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 21 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
Google would have crushed OpenAI by giving Noam Shazeer half its TPUs
“That muscle did not exist during my time at Google. And I think had they had it, what they would have done would be say, hey, Noam Shazir, you're a brilliant guy. You know how to scale these things up? Like, here's half of all of our TPUs. And then I think the…”
Parakhin: Liquid AI could beat frontier models with equal compute
“I think if they if they had similar level of compute, they would be very competitive and maybe even beat the largest models, at least from what I've seen.”
Morris: ChatGPT could likely have been built using RNNs instead of Transformers
“And I think like, we honestly probably could have gotten this with RNNs. I know like the scaling laws paper shows that RNNs have worse curves for scaling, but probably people would have been like, I bet you could have built chat GPT with a very sophisticated R…”
Varun Mohan: Codeium would have failed if it used vLLM
“If we use VLLM, we would not be talking with you right now.”
Drew Houston: Massive AI price-performance gains wouldn't happen without open source
“You've seen like the price performance of these models improve 10 or a hundred X year over year, which is, it's sort of like many Moore's laws compounded together. For a bunch of reasons. Like, that wouldn't have happened without open source, right?”
Beam: CAR-T Therapy Likely Would Have Failed Without Serendipitous Intervention
“In so many counterfactual worlds, that doctor was not the one treating Emily Whitehead in that case, and CAR-T may have looked like, it may have been yet another gravestone in E-Room's law, you know, for you know, yet another failed drug. So I do think that li…”
Lample: Post-training breakthroughs like DPO were impossible without open LLaMA
“And if you look at many of the techniques that were developed after, for instance, Temma was open source, like all these post-training approaches like even DPOD, like performance optimization, all of this were done by people that had access to this model, and …”
Tay: Present AI Milestones Would Have Been Viewed as AGI Five Years Ago
“If you just look at the AI progress now and five years ago, I think people would think that we already reached like AGI.”
Mohan: Codeium would not have survived if it relied on vLLM
“If we use VLLM, we would not be talking with you right now.”
Hsu: If building Speak again, he probably wouldn't build remote hub in Slovenia
“So it worked out, but if I had to do it over again, I probably wouldn't do it.”
Beauchamp: Spotify would retain 85% of users with only five artists
“At the end of the day, if we all go on like Spotify or like, imagine if Spotify only had the top five musicians, I think it would retain over 85% of its existing users.”
Kant: Sourced failed because they did not scale up code models
“And what we missed throughout that entire journey that we were on the right track, but we should have just kept scaling up. And today to all of us, the scaling laws and scaling up seems like the most obvious thing, but having spent four or five years of my lif…”
Nair: Previously Believed IOI Gold Would Mean AI Was Solved
“If you told me that we could have gotten IOI Gold then, I would have just assumed that we could all just go on vacation, like, you know, it's all over, like, AI is solved, like, no point in working anymore.”
Building a custom IDE would cost AI coding startups $100M
“If like Cursor or Devon would have to build their own VS code, that'd cost a hundred million dollars, you know? Call me back in five years.”
Huang: Building Visual Agent Builder in under 2 months required Codex
“For the Visual Agents Builder, we only started that Probably less than two months ago, and that, that wouldn't be possible without Codex.”
Noam Brown: Reasoning paradigms would have failed on GPT-2
“If you try to do the reasoning paradigm on top of GPT-II, I don't think it would have gotten you almost anything.”
Nguyen: AI canvas interfaces could have happened two years earlier
“I think like those ideas could have happened like two years ago. Just like maybe, I don't think it was like a priority at that time. It was like very unclear. I think like AI landscape at that time was very nascent, if that makes sense.”
Comfy: Extending Automatic1111 Was Harder Than Building ComfyUI From Scratch
“It would have been harder to implement that in the auto interface than to create my own interface, so that's when I decided to create my own.”
Comfy: Stable Cascade would have been popular if SD3 hadn't stolen momentum
“If that model had released was Supposed to be released by the authors, then it would probably have gotten very popular since it's a step up from SDXL, but it got all of its momentum stolen by the SD three announcement.”