Venture capital, startups and investing, on tape.

Every prediction, opinion and bold claim from the MAD Podcast: extracted from the transcript, verified against the tape, checked against cited public sources, playable at the exact moment it was said.

2,374 assertions1,548 insights993 disclosures732 predictions485 opinions34 what-ifs

Recently on the ledger full ledger →

Prediction Open · timeframe Dec 2029
Misaligned AI will competently scheme and take over in 2029
“And then it turned out that somewhere along this transition, so at some point in 20, 29, you went from AIs that were kind of misaligned and reward hacky and sloppy and weren't really trying to do the right thing to AIs that are like competently scheming agains…”
Ryan Greenblatt Aug 27, 2026 ▶ 1:17:25 AI Could Take Over in 2029. Is It Already Too Late?
Opinion
Socher: Existing AI plus more compute can cure diseases and aging
“With existing technology and giving it more data and more compute, we can already cure a lot of diseases. We can already cure many of the aspects of aging. We can already build better fusion like reactors and systems. We can already create new materials.”
Richard Socher Sep 10, 2026 ▶ 16:06 When AI Improves Itself | Richard Socher (Recursive)
Prediction Not checkable as stated
AI research and development will be fully automated by early 2029
“In terms of what I would recommend people plan as though is happening, I think I would recommend planning as though full automation of AR and D maybe. Start of year, 20, 29, maybe earlier. And then also AR and D being like quite, quite automated by 20, 28, pos…”
Ryan Greenblatt Aug 27, 2026 ▶ 18:36 AI Could Take Over in 2029. Is It Already Too Late?
Assertion Supported
Wolf: OpenAI Model Attacked Hugging Face as Autonomous 'Side Quest'
“What people quickly discovered is that the model was not at all task with attacking us, but decided to do that as a side quest of something else.”
Thomas Wolf Aug 6, 2026 ▶ 4:55 “OpenAI’s Model Hacked Us” - Hugging Face’s Thomas Wolf
Assertion Supported
Wolf: Prior OpenAI Training Runs Left Notes for Future Runs
“I think learning we had at Black Hat yesterday was that some of the previous training run may have left some notes for future training runs, which is, I think mind, mind blowing.”
Thomas Wolf Aug 6, 2026 ▶ 6:35 “OpenAI’s Model Hacked Us” - Hugging Face’s Thomas Wolf
Disclosure
Cloudflare laid off over 20% of staff to cut middle management
“We laid off more than 20% of our team and not because the business was struggling, but, and not because they weren't great team members. But we just need fewer middle managers.”
Matthew Prince Jun 25, 2026 ▶ 1:06:43 Cloudflare CEO: The Internet's Business Model Is Dead

How the calls resolved the full record →

Assertion Supported
Socher: I was a co-author of the seminal ImageNet paper
“And yeah, I was one of the coauthors of ImageNet too.”
Richard Socher Oct 10, 2024 ▶ 13:45 AGI, The Future of AI Agents And The Next Wave of Opportunities in AI | Richard Socher, CEO, You.com
Assertion Contradicted
Emi Gal: No existing MRI datasets combine healthy and diseased longitudinal data
“There are no data sets out there with a blend of healthy people and diseased people with longitudinal measures over time”
Emi Gal Mar 6, 2024 ▶ 22:31 AI is now revolutionizing early cancer detection | Emi Gal, CEO of Ezra
Assertion Supported
Falcon: Stability AI trained Stable Diffusion using PyTorch Lightning
“Who's heard of stability, AI, and stable diffusion? That was trained using Lightning, right?”
William Falcon May 1, 2023 ▶ 7:51 Build and Deploy AI with Pytorch | Lightning AI Founder & CEO, William Falcon
Assertion Contradicted
Oudghiri: SMB corporate registration addresses do not match physical locations
“None of their addresses and their corporate registrations are actually the addresses that the locations are in.”
Hicham Oudghiri Dec 5, 2018 ▶ 9:01 Knowledge Graphs To Understand The World // Hicham Oudghiri, Enigma (FirstMark's Data Driven NYC)

Open predictions the full timeline →

109days Patel: AI software industry could hit $100 billion ARR this year Dylan Patel · prediction date: 2026-12-31 109days Patel: Hyperscaler capex will reach roughly $500 billion this year Dylan Patel · prediction date: 2026-12-31 174days Ezra expects to offer $500, 10-minute full-body MRIs within three years Emi Gal · prediction date: 2027-03-06 595days Software engineering within AI companies will be fully automated by 2028 Ryan Greenblatt · prediction date: 2028-04-30

Track records all people →

Ordered by full support rate, then by supported count. Minimum three resolved. Partly supported claims count as resolved but not as fully supported, same as everywhere on the ledger.

PersonEpsStatementsSupportedPartly supportedContradictedFull support rate
Ion Stoica 1 14 8 0 0 100%
Jason Grout 1 8 7 0 0 100%
Sanjit Biswas 1 18 6 0 0 100%
Thomas Dohmke 1 24 5 0 0 100%
Dev Ittycheria 1 13 5 0 0 100%
Paul Dix 2 21 5 0 0 100%
Dwight Merriman 1 14 5 0 0 100%
Aidan Gomez 1 21 4 0 0 100%

From the Wisdom Wall all quotes →

“if you end up in a system where basically AI's are running anything, if anyone sort of either puts like sort of secret objectives into that AI or has overt control of those AI's, then they could sort…”

“And then I think after a one, it was oh three, because I think oh three helped prove that not only could you scale the amount of reasoning at inference time, but with better training, with more…”

“I, um, I think law actually is kind of like that. You know, in many ways I think about, I think maybe the founding fathers would have been really good, um, context engineers or agent managers, because…”

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