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 790 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
Park: Public LLMs lack real human social physics due to web data bias
“I don't think the model has yet, at least the models that are out in the open, has yet learned the complete mapping of social physics of humanity. This actually is one of the core thesis of simile, right? And one of the core reason why that is the case is if y…”
Patil: Enterprise cybersecurity buyers are surprisingly non-technical and unsophisticated
“I come from a cybersecurity background or, you know, have worked on security products before and those were dark, dark years because you spend a lot of your time actually selling to people who are surprisingly not that technical. You think cybersecurity people…”
Open-source LLMs have reached closed parity, but video models lag far behind
“The difference between the best open source LLM and the best open closed source LLM is very small. Like it used to be six months. I don't think it's six months anymore. I think it's like basically almost unparative. Video models are definitely not, there's a h…”
Kant: Labs benefiting from Chinese open research have an obligation to give back
“The incredible Chinese lab has done an amazing job at sharing their research, and we have definitely take, like, been on the receiving end of taking advantage of that. So When you're on the receiving end of something coming to you, I think you also have kind o…”
Kant: Focusing solely on small open-source models is a cop out
“I think we ultimately only succeed if we scale our models as large as our competition. I do not, like, I think we should not put our head in the sand and say we're going to be king of open source small models. I think that's Frankly, it's a cop out.”
Beam: AI research has exhausted human-generated internet data
“That data came from the internet, it was human generated, and we have used it all. You know, as Elia said at NeurIPS last year, We have but one internet. It's the fossil fuel. We fracked. We got every ounce of data that we could out of the internet, but it's g…”
Beam: Nature and scientific experiments are ultimate verifiers for RL
“But what at Lilo we believe is that actually science running the scientific method and using nature and experiments as verifier is like the ultimate version of that. And so what we're building, we'll talk about these things that we call AI science factories. T…”
Beam: U.S. Biotech Lagging China Is Regulatory, Not an Innovation Deficit
“The reason why U.S. Biotech is losing to Chinese biotech is not because of an innovation problem. There's a regulatory framework too that has to go to enabling like fast clinical trials.”
Beam: The lab of the future should look like a data center
“But we think that like the lab of the future should not be made for people to easily walk into it. It should feel like a data center where you go and you see the rows of server racks. There's room for like a crash cart behind it to service the nodes. But it sh…”
Feinberg: The most innovative diffusion research is happening in 3D structure prediction
“What's kind of cool is right now for people that are interested in really core fundamental AI research, actually some of the most innovative diffusion research is happening in our field, is happening in three D structure prediction right now.”
Cohen: The Killer Use Case for Autonomous Agents Is a Second Brain
“From my perspective now, especially seeing his use case, the killer use case for claw type of agents, autonomous agents today, Is the second brain use case, where you're just kind of dumping in information, and you're not expecting it to give you ready-made ou…”
Chen: Meta poaching has calmed down and OpenAI came out on top
“I think that met us calmed down a little bit. I think we came out on top”
Mark Chen: AI models are producing 'Move 37' breakthroughs in math and coding
“There's move-thirty-sevens in, in math. There's in computer science and coding. I think even, yeah, just, it feels like a lot of people woke up at the start of this year and were like, man, agents are working in my profession. And you know, they're essentially…”
Chen: Pre-training is not dead and remains underrated in AI research
“Well, I think if you still have a pre-training is dead view of the world I think pre-training is definitely yeah, yeah, not, not dead. It's underrated.”
Krause: AI models are not a moat in science, experiments are
“However, we think in science, models aren't remote, experiments are.”
Hong: Formal verification TAM covers all AI-generated code, not niche applications
“No, that's not the TEM. The TEM is all code. The TEM is a right of first refusal on all AI-generated code. Like, right of first refusal, meaning, you know, you get to choose whether you want to verify it.”
Nadella: Many open-weight models score well on benchmarks but fail in practice
“In fact, that's one of the challenges of a lot of the open rate models is they look great on one benchmark or two, but they're not great on practice.”
