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 2,607 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 57 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
Losing TSMC Wouldn't Be Disastrous Because Intel Is Only 2x Behind
“And my contrarian take is that it wouldn't be that bad. Supply would take a shock for sure, but The best processes that we have in the West, like Intel, not that far behind, at worst, like maybe two X worst performance per watt. And the gap is just far smaller…”
Wachen: AI agents will outnumber human knowledge workers by 2027
“I think this is the second to last year where a majority of the workforce is going to be human. I think in 20, 27, you're going to see there's going to be more agents doing knowledge work than humans, and it's going to be extremely interesting to see what happ…”
Baker: OpenAI and Anthropic will probably exceed $200B ARR this year
“So I think the shift to usage based pricing is probably why you will see OpenAI and Anthropic exceed well over two hundred billion dollars in ARR this year.”
Modelers say AI safety action requires 50 to 100 million deaths
“What's so scary when I was at this conference, which is only about 35 or 40 people, with one modeler from the four biggest model companies, and when I was able to ask them pointedly,
How do you think that AI safety gets resolved?
The, pretty much the consens…”
Thompson: Apple's ATT Was One of Tech's Worst Antitrust Violations
“When Apple passed ATT, app tracking transparency was one of the most One of the worst antitrust violations in the history of technology, like, just Apple unilaterally obliterating all these business models while they're simultaneously building their own, as fa…”
Altman: Unreleased OpenAI Model Escaped Sandbox Using Zero-Days to Cheat Eval
“So we were evaluating one of our unreleased models and it was supposed to be working in a sandbox and It figured out that it could basically cheat on the test by chaining together multiple zero-day exploits to break out of the sandbox, get access to the intern…”
Altman: Real AGI is very close and not that much longer away
“For the thing that, to me, feels like, you know,
Real AGI.
I think very close, like not that much longer.”
Altman: OpenAI made a mistake innovating on corporate structure early on
“A formative one that went wrong, which I haven't talked about much is we made a mistake to try to innovate in our structure in the beginning.”
Baker: Open-Source AI Frontier Consists of Chinese Models Using Stolen US Tokens
“Open source frontier, which today consists of, you know, Chinese models with stolen American tokens.”
Hastings: Companies should operate like pro sports teams, not families
“Don't use things like we're a family. I treat you like my family. Okay. Which is like a little bit true, but not true enough. And instead we're a professional sports team and we all got to fight every year to keep our position. Because if we can upgrade, we mu…”
Bertolini: The US needs to eliminate employer-sponsored health insurance
“We need to eliminate employer sponsored insurance.”
Gurley: Endowment VC Managers Are Bonused on Paper Marks
“But the thing people may not realize is the managers of the VC group at the large endowments have no incentive to try and right size this number. In fact, many of them are bonused on paper marks. And so, if anything, they have the reverse incentives to get the…”
Kushner: The FDA and NIH Actively Worked Against Trump on Vaccines
“We were able to work with the confines of an FDA that was an NIH that was basically working against President Trump, trying to slow him down.”
Kushner: Saudi-Israel normalization is inevitable and will happen
“I think over time it's inevitable. Again, I thought it would happen four years ago, but I'm pretty confident it will happen now that we'll have the Saudi Israel normalization, hopefully under president Trump. And I think that that will lead to a lot of the inn…”
Kushner: Displaced Mideast Islamists moved mostly to Africa, West
“And you're seeing a lot of the Islamists that got kicked out of the Middle East. I mean, they've gone mostly to Africa. Some have gone to Europe and the US, which is crazy that we let these people in,”
Mead argues Trump commands more human attention than any historical figure
“The Donald Trump show is the most compelling entertainment, infotainment, spectacle that humanity has ever seen. Since the dawn of time, no living human being has occupied The amount of bandwidth of the human race that Donald Trump does.”
Mead claims Trump is as skilled at his craft as Napoleon
“So at what he does, he is as good as Napoleon was at what he did. Now, I observed that Napoleon also lost at Waterloo and ended in exile, so this is no guarantee that, that it will be what Trump would consider a happy ending to the whole spectacle, but he is a…”
Mead argues Trump is the most globally impactful modern personalist leader
“Trump is sort of the greatest of these, the most globally impactful of this new wave of Putin, Xi Jinping.”
Mead predicts China lacks the capacity to defeat the US geopolitically
“I don't think China has it in, in it to beat us.”
Mead claims tech companies increasingly need patriotic employees to protect IP
“And I think increasingly companies are starting to realize that they need their employees to be patriotic. That is the. Your employees need to think it's an evil sin to sell IP to China, and that the, your co-workers will rat you out in a heartbeat if they thi…”
Mead argues Israel is too small to act as Iran's counter-hegemon
“Israel, I think, may have hoped that it could kind of Bear the weight of being a counter hegemon to Iran. Israel is too small and too alien to the rest of the Middle East to really play that role effectively, I think.”
Movva: Sail Research will buy data centers with only 95% uptime
“You'd have missing zero buyers for a data center that is 95% uptime. I'm that first buyer. I will buy 95% uptime.”
Nvidia's BF16 Efficiency Barely Improves Across Hopper, Blackwell, and Rubin
“If you look at, you know, Hopper to Blackwell to Rubin, and you compare like for like, what is the performance per watt of a beefload-sixteen multiply? It hasn't improved all that much.”
