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 56 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
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.”
Taylor: The craft of software engineering will be completely different by 2027
“And if I look at 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.”
Taylor: Generating AI code in human-designed programming languages is a local maximum
“It feels like a local maximum in a really obvious way to me, which is you have a bunch of code written by people written in programming languages that were designed to make it easy for people to tell a computer what to do.”
Taylor: Treating software engineers as machine operators will make development more robust
“I have a strong suspicion that if we designed these systems with the role of a software engineer in mind being an operator of a machine rather than the author of the code, we could make the process Much more robust and much more productive.”
Taylor: Pre-training a fourth-best foundation model offers highly questionable ROI
“If you're pre-training a foundation model that's the fourth best that's gonna cost you a lot of money, and the return on that investment is, is probably fairly questionable, because why use your fourth best large language model versus a frontier model or an op…”
Taylor: AI model market will consolidate into a few massive capex players
“I think we have probably have too many people building models right now. There's already been some consolidation actually of companies being folded into Amazon and Microsoft and others. But I do think it will play out a bit like the cloud infrastructure busine…”
Taylor: Pre-training startups have pharma-like costs without the pharma business model
“I would have a hard time personally, like, funding a startup that says, I'm gonna do pre-training, you know, it's, ah, it's, I don't really know, like, what's your differentiation in this marketplace, and I think a lot of those companies you're already seeing,…”
Taylor: ChatGPT will be the primary delivery mechanism for AGI
“Is I do think that, It will be the delivery mechanism for AGI when it's produced, and not just because of the many researchers at OpenAI, but because of the amazing, like, utility it's become from individuals.”
Taylor: AI will shift intellectual power from deep specialists to cross-domain generalists
“I have a completely personal theory that it will benefit deep generalists in a lot of ways, too, because your ability to understand a fair amount in a lot of domains, and leveraging AI knowing where to prompt the AI to go explore and bringing together those do…”
Taylor: Software Value Lies in Closed-Loop AI Systems, Not Chat Interfaces
“What I'm excited about in the software industry is not necessarily a large language model with a prompt and a response being
The product of AI, but actually end to end closed loose systems that use large language models as pieces of infrastructure.
And I actua…”
Taylor: Nvidia may not be a 20-year AI bet as infrastructure shifts
“Nvidia will probably benefit from all of the investments in AI. I'm not sure I would do that over a 20 year period, just assuming that the infrastructure will shift.”
Taylor: Software engineering supply is not close to being solved by AI
“At some point, we will be we will no longer be supply constrained in software, but we're not anywhere close to it right now, and you're taking something that has always been the scarce resource, which is software engineers, and you're making it not scarce, and…”
Taylor: AI agents will rapidly erode legacy seat-based software pricing models
“AI, I think, will change the landscape of software to be tools of productivity that, to agents that actually accomplish tasks, and I think it will Help some companies who, for whom that's a amplifies their existing value proposition and it will really hurt oth…”
Bret Taylor: Personal AI agents will take a while to become robust
“I think it might be a really hard product to build because when you think about all the different services and people you interact with every day, it's kind of everything. So it's not, it has to generalize a lot to be useful to you. And because of the Personal…”
Taylor: Bureaucracy and inaccurate internal storytelling cause companies to die
“The combination of, Bureaucracy and inaccurate storytelling I think is the reason why companies sort of die”
Taylor: Companies relying solely on one person's judgment cannot scale
“Companies that are like solely executing through the judgment of individual probably aren't going to be able to scale to be truly great companies.”
Taylor: AI leaders who ignore first principles will likely fail strategically
“If you're responding to the facts in front of you and not thinking from first principles about why we're at this point and where it will probably be 12 months from now, the likelihood that you'll make the right strategic decision is almost zero.”
Taylor: Sierra charges customers for AI outcomes, not per-seat software licenses
“Our pricing model is really unique and comes from first principles thinking rather than having our customers pay a license for the privilege of using our platform. We only charge our customers for the outcomes meaning if the AI agent they've built for their cu…”
Taylor: 80% of acquirers and acquired teams disagree on success metrics
“If you went to most of the, like, larger acquisitions in the Valley, and you, two weeks after it was closed, interviewed the management team of the acquiring company and the acquired company, and you asked them, like, what does success look like two years from…”
Taylor: Acquired Founders Do Not Take Enough Accountability for Post-Merger Success
“And I think founders don't take on enough accountability towards making these acquisitions successful as I think they should.”
Bret Taylor: Great company cultures empower founders to fix small details directly
“I believe in cultures where, you know, founders have license to go in and all the way to a small decision and fix it. The infamous question mark emails from Jeff Bezos, you know, that type of thing. That's the right way to run a company.”
Taylor: Sierra charges strictly for outcomes rather than software license fees
“Rather than having our customers pay a license for the privilege of using our platform, we only charge our customers for the outcomes.
meaning if the AI agent they've built for their customers solves the problem, there's like a, usually a pre-negotiated rate…”
Taylor: AI can recursively solve most problems in AI development
“I do think it can be turtles all the way down. You can use AI to solve most problems in AI.”
Taylor: AI marks a software shift as significant as the GUI
“I think we should recognize that we're in this brand new era as significant as the GUI. You know, it's like a completely new era of software development.”
