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 39 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 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
Altman: Google could have smashed OpenAI if it took them seriously in 2023
“If Google had really decided to take us seriously in 23, let's say. We would have been in a really bad place. I think they would have just been able to smash us.”
Linux would not exist if Sun Microsystems had open-sourced Solaris x86 early
“I think Linux wouldn't exist if we'd open-sourced Solaris x-eighty-six early, and that would have been a tremendous transformation, because there was a lot of amazing things in Solaris.”
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 …”
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.”
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.”
Krieger: Instagram could have reached sale with 4 to 6 people using AI
“I think we could have gotten there with like four to six, you know?”
Krieger: AI would have allowed Instagram to scale with just 4-6 employees.
“I think we could have gotten there with like four to six, you know?”
Warner: Anthropic-DOD dispute would be major focus without Iran war
“If we were not in this war with Iran at this point, I think, you know, that would have been a major focus.”
Taylor: Current AI models alone can generate trillions in economic value
“And put another way, if we paused innovation at the foundation model layer, we would still have, I think, trillions of dollars of value in the economy with current technology.”
Altman: OpenAI Would Be Profitable Much Earlier Without Massive Training Costs
“If we weren't continuing to grow our training, Costs by so much we would be profitable way, way earlier. But the bet we're making is to invest very aggressively in training these big models.”
Kantrowitz: OpenAI could raise $200 billion at a $1 trillion valuation today
“If open eye were to IPO today and wanted to raise, let's say, two hundred billion at a trillion dollar valuation, it could do it.”
Rice: Stopping Indigenous Chinese Tech Required Action 10–15 Years Ago
“If we were going to stop Chinese indigenous development, we would have had to do that 1015 years ago before they really did Develop the ability to innovate indigenously.”
Lebaredian: ChatGPT would not exist without NVIDIA's early LLM software work
“Had we had not done that, I don't think we would have had ChatGPT.”
Hoffman: Inflection-Microsoft deal could have been an acquisition under different regulation
“It certainly could be and by the way, inflection, you know, who knows, maybe some year will still be acquired.”
Mayer: She would still acquire Tumblr, but integrate it more closely
“And so I think that if I had it to do over again, I still would do the Tumblr acquisition, but I would have integrated it more and I would have loaned more talent from Yahoo, Yahoo to Tumblr. And it may have ultimately changed Tumblr in terms of what it what i…”
Nemade: Google could have safely released LaMDA using OpenAI's vetted-access model
“And I think OpenAI did an excellent job with respect to that. Like, they released GPT-III, and they were like, we are just going to give access to researchers who we are going to vet. That's an amazing way to give access. Now it's kind of pretty standard way, …”
Nemade: Google would have taken 2-4 years to ship AI without ChatGPT
“Had ChatGPT not happened, I predict that It would have taken at least two to three to four years for Google to get there just because of the bureaucracy and the speed at which things move.”
Luckey: Most Americans would abandon a free Quest 2 after a week
“Even if it was literally free, if Oculus Quest II was literally free today, you gave it to every American, I think the majority of people would not continue to use it every day after the first week or so.”
Luckey: Meta might have fared better using Magic Leap's closed mystique approach
“I sometimes wonder if that might have been the better play on this metaverse front, to basically tell the public, hey, we're investing in this, and it's going to be amazing, to build some internal prototypes that don't, where you don't have to spend all this m…”
Luckey: Microsoft, Apple, or Google would have ruined or canceled Oculus
“VR wasn't on their roadmap, certainly not their ten-year or, you know, long-term roadmap. It was just an interesting thing going on. So even if they would have bought us, it would have been to, you know, use us as a gimmick to sell game consoles, or as an inte…”
LeCun: Reinforcement learning cannot safely or efficiently train self-driving cars
“If we were to use, let's say, reinforcement learning to train a self-driving car to drive itself,
It would have to drive itself for millions of hours and cause, you know, until thousands of accidents and destroy itself multiple times before it learns to drive …”
Krieger: Instagram's original Android app could be built in a week with AI
“Android we built. In about a month for Instagram, we could have done it probably in a week with the models”
Kantrowitz: SpaceX AI IPO Took Investor Money Otherwise Earmarked for OpenAI and Anthropic
“I don't know if it would have been that level of cash if the AI side of this wasn't included. So I think that, that money would have otherwise gone to OpenAI and Anthropic.”
