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 22 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
Brockman: Elon, Sam, Ilya, and I Agreed OpenAI Needed For-Profit Structure
“Elon, Sam, Ilya, and I all agreed. That the only path forward for OpenAI, the only path to achieve the mission, was to create a for-profit entity associated with OpenAI of some form. And so we were committed to that direction, and that is something that we kne…”
Brockman: OpenAI board gave zero explanation when firing Altman and removing Brockman
“I was told that the board has decided That Sam would be removed, and effectively the message that I got was the same messaging that was in the public post, and I asked if I could have any more information. I was told no, not right now, and I pressed on that ma…”
Brockman: OpenAI models recently resolved an open quantum physics problem
“If you look at math and physics, we now are solving open math problems. We're solving Open physics problems and actually have resolved this particular physics problem recently in quantum physics in the opposite way that the community expected.”
Brockman: Claims that OpenAI data centers consume massive water are misinformation
“Like a good example is data centers and water usage. Like that, that's something that people talk about a lot, but actually our data centers use incredibly little water, right? That's actually misinformation that they use a lot.”
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,…”
Brockman: OpenAI's 10-year roadmap focused on RL, unsupervised learning, then complexity
“We came up with what I would Really say is almost the technical plan that we have pursued for the past 10 years. Number one, solve reinforcement learning. Number two, solve unsupervised learning. And number three was gradually learn more complicated, in quotes…”
Brockman: Altman, Pachocki, Sidor, Madry, and Brockman Charted New AI Venture
“There were a few of my close collaborators who quit that day as well. That's Jakob, Shimon, Alexander, and the five of us. So Those people plus Sam. We all got together and we started to chart out what a new company could look like.”
Brockman: Altman Asked Satya Nadella to Fund Venture Absorbing All OpenAI Staff
“Sam talked to Satya, who we'd been talking about. Hey, can you be a funder? Could you know, help, help support this new endeavor? I was like, Hey, actually, can we expand from the small life raft to like, yes, can we take everyone? And we're like, all right, w…”
Brockman: Global GPU production is nowhere near one GPU per person
“If you just wanted enough compute for, you know, you wanted one GPU for every person in the world, you're talking like eight billion GPUs. We are not on a trajectory to build anywhere near that level of compute, right? It's like, you know, hundreds of thousand…”
Brockman: OpenAI's initial planned core team included Dario Amodei and Chris Olah
“Initially, the set of people that I narrowed down to were actually Ilya, Dario, Amidai, Chris Ola, and myself. That was going to be the team.”
Brockman: 2017 sentiment neuron proved semantics emerge from next-character prediction
“Because it's 2017, and it's really the first time that we saw semantics arise from training on A language modeling objective. So you train on learn the next character, predict the next character, and then suddenly you get a neural net that understands sentimen…”
Brockman: OpenAI Five neural net was comparable to an insect brain
“And by the way, the neural net we used, tiny, tiny little insect brain, similar number of synapses as to truly an insect brain.”
Brockman: OpenAI Staff Reinstatement Petition Crashed Google Docs
“So many people were trying to sign the petition at once, it actually crashed Google Docs. And so you had to have certain people who were designated as the person you go to actually put your name on the document so you don't have too many editors at once.”
Brockman: OpenAI lost zero employees to competitors during the 2023 board crisis
“People are getting offers and we actually did not lose a single person through that weekend. No one accepted a competing offer.”