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 36 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 3 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
Wolfe: SK Hynix will bypass export controls easier than Micron
“I think Micron is a US company which is going to be more constrained by restrictions that are put on export control, and I think SK being a Korean company is going to be able to skirt those in the same way that NVIDIA has with, you know, distribution to China …”
Wolfe: LLMs will trend toward zero and become commoditized
“Being able to do that is the real gold, and the large language models are effectively, like, over time, I think, going to trend toward zero in a commodity excavator of that data.”
Wolfe: AI will generate full feature films without actors or crew
“One of our companies, Runway ML, you can, and there's others that you can conjure. Today it's 10 seconds, but tomorrow it'll be two minutes, and full feature films with no key grips, no lighting, no costume design, no set design, no actors, and voices entirely…”
Wolfe: AI Agents Interacting on Frontends Portend the Death of APIs
“There's another adjacent theme, which I think is also really interesting, which is AI portends the death of APIs. So APIs allow meta with their meta glasses or Ryan to be able to communicate with Uber and, you know, Spotify through the backend, through softwar…”
Wolfe: 30% to 50% of AI inference will occur on-device
“I think that you're going to end up doing a lot of inference on device. Meaning, instead of going, ah, to the cloud and typing a query, like, 30 to 50% of your inference may be on an Apple or an Android device.”
Wolfe: AI Will Cut Software Engineering Hiring by 10% to 30%
“I would suspect that maybe you lose 10 to 30% of the people that you normally would have hired, but the people that are there are still like these 10 X coders, and now they have a machine that's helping them be like 20 to a hundred X.”
Wolfe: DeepSeek release accelerated OpenAI model launch timelines
“The second that DeepSea comes out, it suddenly accelerated the internal strategic decisions from OpenAI of when are we gonna release models.”
Wolfe: AI model developers without proprietary data will struggle
“I think the people that are continuing to develop ever better models, unless they have proprietary data, are going to be sort of screwed.”
Wolfe: Automated 24/7 Machine-Led Scientific Discovery is Inevitable
“So I'm absolutely convinced. Like, high certitude. I don't know exactly which company will do it. We've invested in some. They haven't worked. We'll invest in more. Hopefully they will. But this directional arrow of progress of the idea, by analogy, of machine…”
Wolfe: Everyone will run multiple virtual companies within 20 years
“Like that, in 10 or 20 years, people look back and be like, how did we not see that coming? And look at all the jobs that are being created, because every single person is now creating And has, like, six virtual companies.”
Wolfe: Retail Inflows into Illiquid Private Equity Could Cause a Massive Blow-Up
“There's something here to watch about the flood of retail money that will go into illiquid alts, private equity in particular, and new vehicles that are formed to be able to provide liquidity because of that. And I think that that's both going to be really int…”
Wolfe: Trained AI Avatars of Loved Ones Will Become a Reality
“If there is an AI that is totally trained on my voice, and my likeness, and everything I've ever said, which I have done, that my kids would actually have a dad AI, and maybe they can consult it for questions, or, and is that a good thing, or a bad thing? I do…”
Wolfe: Anduril will be a $30B–$50B public company with software margins
“I deeply believe that Anderil in the next few years will be a 30 to fifty billion dollar publicly traded business doing single-digit mid-billions of revenue with software-like margins that are not like these cost-plus margins, so that is gonna usher in a big w…”
Wolfe: US SOCOM drone operations require legal authorization for strike ratios
“In the Pacific region with SOCOM, and there's a drone operator who's flying the drone, there's another drone operator who's piloting the weapon system, and there's two lawyers. So, they're helping the commander who is effectively given, like, a godshot of, you…”
Wolfe: 38% of US AI researchers are from China
“In our own country, in the United States, 38% of researchers in AI are from China.”
