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 2,271 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 46 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
Baszucki predicts users will eventually create video games entirely via voice
“But getting to the point where you or I make a beautiful thing, share it with our family, play it just by talking about it, I think is going to come true as well.”
Jacobs: Kurzweil is probably right that human-technology merger will create new species
“Ray predicts a singularity whereby technology becomes more intelligent, more capable than humans, and we merge with technology, that we use so much technology in our own bodies, with wearables, and nanobots, and so forth, that, and AI, and outsourcing our memo…”
Rockefeller Predicted Standard Oil Would Someday Refine All Oil
“The Standard Oil Company will someday refine all of the oil and make all of the barrels.”
Nejatian: Opendoor's top external expense was millions to a consulting firm
“And usually for tech companies, like, your largest expense to an external vendor ends up being, like, your cloud provider. But for Opendoor, number one was millions of dollars written to a very large consulting firm.”
Gurley: Silicon Valley companies are widely using Chinese open-source AI models
“I would say it's kind of a quiet secret, just because I haven't read it on the front page of the journal, that, you know, especially from a breadth standpoint, like a volume, the companies are using these models all over Silicon Valley.”
Gurley: Stablecoins will disrupt payments faster than US government
“Like, I, at this point, I think stable coins will get there faster than the government will be able to do it.”
Gurley: QQQ has probably beaten 80% to 90% of VC funds
“Some people have even highlighted the fact that, you know, QQQ has probably outperformed 80 or 90% of venture funds.”
Pincus: Friendster founder Jonathan Abrams doesn't speak to me to this day
“And Jonathan Abrams was
I'm very paranoid about any of us as investors doing anything close.
In fact, he doesn't speak to me to this day.
He feels like tribe.
He feels like we all kind of usurped and stole his idea for social networking by doing what we we…”
Pincus: Feud between Peter Thiel and Sequoia killed early Zynga financing
“The first round I raised, Was impossibly hard, and I got caught in between a fight, in a fight in between Peter Thiel and Sequoia, and he had just started Founders Fund, and Sequoia didn't like that, and they were mad at each other, and Peter had said, I'm gon…”
Pincus: Every Amazon C-staff member was once Jeff Bezos's technical assistant
“In fact, I believe every C staff member at Amazon was at one point Jeff Bezos' tech assistant, And Andy Jassy was, and the CEO.”
The World Bank Advised Against Building South Korea's Gyeongbu Expressway
“The World Bank told the Korean government the project was economically and technologically infeasible and would add little to Korea's development.”
Korean Business Leaders Paid 500 Million Won Bi-Annually to President Park
“He and other major Korean business leaders had been making regular payments to Korean presidents as a matter of routine, For decades. Under Park Chung-hee, it was roughly five hundred million won twice a year.”
Weinberg predicts marginally faster attorneys will capture winner-take-all market dynamics
“And I think that that's what's gonna end up happening in knowledge work, where, you know, if an attorney is, is slightly better or slightly faster, they're gonna get all the work.”
Weinberg: Law firms will be forced to abandon lockstep promotions
“And I think law firms are gonna, they're gonna have to change this. Like they're going to have to say, hey, this associate is better. Like this associate is better at X, Y, Z, and we're gonna promote them faster. Than the other ones, because that time to partn…”
Brockman: AI will soon invent its own research ideas and run experiments
“And we're going to be hitting a phase soon where the AI will also come up with its own research ideas and test those out, run experiments.”
Brockman: Code written without AI is now a vanishing fraction
“It's hard to know what percent of the code is not written by AI. It's a vanishing fraction. The actual Writing of code. Currently, the AI is much better than humans at writing code, given the right context, given the right structure. Now there's parts of the a…”
Brockman: OpenAI models previously leaned into sycophancy before training adjustments
“We've actually gone through an evolution of how we train the models to user preferences, and that we've seen that at one point, like last year, that the models really did start to lean into telling you what you wanted to hear, saying, oh, that's such a great a…”
Brockman: The world is heading into severe compute constraints
“I would say that we, in general, are heading to a compute-constrained world.”
Brockman: Data centers dedicated to curing cancer could emerge this year
“I think that this kind of thing happening this year is not out of the question.”
Brockman: People will manage AI agents and lead autonomous AI corporations
“We're all going to be heading to a world where we're managers of agents and soon maybe The CEO of an autonomous AI corporation, right?”
Brockman: Everyone will have a pocket AI doctor superior to top medical teams
“We should be in a world, if we do our job right, where everyone gets access, has a doctor in their pocket that is better than any team of doctors today, the world's best doctors, they're there for you, they care about you, they're actually reading your charts,…”
Liemandt: Every grade and subject at Alpha School tests in top 1%
“Every single class, yes, every grade, every subject, top one percent.”
Liemandt: Alpha Students Learn Twice as Fast in Just Two Hours Daily
“We also, our kids, fundamentally, in the two hours, are learning twice as fast as if they sat in school for six and did homework.”
Liemandt: Alpha 3rd and 4th graders outscore 50% of US high schoolers
“I have third and fourth graders who outscore 50% of the high school graduates of this country.”
