington Post can give up their editorial content. It's not going to matter. If he's going to come for you, he's coming fo…”
Roy: A single dominant AI model will not eliminate 20-50% of jobs
“I believe that the one model to rule them all, one giant model is going to wipe out 20% or 50% of white collar jobs. Like, I just don't see that happening.”
Kantrowitz: Grammarly will go extinct as LLMs replace grammar tools
“And here's my hot take on Grammarly. I think they're going to go extinct. I think I wouldn't call them a rapper because they were around before large language models, but all this logic that they painstakingly built into their program and all the AI developmen…”
LeCun: Inventing new things requires skills language models cannot achieve
“Inventing new things, you know, requires a type of skill and abilities that you're not gonna get from NLMs.”
LeCun: Open-source AI researchers will progress faster than closed competitors
“The people who share their research are going to move faster than the ones that don't.”
Klarna CEO: AI agent handles 1.3M monthly errands, replacing 800 workers
“Our agent that we launched about a year ago is still dealing with, I think it is about 1.3 million errands per month, which is the equivalent of previously was done By about 800 people on a monthly basis. And so that is obviously, and it's actually gone up a l…”
Bender: ChatGPT only mimics language form and fails genuine information needs
“What ChatGPT can do is it can mimic human language use across many different domains. And so it can produce the form of a poem. It can produce the form of a travel itinerary. It can produce the form of a Wikipedia page on the history of some event. It is an ex…”
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.”