Rives: Current Virtual Cell Models Cannot Predict Novel Interventions
“I think with, you know, kind of the current generation of models that are being called virtual cells, they are good representations of the underlying data, but, you know, they have a very limited ability to predict what will happen when you make a novel interv…”
Cooper: AI SREs without safe primitives will destroy production databases
“If you just unleash an AI SRE on your production infrastructure and you don't have like safe primitives for like copying volumes, making sure that this is fine, it's gonna nuke your production database. Like it's not a matter of if, it's a matter of when it's …”
Azhnyuk: The Fourth Law leads in on-drone AI and thermal imaging
“And this group of companies is currently the leading team in on-drone AI and thermal imaging on the Ukrainian battlefield. And likely one of the leading, if not the leading in the world.”
Azhnyuk: The West Lacks Key Technology and Manufacturing to Counter China
“So we lack technology, we lack mass manufacturing capacity, we lack the components, and we lack the rare earth materials. Sort of four layers in which we're behind this challenge.”
Frontier AI Models Can Solve Six-Month Graduate Physics Starter Problems
“And I think the issue is that many such problems now, I would say these models can probably crush. Yeah. These are problems that we usually take again, you know, timescale for a theoretical physics paper is six months to a year. That's pretty typical.”
Yasser Elsaid: 95% of AI customer service limitations stem from harness architecture
“I would say like, 95% of the limitation is not from the model. It's from the harness. So like, it's my job to fix, but I think the intelligence is there and like, I think has been there for a while, especially for like, if you're only thinking about customer s…”
Younis: Cruise's fallout stemmed from regulatory communication, not technology failure
“The cruise example wasn't a technology failure. There was the real compounding issue there was just how did the company talk to the regulators and what was their kind of behavior? And I think that became more of the issue.”
Younis: 2014 Y Combinator startup advice does not apply in 2026
“So the YC advice from 20 14 just would not apply in 2026.”
Parakhin: Liquid-transformer hybrids are probably the best neural network architecture available
“I think especially in their hybrid form, when combined with Transformer, like in Mamba fashion, they probably the best architecture I'm aware of, like, period.”
Notion Will Beat Frontier Labs in Collaboration Like Datadog Beat AWS
“Datadog could not exist without cloud storage, right? That it's kind of fundamental that that works. And AWS has like a cloud watch product, but Datadog is an expert on understanding how people want observability on the products they launch. And we're experts …”
Andreessen: Recursive self-improvement and three other AI breakthroughs are actively working
“So the way I think about it is we've had four fundamental breakthroughs in functionality, LLMs, reasoning agents and then and then now RSI and they're all actually working.”
Manning: OpenAI's Sora cannot produce compelling gameplay or persistent mechanics
“Don't think you can take Sora and produce compelling gameplay, right? If you want to have a world that you can wander around in a bit, you're good, but what are your abilities to have gameplay mechanics implemented the way you'd like them to be, and to have th…”
Kulik: Materials AI Models Can Fail Far More Catastrophically Than AlphaFold
“So it's just hard to know from experiment or from other computations if these types of models are correct, and they're certainly not correct across all of chemical space and I'd say they could fail more catastrophically than AlphaFold obviously fails, though t…”
Nelle: Optimistic AI compute buildout forecasts still underestimate agent demand
“Even with You know, the most optimistic projections for what we're going to need in terms of build out are underestimating the extent to which these swarm systems can like churn at scale to produce code that is valuable to the economy”
Becker: Overly Bullish AI Developer Speedup Estimates Are Inflated
“I do think that very bullish estimates of speed up today are, you know, to some extent inflated by what we document in that original paper, that people's expectations of speed up tend to be too optimistic, it seems. They also tend to be inflated, I think, by n…”
Welling: Billion-Dollar Funding Rounds Signal Exploding AI for Science Bubble
“It's not just emerging, it's exploding, I would say. That's the better term, because I know you go from investments into like in the hundreds of millions, now in the billions. So there's now actually a startup by Jeff Bezos that, you know, is that 6.2 billion …”
O'Laughlin: Claude agent teams degrade performance unlike Kimi 2.5 swarms
“My experience is the 2.5 swarm actually improves the model's performance meaningfully. The agent team makes it meaningfully worse because there's clearly not RL done.”