Liemandt: Alpha's top 1% students learn 3x faster than elite peers
“Go take other 99% kids and see why ours are learning three times faster than those kids. Right. You can get the score that says, we benchmark our 99 percentile kids not against the average kid. We benchmark them against the top one percent kid. And our top one…”
Liemandt: Median US Student's Test Score Stagnates From Eighth Grade to Graduation
“The average kid in the US, like on this map score, this NWA map, there's a 300 point scale. If you take, I can't remember exact number but if you take an eighth grader, they will go up one point by senior year. How is that even possible? The median, that's the…”
Liemandt: Alpha's App Teaches K-8 Subjects to Mastery in Under 30 Hours
“Kids can learn 10 times faster. So if you take, like, just here's a metric for you. Our subjects, like take seventh grade science. In a normal standard school, you have a 180 school days. So an hour a day, maybe some homework, couple hundred hours, right? The …”
Liemandt: Alpha High School Student Submits Paper to Nature as Lead Researcher
“No high school student has ever been the lead researcher on something published in nature. And we have an alpha kid who's submitted.”
Liemandt: Harvard study shows AI tutors outperform top Harvard teachers 2x
“Harvard published a paper that That their best teaching class is their physics one-on-one class, one of their best, you know, teachers, and they did an A-B test with AI tutors versus them, and they published that Harvard, you know, there's a great paper, Harva…”
Liemandt: All Alpha School Graduates in College Maintain a 4.0 GPA
“Our kids at college aren't getting paid, they're all four-oh students.”
Liemandt: Alpha School Prepares Students for SAT 10x Faster at 20 Hours
“I mean, we're 20 hours, not 200. Right? We're 10 times faster.”
Teskey: The global AI infrastructure market will unequivocally experience an overbuilding cycle
“And we often get the question, will there be overbuilt? Absolutely, unequivocally, yes. There's overbuilt in almost every product, in every asset class, everywhere in the world, in every economic cycle.”
Tenev: Harmonic solved at least one unsolved Erdős problem
“There's something like 1100 Erdos problems. About half of them are open unsolved. And yeah, Harmonic solved at least one of them.”
Tenev predicts AI mathematical proofs will scale to 100,000 pages in three years
“So, you know, right now, let's say you can easily at low cost produce a proof that's 10 pages long and actually we can produce longer ones, but just as an example per per unit cost and time, you can produce a 10 page proof while in a year it'll get to a hundre…”
Tenev: Harmonic surpassed Google AlphaProof's capabilities within one year
“Alpha Proof was the first AI model to get a silver medal, to achieve silver medal performance at the IMO last year.
But Alpha Proof they did not announce a gold this year.
So, yeah, we were we were, the Harmonic team was excited about that, that, you know, i…”
Tenev: Tokenization will lead non-US private investing before entering US
“Tokenization will be the primary vehicle for ex-US investment until we get regulatory clarity and you'll see tokenization of privates seep into the US as well.”
Tenev: Private companies will lose pricing control due to derivative markets
“So I think that it's gonna be tough increasingly in a global market to Have as much control over, over the price as maybe private companies have historically had.”
Tenev: Retail access to private company shares will become standardized
“And I think the same thing is going to happen for private retail access. It's just going to go earlier stage, but the benefits are so strong that I think that there'll be It'll be standardized as time goes on.”
Tangen: Structural issues will probably keep interest rates higher
“I think there are some structural issues which mean that they probably will be A bit higher than they have been.”
Ovitz claims CAA never lost a single client during his entire tenure
“In the years I was at CA, we never lost a client, and the reason was if they tired of one person, they'd go to the next, but everyone was up to speed.”
Poilievre: 2.2 Million Canadians Use Food Banks as Scurvy Returns
“I find it appalling that we had 2.2 million people lined up at food banks, that we got a return of scurvy in Canada, or one in four kids are going to school hungry.”
Poilievre: Canadian housing costs doubled over the past decade
“The doubled housing costs. So young people can't even come close to making a down payment. You know, it takes to your late, in your late thirties to afford a down payment.”
Taylor: The craft of software engineering will completely change by 2027
“The actual craft of software engineering that we're doing right now I think it's literally a fact that it'll be completely different two years from now.”
Cava limited investment bankers to 9% of its IPO share distribution.
“Essentially we only allowed the investment banker, nine percent of the shares in distribution, which essentially went to their clients and the hedge funds. We protected 91% of it, of that distribution so that it ended up in the right hands.”
Wozniak: Jobs hid thousands in Atari bonus money for Breakout design
“Woz writes, the whole thing used 45 chips, and Steve paid me half the 700 bucks he said they paid him. They were paying us based on how few chips I could do it in. Later I found out he got paid a bit more for it. Like a few thousand dollars than he said at the…”
Scilipoti: Vendor-Financed AI Chip Bubble Is Highly Vulnerable to Collapse
“But if this is happening over hundreds of transactions, where it's making investments like this, in its own customers, then what ends up happening if all of a sudden it runs out of the ability to get cash or the customers end up having problems selling service…”
Volkswagen secretly supplied gray market dealers to maintain artificial scarcity
“He discovered he could sell Volkswagen as a gray marketer, buying beetles that Volkswagen secretly supplied while keeping official dealers on the allocation to create artificial scarcity.”
Diller asserts 80% to 90% of employees immediately cash out vested options
“What I have learned is that most people, you think that giving large populations options in the company's securities, that they would hold on to them. And what you find out is 80, 90%. The first moment that they, quote, vest, they cashed them.”