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 43 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 1 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
Bosworth: Meta emptied its AI research pipeline to build Llama 3
“When we were pulling Llama three together, we had really pulled in all the research, all the every, we pulled out every single stop we had and unwittingly kind of killed the pipeline. So researchers, you know, the way that it works is you build a base And you'…”
Bosworth: Competitors like Apple, Google, and OpenAI lack complete stacks
“And I think it is the collection of all four of those things that we see as our superpower relative to the competitors, most of whom, whether it's Apple or Anthropic OpenAI or Google, only have one of those things.”
Bosworth: Mobile Gatekeepers, Especially Apple, Stifle Meta's Application Development
“Strategically, we have just been at the mercy of platforms for since the start of the mobile era. And we were a web company, right? We were born of the web, and the web was this, like, amazing, unowned platform that you just, like really had a lot of control o…”
Bosworth: Apple's ATT Self-Preferencing Slowed Down the Games Industry
“We built a app install business and then Apple came for that with ATT, you know, a tremendous amount of kind of self-preferencing for themselves there. And in doing so, they really put a, you know, the brakes on what was a really rapidly growing part of the ga…”
Bosworth: Consumers will soon treat AI models like invisible database infrastructure
“The model itself isn't the value. And I think we're going to get to a world very soon where consumers, they don't care. They don't want to specify the model they're using. They don't want to, they don't care if it's 4.7 or 4.8. Like you don't care what Oracle,…”
Bosworth: The era of monolithic AI models ended around Llama 3
“The era of the monolithic model kind of died around Lama III launch. Like, the idea, like, here's one model, and just, like, let's just test how smart this model is, and that was how good it's going to be at lots of things. We're now in a world where when you'…”
Bosworth: Future smart glasses will generate custom apps on the fly
“In the future, there's no reason that couldn't just be you wearing the glasses in real time, telling the glasses what app you want right now, and having it on the fly build that app for you.”
Bosworth: The future of computing is agent-brokered services, not standalone apps
“I don't think the appy thing is the way the future's gonna look. I think the future's gonna be valuable services. That are provided to you, and you getting access to those services the way that you want when you need it, and paying money to the people who prov…”
Bosworth: Meta reassigned thousands of employees to generate AI training data
“We basically saw this huge opportunity, such a big opportunity that we pivoted kind of on a dime and brought a lot of people across the company, thousands of people out into this AAI organization to do these expert traces.”
Bosworth: Meta added unlimited pausing and opt-outs to employee tracking program
“Unlimited pausing. People can opt out for a bunch of reasons. So like we've made a bunch of changes to the program for people who had concerns about it.”
Bosworth: AR is history's first computing platform without direct manipulation
“Well, it's worth noting this is really the first computing platform that we've had ever that didn't have a direct manipulation interface.”
Bosworth: Meta has meaningful tech lead in AR over Apple
“I think we've been investing longer. I think we've believed in it more. And as a consequence of frankly, Mark Zuckerberg's faith and tremendous execution by a team of Thousands of people over a long period of years. I think we have a meaningful lead in a bunch…”
Bosworth: Apple will block third-party AI agents from intermediating iPhone apps
“That is not something that Apple wants some other developer to be able to do, because that would disintermediate their position, their privileged position on the phone.”
Bosworth: App model will not disappear, but gain agentic layer
“So I think the application model doesn't go away. But I do think you end up injecting this potential new layer on top of it, which is an agentic layer.”
Bosworth: AR will conceivably replace smartphones for high-end consumers over time
“We're a long ways from that for a bunch of reasons, not the least of which being the technology is not ready yet, but also because The application ecosystems will take a long time to transfer and user behaviors take a long time to change. So I think we have a …”
Bosworth: Wrist neural interfaces will eventually work without physical gestures
“Over time, we think we can do that without having any gestures at all. Just having the intention, expressing the intention down your control system.”
Bosworth: Invasive brain implants are a consumer non-starter due to myelination
“There's a couple of challenges, one of which is that the brain myelinates the things that are put there, so they become electrically inert over time. So they have to be removed and replaced. And if you leave them in long enough, they can prove fatal or at leas…”
Bosworth: LLMs cannot be conscious and are merely associative databases
“And also I do not believe it is even the kind of thing from which consciousness exists. It doesn't exist in any Again, to my point about Doug Hofstetter it doesn't exist in any self-referential loop. In fact, it doesn't exist at all except when I instantiate i…”
Bosworth: Bulk of AI value will accrue to applications, not foundation models
“I think the bulk of the value though, so there will be valuable companies there, but the bulk of the value will be in the application side.”
Bosworth: Meta uses AI models from Google, Anthropic, and OpenAI
“When we're doing development internally, we do have a lot of development happening on our own models. There's also some areas of development that we do on models that we use from, ah, from Google, or from Anthropic, or from OpenAI.”