O'Laughlin: Oracle's massive AI infrastructure debt raise is an own goal
“I think Oracle was irresponsible because of the magnitude of what they did. It's like, the thing is like, I think the slack they should have done it, but like the whole setup, in my opinion, on Oracle is own goal. They messed up the messaging. They messed up t…”
O'Laughlin: TPU v7 is Google's peak TCO advantage over Nvidia
“I think Ironwood a V seven is the peak gap between on Between TCO, between NVIDIA and TPU, right?”
O'Laughlin: Google TPU business could be worth $1 trillion
“I've done the math. It could be like, it's like a trillion. It's like a trillion. It's like a trillion or something like that. Assuming it gets like 30% market share or something like that.”
O'Laughlin: Prior to Cerebras and Groq, AI accelerator startups were failures
“The reason why my hit rate for every AI accelerator trip is, like, very, like, I just don't believe in them is because, like, where are they? Until Cerebrus and Grok, honestly, they were all considered failures, and even then, we're like, what are they gonna d…”
Watkins: SWE-bench Verified is saturated, contaminated, and should be retired
“SweetBenchVerified has been one of the Northstar coding benchmarks that the field has looked at to measure coding progress. But recently we've seen that progress has kind of stalled and this, we realized that this is because the eval is effectively saturated a…”
Casado: AI founder turnover is highest since the Traitorous Eight
“And so I think we're seeing more kind of founder movement, you know, as a fraction of founders than we've ever seen. I mean, maybe since, like, I don't know, the time of like Shockley and the Traitorous Eight or something like that way back in the beginning of…”
Casado: Wave of AI acqui-hires is net positive for VCs
“We're actually seeing historic amount of M&A for basically aqua hires, right? That you like, you know, really good outcomes from a venture perspective that are effective aqua hires, right? So I would say it's probably net positive from the investment standpoin…”
Casado: Traditional non-AI software is venture capital's most under-invested sector
“I actually think that we've taken our eye off the ball in a lot of like just traditional, you know, software companies... We've got this kind of mania on these strong growths, and so I would say that that's probably the most under-invested sector right now.”
Wang: Robotics funding prematurely assumes a 'ChatGPT moment' has happened
“It would probably be on the hardware side, actually, right, and the robotics sector, right, which is, it's, I don't want to say that it's not getting funding, because it's clearly it's sort of non-consensus to almost not invest in robotics at this point, but w…”
Casado: Language is not the right primitive to describe the universe
“Language is not the right primitives to describe the universe, because it's not exact enough.”
Specialized Equivariant Architectures Vastly Outperform Simple Transformers in Molecular ML
“This field is one of the I would argue very few fields in applied machine learning where we still have kind of architecture. They are Very specialized. And, you know, there are many people that have tried to replace these architectures with, you know, simple t…”
Garg: Deep automation will be solved by dedicated companies, not Glean
“Glean's an amazing company, and I have a lot of respect for Arvin, but it's so horizontal. Like it's a very powerful chatbot, and it allows people to build some agentic applications or systems of agents on top of them, but really the deep cross-functional cros…”
White: AI for Science Is Difficult in Academia and Demands Bigger Bets
“AI over science is just, I think, A, difficult to do in academia, and B, so exciting, but I think you can take bigger bets, and I think having a tenured position and writing research grants is maybe not the biggest bet you can take on, on a field.”
White: Existing LLMs Are Already Capable of Automating Much of Science
“We can actually automate so much of the scientific method, because it turns out, especially in a field like biology, which is very empirical limited, you know, the top one percent guesser of, you know, what they think will happen in experiment that, you know, …”