Wolfe: Africa's Sahel Region Could Become the Next Afghanistan
“The Sahel and Maghreb in Africa, which is not an area that a lot of people talk about or think about, that I believe with low probability, super high magnitude import
Is going to become the next Afghanistan, that that region in the Sahel, all these coups and c…”
Wolfe: Machines will replace white-collar knowledge workers while blue-collar craft is protected
“But interestingly, I actually think that the people whose jobs are, like, most protected in this new domain are blue-collar workers. A robot today can't really fully serve a meal, and they cannot effectively, even though every humanoid robot tries to do foldin…”
Wolfe: Rising capital costs will bring a return to active managers
“I do think that we will see a return to
Active managers that are able to discriminate true fundamentals, in part because I think that the cost of capital is just gonna rise and all the funny money of the past 10 years is, is gonna wash out.”
Josh Wolfe: AI will never replicate shared human experience and memories
“And the great human feeling is commiserating about the thing that we experience together, or the memory and laughing hysterically, which I still do with my childhood friends, of this shared moment, and AI will never get that.”
Josh Wolfe: Adding 10 to 20 Years to Lifespan Is Possible, Not Doubling
“I think that's possible, 10 or 15 or 20 not doubling.”
Wolfe: Reshoring and tariffs will cause inflation and raise capital costs
“Reshoring. All of these things, you know, tariffs, they're gonna be inflationary, there would be a rising cost of capital.”
Wolfe: China graduates 50% of all global AI undergrads
“50% of all AI undergrads in the world today are being graduated by China.”
Wolfe: Thomas Reardon single-handedly coded Microsoft's Internet Explorer
“Single-handedly codes Internet Explorer, and makes a lot of money, retires, does another company, retires, and then early thirties now.”
Wolfe: Users will soon control ambient technology using neural micro-gesture wristbands
“What that implies is that you will wear something akin to a bracelet or a wristwatch, and you will be able to gesture like Disney's Sorcerer's Apprentice to flick your fingers to turn on the lights, to swipe like you would swipe in three dimensional, three Rai…”
Wolfe: Computational generative design will make products look biological within a decade
“I believe that within a decade, you will see Architectural structures. You will see product design. You will see components inside of vehicles and industrial products that look way more biological because they were designed, interestingly, by a computer that a…”
Wolfe: Bill Gates and Nathan Myhrvold notoriously eviscerated dissenters at Microsoft
“And it's interesting because Bill Gates, in a sense, was notorious for that. You know Nathan Mervold, brilliant, you know, but would sort of eviscerate people if they were wrong.”
Wolfe: Major LLM providers will offer enterprise document search within six months
“Why don't we wait six months? Because this is going to be available from all of the major LLM providers today that want to get the enterprise accounts.”
Wolfe: Sakana AI trained an evolutionary model on eight GPUs
“Their latest model
Which was based on this evolutionary technique was like eight GPUs, which was wild.”
Wolfe: Marvel Movies Have Only Two or Three Years of Demand Left
“I heard Anthony Mackie, who's in You know, the latest Marvel movie talking about an expectation that he'll be, somebody was like, how long do you think you'll be doing Marvel movies? And he's like, I think probably like the next 10 years. And I'm like, probabl…”
Wolfe: AI will create automated patent trolls
“Well, yeah, there will for sure be AI patent trolls, if you put it negatively.”
Wolfe: AI already detects subtle CEO sentiment and linguistic shifts in earnings
“Already, there are AIs that can not only go through Qs and Ks, 10 Qs and 10 Ks, and can listen to quarterly earnings reports and CEOs that are talking at conferences or on podcasts and can get an emotional sentiment, can see where they're varying their languag…”
Wolfe: US share of foreign graduates fell from 23% to 15%
“And we used to attract something like 23% of all foreign graduates here. That's down to 15%.”
Wolfe: MIT's Bob Langer created billions in value through spinout companies
“So for example, Bob Langer at MIT is a prodigious output of PhDs who are very commercially minded. This is a guy who has made hundreds of millions of dollars, created billions of dollars of market value in companies, and attracts postdocs that want to be like …”
Wolfe: Bill Gates only sits on Berkshire, Microsoft, and Kymeta boards
“Which led to this company called Kymeta, which I co-founded with Bill Gates. And I'm in a board room with Bill Gates, and he's on the board of this company. It's the only board he's been on besides Berkshire and Microsoft.”