Taylor: AGI means matching human capability on any computer task
“I think a reasonable definition of AGI might be that Any task that a person can do at a computer that system can do on par or better.”
Taylor: Reasoning models generate net new ideas, breaking the data wall
“What's really interesting about, you know, reasoning and reasoning models is I think I feel really optimistic these models are generating net new ideas, and so it really affords the opportunity to break through some of these, the data wall as well.”
Taylor: AGI progress is very unlikely to stall across all key inputs
“The idea that we will be stuck on all three of those domains feels very unlikely to me, and in fact, what we've seen because of the potential economic benefits of AGIs, we're in fact seeing breakthroughs in all three of them”
Taylor: Engineers Remain Accountable for AI Safety Regardless of Autonomy
“At the end of the day, we are accountable for the safety of the systems we produce. Not just OpenAI, like every, every engineer and that's a principle that should not change.”
Taylor: GPT-4o Mini is likely cheaper than self-hosting open-source models
“I haven't done the math on it, but it's probably cheaper to use that than to host, self-host any of the open source models.”
Taylor: Speculatively patenting generated ideas is value destructive
“I think patents make sense if it's protecting something that's an active use that you know, invented, and you're trying to you know, like the standard, you know legal rationale for patents, just generating a bunch of ideas and patenting, it seems Destructive t…”
Taylor: Self-driving software will likely shift to monolithic models replacing heuristics
“A lot of smart people think that eventually it'll probably be a more monolithic model that encodes many of the same rules. You have to throw out a lot of code in that transition, but it doesn't mean it's not the right thing to do.”
Bret Taylor: Constraining agent autonomy creates commercially viable products today
“By narrowing the domain of autonomy, you can have more robust guardrails and even with current models actually achieve something that's effective enough to be commercially viable today.”
Taylor: Engineer founders who refuse to broaden their identity plateau company growth
“I think engineers who are unwilling to elevate their identity from what they were to what it needs to be in the moment often leads to sort of plateaus in companies growth.”
Bret Taylor: Most acquired founders fail to make the necessary identity shift
“What I've observed is it's that identity shift is a prerequisite for most of the other things. It's not simply your ability to handle the politics and bureaucracy of a bigger company or to navigate a new structure. I actually think most founders don't make tha…”
Taylor: Tough M&A talks should happen between term sheet and close
“I think it's right after that. So where people have really committed to the key things, how much value, why are we doing this, the big stuff. And there's usually you know, many, lots of lawyers being paid lots of money to turn those term sheets into, you know …”
Bret Taylor: Engineers Who Refuse to Evolve Beyond Technical Roles Plateau
“I think engineers who are unwilling to Elevate their identity from what they were to what it needs to be in the moment often leads to sort of plateaus in companies growth.”
Taylor: Server outage root-cause analysis is effective for diagnosing lost sales deals
“Everything from process, like how engineers do a root cause analysis of an outage on a server is a really great way to analyze why you lost a sales deal.”
Taylor: Over-applying engineering mindset leads to analysis paralysis in human problems
“And so I would say, I think a lot of things coming with an engineer mindset could really benefit, but I do think that taking that to its like logical extreme can lead to analysis paralysis, can lead to over intellectualizing some things that are fundamentally …”
Taylor: Superintelligent AI will not accelerate all industries equally
“The progress in that domain isn't necessarily limited by intelligence but by other social artifacts. So as an example, and I'm not an expert in this area, but if you think about the pharmaceutical industry, my understanding is, you know, the, one of the main b…”
Taylor: OpenAI o1 used reinforcement learning on chains of thought
“What at OpenAI, what we did with the O-one model, which is to do some reinforcement learning those chains of thought to really reach new levels of intelligence.”
Taylor: AI model adoption will mirror cloud computing trade-offs
“And I actually think of it as, you know, just like in cloud computing, you'll end up with a price performance quality trade off and for any given engineering talents, they'll have a different answer and that's appropriate.”
Taylor: AI research labs will naturally go wherever compute is built
“But in general, where there is compute, the research labs will find you know, and so I think that's it.”
Taylor: Raw coding speed is no longer a differentiated engineering skill
“You know, if you define your role as a software engineer is how quickly you type into your IDE, the next few years might leave you behind, you know, because that that is no longer a differentiated, you know, part of the software engineering experience or will …”
Taylor: Nothing is stopping AI from mastering mathematics
“There's not really anything keeping AI from getting really good at math. There's not really an interface to the real world. You don't need to do a clinical trial to verify something's correct.”
Taylor: Google Maps Would Have Been Far Less Interactive Without Desktop Precursor
“And I think that by having the goalposts so far down the field, because they had just started with this Windows app, which was sort of a quirk of Lars and Jens, just like technical choices, we made much bolder technical bets than we would have otherwise. I thi…”
Taylor: AI disproportionately benefits sectors where intelligence limits growth
“AI will probably benefit different parts of the economy disproportionately. There will be some parts of the economy that can essentially Where intelligence is a limiting factor to its growth and where you can absorb almost arbitrary levels of intelligence and …”
Taylor: Technology and finance will probably benefit most from AI
“Two that are, I think, probably going to benefit a lot are technology and finance you know, where you're, You know, if you can make better financial decisions than competitors, you'll generate outsized returns, and that's why over the past, you know, 30 years,…”