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 295 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 32 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
Sinclair: Team May Reverse Aging in Humans Within 18 Months
“In Canada, we have a non-human primate study for safety to see how that goes, and within the next 18 months, if all goes well, we will be reversing aging in a human, if all goes well.”
Balaji Srinivasan: Western governments will lose battle against decentralized network elite
“And I think that Western governments will lose. It's going to be super nasty and super gnarly, but on balance, they will lose because their ideology is not one that attracts the very top talent.”
Srinivasan: Bitcoin Is on Track to Become the 'Government of Governments'
“Bitcoin, the reason I say Bitcoin specifically is it's, you know, it's on track. We will see if it can actually get there. Cause it's got various kinds of issues, you know, privacy and other kinds of things that, you know, but It's on track to be the governmen…”
Jacobs: QXO will reach $50 billion by capturing 6% of distribution market
“I want to build a company that's called fifty billion dollars. I can do that. If there's an eight hundred billion dollar size, I can take six percent of that through acquisition and through organic growth. I can get to fifty billion dollars.”
Liemandt: University 100-series lecture classes will disappear due to AI tutors
“A hundred series classes in university are going to go away. Like as soon as everybody figures out this AI tutor stuff, they're just going to go away.”
Poilievre: Northwest BC pipeline would generate $30B annually in exports
“You got one pipeline to Northwest British Columbia that the liberals blocked and that I'm pushing for that would move a million barrels and 30 a day and thirty billion dollars a year overseas. That would be the single biggest boost to overseas exports in the h…”
Hastings: Teachers will stop instructing and evolve into social-emotional motivators as AI teaches
“Well, the teacher will evolve to be a little more like a social worker and a motivator so they're not actually giving the instruction in that long-term case. All the AI is doing that, and they're doing the social emotional learning.”
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…”
Kelly: AI will never escape human control
“I don't believe AI is ever going to be out of our control in the sense of, yes, I mean, there may be occasions when it does something, but we're going to be quick to correct it and say, no, no.”
Kelly: Bottom-up neural nets will never achieve full AI without top-down control
“That bottom up
Will take you much further than you thought you could go, but will never take you all the way to where you want to go. So Wikipedia, this classic bottom-up thing, over time, there's a more and more top-down editorial control, and eventually, ov…”
Kelly: AI-based religions will inevitably emerge first in China and Russia
“It would not surprise me to see
Some new religions based around AI emerging in the kind of vacuum of the waning of the established religions.
And let me say one last thing.
And I would expect it to see these first in China and maybe Russia because they have a …”
The European energy crisis sparked by Russia may solve climate change
“Europe's dependence on Russia for natural gas pipelines plus the act of aggression by Russia may actually cause climate change to be solved, which is, like, an unbelievable story when you're looking at this.”
The next generation of humans will definitively achieve biological immortality
“Hey, the future's fantastic, and we'll probably become immortal relatively soon, and all these kind of things and maybe not us, but our children definitely will.”
Parrish: Remote workers will end up working for in-office colleagues
“Oh, I just said the people who don't go back to the office are going to end up working for the people that do.”
Kunal Shah: India's Per Capita Income Growth Will Never Match China's
“And therefore, a lot of Western markets love to come to India and say, oh, India is the next China. It's not, because our per capita income is never going to beat and grow like China, because before China started becoming affluent, 96% of Chinese urban women w…”
Sinclair: Someone Born Today Will Live to Be 150 Years Old
“But I do think that somebody born today
We'll live that long because the technology is just going so quickly.”
Balaji: US is headed toward anarchy rather than totalitarian dictatorship
“For some time, I'd been increasingly concerned that instead of marching into a future of freedom, we were heading into a time of tyranny. I still think something like this may take place in China's sphere of influence. Arguably, it already has. But as the even…”
Balaji: Tech labs will raise more funding via crypto than grants
“And any lab that is like doing reasonably interesting technology work. Absolutely. Will probably be able to get more funding online via cryptocurrency and NFTs than they will within the academic grants process.”
Balaji Srinivasan: Governments will fail to ban crypto as elites profit
“Like, they're not going to be able to ban it now. It's going to be harder to ban it. If enough members of the elite have sort of defected and are making money from this, only the sort of retro authoritarian chunk, which is Only about 30% of the population. It'…”
Srinivasan: Geopolitics by 2040 may center on China vs. international Indians
“I think by 2040, there's a chance, I'm not saying a hundred percent, but I think that if the last century ended up at least the second half was USA versus USSR, right? I think this century may end up as being China versus Indians, not India. I think that's whe…”
Srinivasan: US will collapse as an empire like the Soviet Union did
“I think the transition from just like the USSR became Russia, I think the USA after whatever collapse becomes America. That say it's like American culture. It's baseball, it's hot dogs, but it's not global empire, right?”
Andreessen: Open internet access makes Soviet-style totalitarianism impossible over time
“I mean, I guess I'm an optimist on this point. Like, I tend to think open access information basically makes a lot of these historical things, you know, fundamentally impossible. Not, you know, not necessarily, you know, not all centralized institutions get to…”
Ridley: China's declining economic freedom means it won't lead global prosperity
“China has been relatively free economically, but relative, but very unfree politically in the last few decades. I think that's now changing. I don't think it's very free in either respect. And so I don't see it leading the world in prosperity for an awful lot …”
Mullenweg: Open Source Eventually Dominates Every Market It Enters
“So I believe that open source comes to dominate any market that enters over time. And the key word is over time because sometimes it takes many decades.”
Roger Martin: The era of widely held public corporations will end
“I think we're going to look back, twenty-fifty, we'll look back on this period, 19, 40 ish, 35, 40 ish to say 20, 20, 25 or 30 as this insane period where we thought the widely held publicly traded corporation was the optimal form. And we're going to look back…”
The pandemic will permanently shift tech to a primary remote work model
“So what this is going to do is it's going to force everybody to look at remote work as not a auxiliary,
But as a primary, this is what I, one of the grand challenges I think for tech as opposed to biotech to work on, and it's going to have its hands full buil…”
AI Will Exponentially Exceed Human Intelligence in Hours in New Domains
“Now imagine that computer is unleashed not in the domain of chess, but in other domains. It'll totally recreate everything we know and then go beyond it in hours. So the scary thing with AI is this, that it will become exponentially smarter than we are in minu…”
Cowen: Most of Eastern Europe is depopulating and will never catch up
“Parts of the world, such as Eastern Europe you know, Poland maybe is catching up to the West, but most of it is being depopulated and emptying out. And it basically will never catch up.”
Computers will surpass humans at quality thinking long before intuition
“It'll be a long time before those intuitions and those imaginations are created by computers. Ok, but it won't be a long time before computers produce better quality thinking.”
Domingos: AI Will Plateau Rather Than Experiencing Infinite Runaway Intelligence Growth
“And I think they will be in the case of AI, but I don't think we're going to see this, you know, infinite growth that, you know, goes completely beyond you know, what humans can imagine.”
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.”
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.”
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: 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,…”
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 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…”