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
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…”
Wood: AWS customers saw their proprietary IP output back by ChatGPT
“We've seen actual customers see their own IP come back to them from the model, and that is terrifying to enterprise customers, where the IP is the crown jewels”
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.”