Bosworth: Model agnosticism requires owning a competitive proprietary model
“The ability to be model agnostic and have that be economically sensible actually kind of hinges on you having a competitive model. Right. That you can go back to if you need to, and it creates a real backstop on like how much rent somebody can try to charge yo…”
Bosworth: OpenAI and Anthropic pivot to enterprise to fund model development
“The business that Anthropic is doing, and that OpenAI appears to be increasingly pursuing concentrating on things under, under Greg, is an enterprise business, where they're building these harnesses and that's where the money is, and I understand that's, they …”
Bosworth: Meta's AI focus is 100% on consumer use cases
“That's not our major focus. Like our major focus is a hundred percent on how this is going to help consumers in their lives.”
Bosworth: AR Glasses Will Be Usable and Enjoyed Within a Decade
“It's within our lifetime, certainly within the next decade, it's in our view we're going to be able to use and enjoy this technology.”
Bosworth: AR Glasses Will Not Replace VR Headsets
“And so I think there continue to be, even when you have these wonderful AR glasses things that can be done in virtual and mixed reality that can be done no other way. Your augmented reality glasses will never convince you that gravity is off because you can li…”
Bosworth: Smartphones haven't changed in 10 years and stifle developer innovation
“The market's super efficient. And so, yep, there's a lot of people on the phone, but it's also the hardest place to get noticed or stand out. It's the hardest place to do new things. Cause there's nothing new that you can do there. It's all been done before. P…”
Bosworth: Tech companies should always commoditize their complements
“And you want to always commoditize your compliments. You always want to make sure that the thing that you depend on is like cheap and getting better by a lot of people, not just by your effort and money.”
Bosworth: Current AI models are too fussy for mainstream consumer adoption
“We have not done the work to make it something that people want to integrate into their daily life yet. It's not easy enough to use. It doesn't create enough value. It's too fussy. And so that is the problem to tackle. It's the product problem to tackle. You n…”
Bosworth: Meta shelved Orion consumer launch due to unviable pricing
“Even though we couldn't get the price to be one that we felt comfortable launching as a consumer product, we did intent when we designed it and developed it was a consumer design and intention.”
Bosworth: Reinforcement learning plays a far bigger role in AI than predicted
“Reinforcement learning is playing a huge, a much bigger role in today's kind of AI than people had maybe predicted two or three years ago that it would.”
Bosworth: AI models are still surprisingly bad at using computers
“AIs are actually still really weirdly bad at just using computers. Like it's like a, it's a surprisingly hard problem that is not well solved.”
Bosworth: Meta's Orion Codec Avatars Fooled Video Call Recipients
“And then conversely, what they would see is your codec avatar. And we've really fooled some people with the codec avatars. When they've seen the codec avatar call in they don't realize it's a codec avatar. They think it's a real, an image.”
Bosworth: Building smart glasses purely for notifications is an anti-pattern
“Anti-patterns that I've been telling people about for these glasses is just having to be notification services because notification services are an invitation to leave the present moment and instead go elsewhere. Like that's what a notification is intended to …”
Bosworth: Smart glasses will offer proactive assistance smartphones cannot match
“Because the glasses are on your face, they're not in your pocket, and they have the ability over time, not immediately, to become aware of the world and to understand what you're trying to do in the world they can actually be very proactively helpful just to y…”
Bosworth: Meta's Magnesium Orion Glasses Last 2–3 Hours on Battery
“The ones that we actually use are have opaque magnesium shells. The clear transparent ones are super fun to have. They don't, they only work for about half an hour at a time before the thermal shut down because this plastic does not dissipate heat fast enough.…”
Bosworth: Direct manipulation interfaces will persist alongside voice AI
“I think voice is probably not the only piece of it. Voice and text are part of it. I'm sure there will still be a lot of very direct manipulation interfaces for a long time to come.”
Bosworth Strongly Advocated Internally For Meta To Open-Source LLaMA
“I was one of the loudest voices internally to channel, encouraging us to open source Llama one, Llama two.”
Bosworth: Pre-LLM virtual assistants had the worst scaling laws in software
“When we got into building our own assistant, I could not believe the, how poorly they scale you because you have to build it for every language, for every device, and for every use case. Oh my gosh, that's not software. That's the worst scaling laws of all tim…”
Bosworth: Orion AR Glasses Hardware Emerged in 2023, Software in Mid-2024
“The hardware came up last year at this time. And so the software bring up really only came together a few months ago and they just made incredible progress since then already.”
Bosworth: Meta expected holograms before AI in smart glasses roadmap
“We really thought early on when we were developing these, even until maybe a year ago, it was going to be holograms and then at some point later, AI. And in fact, it's going to be the opposite. The AI is going to come first. It's already come to the Meta Ray-B…”
Bosworth: Meta is prototyping a persistent three-panel AR workstation
“One of the fun demos that we have in prototyping, it's not even in the demo that you tried yet is this cool thing where you have your whole workstation set up. So you've got like a three panel workstation set up. And then you like just get up and walk around a…”
Bosworth Uses Meta AI 10x More On Ray-Ban Glasses Than Phone
“Now I have Meta AI on the Ray-Ban Meta glasses, and it's like, oh, I use it 10 times more often because just the friction of, like, getting my phone out of my pocket and, like, pulling it up and, like, pulling the app is not trivial to me being able to just, l…”