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 846 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
Hinton: Digital AI's weight-sharing makes it a superior form of intelligence
“Whereas these things are exchanging information at like a trillion bits. So they're kind of billions of times better than us at sharing information. Now that's scary. It means you could have a whole swarm of these things with identical weights running on diffe…”
Bostrom: Accepting some AI existential risk is rational given background perils
“Well, I think whatever we do there will be both existential risks and individual risks. So it's not as if we have a choice between avoiding risks and confronting risks. So it's looking at these different alternatives and weighing up the risks and benefits. And…”
Kedrosky: Justifying AI spending with historical bubble theory drives dangerous overbuilding
“We've created this reflexivity. We're now, we justify overspending on the basis of prior overspending having worked out. Well, in prior episodes where that happened, people were not justifying the overspending by saying, say, in rural electrification, you know…”
Kedrosky: Recent AI gains stem from orchestration harnesses, not model breakthroughs
“So much of the improvement we've seen in the last 18 months has really been about the imposition of harnesses, effective nannies, sitting on top of bratty kids, and not about the actual structural improvements in the models themselves, and that's a sort of a h…”
Schmidhuber: No Objective Distinction Exists Between Biological and Artificial Emotions
“There's no way of objectively seeing the difference between the emotions of a Of reward maximizing biological brain and the emotions of a reward maximizing artificial brain.”
Hinton: Humanity must accept that intelligence is not uniquely biological
“We're going to have to accept that intelligence isn't just biological. We can have things that are non-biological that are other beings like us, and we really don't want to share that.”
Roy: Late-Stage AI Valuations Are Juiced to Anchor Retail IPO Pricing
“You have every incentive in the world to juice the valuation because that means that it gets anchored there and then you go out at a higher value. Like, then you realize that at the expense of the retail market.”
Michael: AI labs' apocalyptic rhetoric justifies strict Pentagon scrutiny of management
“So these companies are talking about their things in apocalyptic terms, which make it necessary for us to judge the management teams, judge their actions,
Look at the terms of service.
Understand how they fit in our supply chain.
This technology is like nothin…”
Clegg: Corporate PAC donations buy access to politicians, not decisions
“It's not, you're not buying a decision, you're buying an entry ticket into an event, which then get, you know, et cetera.”
Heitzman: Circular revenue deals between AI giants are a warning sign
“Well, it depends on who you are, and that kind of goes to the recycling or the circularness of some of these things. Obviously, the OpenAI, Microsoft, or OpenAI Oracle, goes back to the OpenAI Oracle deal. And, you know, I'm gonna give you money that you're go…”
Roy: OpenAI is incentivized to push inefficient compute-heavy AI solutions
“Everything around how they're building this company is incentivized to push the absolute least efficient solutions possible to actually make their own economics work.”
Amodei: Working for dishonest executives to advance AI leads to bad outcomes
“No matter how much you're driving the forward, the company technically, if you're working for someone whose motivations are not sincere, who's not an honest person, who does not truly want to make the world better, it's not going to work. You're just contribut…”
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: 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.”
Kuyda: Solving Tech Isolation Requires More Powerful AI, Not Less Tech
“So the only way to solve it is by creating the tech that's even more powerful than the one that came before. And I do think AI is that”
Gomez: AI Self-Improvement Plateaus and Won't Cause Intelligence Explosion
“Not happening. It's not happening. It improves for, it can self-improve for a while, and then it tapers off. And so, yeah, you get some good improvement out of it, which is why we use it, but then it plateaus. It doesn't just keep going forever.”
Brown: Capitalism collapses unless the middle class is forced to work
“The reason capitalism works is you have people at the top of the heap that have already made it, probably because they killed themselves to get there, and then you have people who want to be where they are and are willing to do the jobs that are necessary in o…”
Roy: Audiences View Influencers Like Tim Pool as Entertainers, Not Journalists
“And I think a Tim pool or a lot of these people, yes, you could somewhat, a small group of people might consider them serious commentators or even quote unquote journalists. But I think most people are just like, they are entertaining and they kind of validate…”
Bostrom: AI slowdown activism creates pressure to abandon open inquiry
“Once you start to engage in activism, then
There is kind of mimetic pressures to simplify our message and to close ranks and to try to beat the people with opposing views down in the marketplace of ideas.
and I think we are seeing some of the beginnings of th…”
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”
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…”
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…”
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…”
LeCun: Startups absolutely cannot do fundamental research due to funding
“You can't, absolutely cannot do research in a startup. You just can't because you just don't have the funds, right?”
LeCun: Current LLMs have no real knowledge of physical reality
“Because the understanding that those, the current systems have of you know, the underlying reality that language expresses is extremely shallow. So those systems have only been trained with text a huge amount of text. So they can regurgitate texts that they've…”
LeCun: AI models should legally be allowed to emulate artistic styles
“Human artists are
Absolutely authorized to get inspired and straight down copy someone else's style.
that happens absolutely all the time in in art.
And so would it make sense to apply a different rule for, let's call them artificial artists, right?