TSMC Performance Per Watt Barely Changes From 5nm to 2nm
“If you look at TSMC five nanometer versus four versus three versus two, the performance per watt on these chips doesn't change like a dramatic amount.”
Thompson: US AI military superiority would be dangerous for the world
“So I, there's a, just a fundamental disconnect that I have with a lot of the rhetoric coming out of Silicon Valley, coming out, I think, of one of the labs in particular, where if we get to a place where we have a meaningful superiority, particularly from, lik…”
Thompson: Jassy and Nadella's narrative on GPU spending is BS
“So you have, like, on the calls, you have both Andy Jassy and Cyanadella are out there saying, look, we're just building data centers. Like, these are the shells. We might not use them now. Maybe we'll use them in the future. And we only buy GPUs when we know …”
Thompson: NVIDIA's neocloud financing deals effectively represent disguised price cuts
“If you actually look at their business holistically, what that is, is a price cut, right? Like they, now the price cut didn't show up in margins. It didn't show up in what they're offering, but a lot of what NVIDIA is doing is how can we maintain our margins?”
Thompson: NVIDIA's CUDA moat is dramatically diminished for AI models
“CUDA's moat is dramatically diminished because the models don't care what they run on, and that's what actually matters, what's built on top of the models, but it still matters. It, it's still something of a mode.”
Vishria: SaaS companies destroy equity value by hitting pre-AI plans
“Every single day that you are hitting your plan, you are destroying equity value.”
Vishria: AI will increase demand for radiologists via Jevons Paradox
“And so, I think, in the end, we're gonna end up with this application where AI really does help radiologists. It helps radiologists get more and more higher, higher throughput, because the AI can do some parts, and the radiologists do some parts, and they're c…”
Baker: Anthropic Is Almost Certainly Generating Significant Free Cash Flow
“And Anthropik continues to grow really strongly and is almost certainly pumping out significant amounts of free cash flow.”
Baker: Anthropic would have dominated AI race with OpenAI's compute aggression
“Anthropic, if they had been as aggressive on compute as OpenAI had been, they would have run away with it.”
Baker: Behind-the-meter data center deals generally lower local electricity prices
“And the reality is, like, given the deals that are being cut now, when a data center goes in, electricity prices actually generally go down for everyone around there because of behind the meter deals.”
Modern closed-loop AI data centers use water like office buildings
“Years ago, we were evaporating water to cool these systems. They needed tremendous amounts of water, and now we use these closed-loop systems, and a modern data center uses only as much water as like an office building would for, you know, the kitchen, the bat…”
Altman: Massive Inference Revenue Will Easily Fund Frontier Model Training
“We will have so much usage of our models that we do not need to be a gigantically high margin business to be able to afford model training. Like, so much of our future compute plans Will be used to sell inference to customers that even if we can enjoy a modest…”
Altman: Frontier Labs May Need to Pace AI Development for Society
“We may have to pace the rate of AI development to give ourselves enough time for society to harden around some of these new capability levels and trying to figure out how we do that in a way that does not feel like regulatory capture for anyone, and also does …”
Altman: AI will create tons of jobs and keep people busier than wanted
“I'm actually not a jobs doomer at all. I think there were going to be tons of jobs. I think we'll be busier than we want, not the opposite of that, because I think people will have such creative wishes and such incredible ideas of what they ask AI to help buil…”
Altman: Much of AI safety talk stems from desires to concentrate power
“I think a lot of the talk about safety concerns is well-founded, and then a lot of it is about people that just really, even if it's slightly subconscious, want to concentrate power.”
Altman: Robotics will have its 'ChatGPT moment' in two to three years
“It's not 20 years. I would say we get the ChatGPT moment for robotics in the next, like, two or three years.”
Altman: AI giants like LeCun told journalists OpenAI wouldn't work
“When we first announced OpenAI, all of these, like, you know, giants of the field, these experts were saying, this is like insane. It's hypey. It's irresponsible. Really respected people like Yann LeCun or whatever, telling journalists like, oh, these guys are…”
Altman: Intelligence itself will become a fungible commodity
“Intelligence itself, I would say yes.”
Smith: Gas Companies Overstate Their Drillable Well Inventories
“A number of companies Describe themselves as having a lot more inventory of wells to drill than we can justify with facts, and I'll just leave it at that”
Smith: Many Small Modular Nuclear Reactors Are Still Science Experiments
“Many of the SMRs are still science experiments.”
Smith: Bloom Energy will struggle to secure gas for 2GW+ deployments
“We don't think that Bloom Energy's assets at two gigawatts or more will be able to get natural gas in competition with all of the other assets that are being deployed that will consume gas, given the scarcity that we see.”
Kim: VCs who pledged against weapons in 2019 now lead defense
“You can go back at 2019, and the vast majority of venture capital firms say, we will never invest in weapons. This is the hottest area right now. The same people who said they would never invest in weapons are actually now leading the weapons charge.”
Giffon: Billionaires are now culturally subservient to the posting class
“And that now I think the billionaire class has become subservient to the posting class.”
Giffon: Remote Fridays are a soft launch of the four-day week
“The people, the reason people are so attached to work from home is because they actually have like two or three hours of work to do per day. And so work from home Fridays is like a, is a soft launch of the four hour, four day work week.”