Siegler: Microsoft missed its chance to turn Bing into ChatGPT
“It was a huge missed opportunity. They could have made being a real potential competitor to Google and In some ways they, you know, they were probably too early, I'm sure. And they stubbed their toe and they pulled back... But still they were there and they co…”
Morris: Tesla Would Have Lost Money in Q1 Without Regulatory Credits
“Tesla would have actually made a loss in the first quarter if it had not been for selling regulatory credits.”
Lee: Dot-Com Recession Would Have Been Mild Without 9/11
“The reason we had a bigger recession after that was because of nine 11, but it really would have been a mild recession.”
Kantrowitz: OpenAI could be profitable by halting model scaling for efficiency
“If open AI stopped development today and just found a way to make what's in ChatGPT more efficient, they could run a profitable business with that five hundred million or that billion users.”
Hoffman: Luddites destroying power looms would have doomed their descendants to poverty
“If the Luddites had successfully destroyed all the power looms, And said, well, no, we want to have independent weaving, then that would have meant the, their children, their grandchildren, et cetera, would have been kind of doomed to poverty and less relevanc…”
Benioff: Salesforce planned to transform Twitter into an interactive application platform
“We were really going to build something that was more of an application development and deployment capability, where you really had this kind of same Twitter feeds, but you'd kind of have hypercards in those frames, not just photos.”
Swisher: Zuckerberg's Advisors Should Have Directed Meta to AI Much Earlier
“He, if he had the right people, they would have said AI is where we need to focus mark a long time ago.”
Catanzaro: AI community would have found a Transformer alternative without Google
“If Google had not open source that or had not published that paper but if we started seeing like incredible language modeling results we would have figured out some sort of a model that had good scalable properties that that could help with this space.”
Krieger: Instagram's month-long Android build would take one week with AI
“In about a month for Instagram, we could have done it probably in a week with the models”
Véliz: Algorithmic Selection Would Have Rejected Seinfeld
“So if we had had algorithms back then selecting what people want to watch, Seinfeld would have not been one of those cases.”
Levie: Existing AI models will deliver massive economic gain without further progress
“Even if you stopped right now, you'd still have, you know, massive amounts of economic gain get delivered from what we've already created.”
Panay: Amazon Could Have Launched AI Faster Without Legacy Alexa Base
“If we started from zero customers, I think this is a different story. You can move a lot faster, we can solve problems, and then just add features as we go, if that makes sense. So maybe we just had a conversationalist, a pretty cool one, then we can add perso…”
Ramaswamy: Google open-sourced Transformers in 2017 to prevent top researchers from leaving
“If you had told these people at that time that they could not publish, they would have gone and worked for universities, they would have gone and worked for Microsoft, they would have gone and worked for other people.”
McDermott: Xerox had cloud computing ideas but lacked singular focus
“And if you think about cloud computing and distributing things on demand, Xerox had all those ideas, but didn't necessarily lean into them with a single purpose at the time. I think that could have made a really big difference.”
Luckey: Oculus would have failed without an initial gaming focus
“If we had started out saying, hey, you know, this is the headset that changes everything for everyone all the time Everywhere. I don't think we would have gotten very far.”
Amazon Would Not Be a $2 Trillion Company by Merely Automating Cashiers
“If he had been uncreative, he would have walked into a bookstore and said, you know, that cashier, we could automate the cashier. We could put a robot where the cashier is and check people out with a robot cashier. And you know, maybe that would have led to a …”