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 14 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
Gil: AI Business Models Will Shift to Selling Units of Cognition
“I think in a couple years we'll start thinking about it as we're selling units of cognition, right? We're selling bits of person time or person equivalent to do stuff for us.”
Gil: Over half of biology research in top journals is not reproducible
“If you look at it, about half or more than half of all biology research in top journals is not reproducible.”
Gil: Crash data shows children only need car seats until age two
“If you actually look at crash data, Real data, and people have now reproduced this across multiple countries, multiple time periods, it's the age of two. So for six extra years, we keep people in booster seats and car seats, at least against the data, right?”
Gil: 80% to 90% of AI market cap is in the Bay Area
“If you look at AI, it's like, 80 to 90% of the market cap is all in the Bay Area.”
Gil: The Tech Sector Will See Fewer New Foundation Model Companies
“We'll see fewer, what are known as foundation model companies, the people building the open AIs or Anthropics or some of the Google core technologies.”
Gil: Protocols to create viruses are already public without AI
“The protocols for cloning and PCR and all this, it's all on the internet. It's all posted by major labs. It's in all the textbooks. Like that's not new knowledge that people can't just go and do right now if they really wanted to.”
Gil: Bay Area represents 25% of global private tech wealth creation
“Traditionally the U.S. Has been about half of that globally. The Bay Area has been about half of that. So, 25% of all private technology wealth creation happens in one place, right? In one city. If you add in New York and L.A., then you're at like 40% of the w…”
Gil: AI will deliver major breakthroughs in math and physics soon
“If you look at things like math and physics and other things like that, people are just starting to train models against that now. So I do think we'll, in the coming years, see some really interesting breakthroughs there.”
Gil: AI models will evolve from intern-level capability to senior managers
“And as the models get more and more capable, they'll be less like an intern and more like a junior employee, and then they'll be like a senior employee, and then they'll be like a manager, and they'll kind of, you know, as the models get better and better, and…”
Gil: Major open-source technologies historically require giant corporate backers
“Almost every single major open source company has had a giant, ah, institutional backer. IBM was the biggest funder of Linux in the nineties as a counterbalance to Microsoft. And the biggest funders of all the open source browsers are Apple and Google with Web…”
Gil: Foundation model potential was in plain sight post-GPT-3, but few recognized it
“When I started investing in generative AI all these early foundation model things, et cetera, basically nobody was doing it. And it was all out in the open, right? GPT-III had just dropped. It was clearly a big step function from two. If you just extrapolated …”
Gil: Stanford, MIT, and Harvard dominate outsized startup founder outcomes
“We went, my team went back and we looked at where do all the startup founders come out of school-wise, and three schools dominate by far in terms of big outside outcomes. Stanford is number one by far, and then MIT and Harvard.”
Gil: Anduril achieved fastest DoD program of record since Korean War
“And I think Anderle did their first program of record in something like three and a half years, so it was remarkably fast. I think it was the fastest program of record since the Korean War or something, which is super impressive.”