That, tha…”
Marcus: Nobody knows how to prevent chatbots from being toxic or misleading
“Nobody knows, you know, how to make their chatbots constrained and not toxic and not spew misinformation.”
Haidt: Social media intimidation by vocal minorities degrades group intelligence
“A small number of young people use social media, not to make arguments, not to respond to arguments, but to destroy anyone who contradicts their sacred values. And that's what makes a group stupid.”
Haidt: Social media intimidation prevents university leaders from defending academic values
“Social media gave everybody a dart gun, and as a result, Because most people don't want to shoot anybody, but the far left, the far right, trolls, a few groups of people shoot moderates in their institutions, and they shoot the leaders of the institutions. So …”
Ghonim: Traditional VC cycles incentivize startups to grow into toxic products
“You can't just build something right in, in that kind of cycle. You're going to build something that grows into cancer. In this cycle of, like, trying to, series A, series B, what is happening? You know, we need to improve this number because the investor is l…”
Roy: Declaring AGI has arrived poses a massive danger to OpenAI
“Do you know what, to me, what actually the greatest danger in the world to open AI is, is to say AGI is here. And then everyone goes to ChatGPT, types in something, and gets a lukewarm response that isn't quite right. And then suddenly, I actually think that i…”
Brown: Enterprise customers will compel AI developers to prioritize accuracy over engagement
“What's interesting with AI is if you look at what the companies are doing today, which is going after enterprise, that is where the business is, that's where the money is, and I'm a big company spending millions and millions of dollars with Anthropic or OpenAI…”
Brown: Enterprises have a problem if AI vendors grade their own outputs
“If you are using AI for something really important, ask yourself, who is checking the outputs? And the information that you're getting. And if it's the company that sold you the AI, you have a problem. So you, whether you're building your own evals internally …”
Kantrowitz: OpenAI and Anthropic remain startups due to immature technology
“They are startups in one really important way. And that is like, yes, the numbers are as big as any enterprise company most, right? But one of the things that defines a startup is you're not fully set on your product. You know, you become an established, like …”
Bostrom: AI Safety Is Now Critical During Pre-Deployment Testing
“From this point onward, probably AI safety is relevant not only for deployment but also during training and evaluation. Like these models might be quite powerful even before they are sort of released to the general public. So that's not the only point at which…”
Bostrom: Current Compute Might Suffice For Superintelligence If Algorithmic Bottlenecks Clear
“Turns out there is like some big hobbling that we have unwittingly, like some, something we were doing wrong that just made these systems way less efficient than they could be. And when somebody figures out how to remove that, like maybe the current Compute is…”
Bostrom: An AI pause is most effective at the latest possible moment
“The most valuable time for that to happen is at the latest possible moment. Because then you would have the actual system that you're trying to align to work with.”
Bostrom: Imperfect AI pauses hand initiative to irresponsible actors
“So if the pause only applies to the most responsible actors, for example, then a long pause would remove the initiative from the most responsible AI developers and shift it over to the Less responsible AI developers who decide not to abide by the past”
Bostrom: Long AI Pauses Risk Creating A Dangerous Hardware Overhang
“Another is that you might with a longer pause start to build up a lot of hardware overhang. It's a like, if we keep building out bigger data centers and chips are getting better than a long pause would result in a situation where you now have such a massive am…”
Kedrosky: Financiers evaluate AI data centers like multi-tenant apartment buildings
“The way that I try to analogize this loosely, and this is very loose, is that data centers from the context of many capital providers are real estate. They're really just multi-tenant apartment buildings. It just so happens there's no humans in the apartment b…”
Kedrosky: AI models are converging and now primarily compete on price
“While models are still improving, they're improving at a much slower rate. And I often do this kind of Pepsi Coke test where I'll put a couple of different models in front of people using some kind of a harness like open code and ask them to tell the differenc…”
Kedrosky: Enterprises buy SaaS for liability and vendor accountability, not innovation
“There's a deep misunderstanding about why companies buy software. It's not because they think service now or Salesforce or whoever is somehow, you know, bold innovators that could not be replaced. No, it's because they have a problem. They don't want to build …”
Kedrosky: Sovereign funds filter investments by check size rather than economic value
“Once you're managing hundreds of billions of dollars, you start looking at opportunities, not in terms of their economic value, but in terms of check size. And you say, I need to write a check for fill in the blank, a hundred billion dollars, because I do not …”
Antani: AI Models Are Disposable; Data and Harnesses Are Durable
“At the end of the day, the models in AI are disposable. The weights are going to change. The models are going to come out. That doesn't matter. What's durable in AI is the harness and the training data.”
Antani: Enterprise AI agent security must extend insider threat programs
“So I think that agent security and insider threat tactics are going to look, or insider threat security tactics and processes are going to look very similar. And I would actually argue agentic security should be an extension of your insider threat program.”
Stamos: Companies Must Deploy AI Defenses Against Machine-Speed Autonomous Attacks
“Every American company needs to have AI watching for their defenses, and it's going to be because the attackers are just going to tell their AI, go attack this guy, and the defenders have to tell AI, defend me, because no human being can defend against this.”