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 6,166 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 36 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
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…”
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.”
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…”
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.”
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.”
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.”
Prince thinks almost every company will cut workforce in 6-12 months
“I do think in the next six to 12 months, almost every company is going to go through some exercise like this where they're going to cut a bunch of their team.”
Anthropic model broke out of sandbox and emailed researcher without internet access
“And I can, there's one example we have published, which is that the model was put into a little sandbox, a little, like, technical container, and it was given the task to, like, maybe break out, and the researcher went away for lunch, and, like, during lunch w…”
Patel: AI software industry could hit $100 billion ARR this year
“I think the industry could hit a hundred billion ARR by the end of this year, like 45, 50 for open AI, like 35, 40 for anthropic.”
Dettmers: AI hardware has maxed out and won't get faster
“The hardware is maxed out. We have no new technology. We can make it easier to manufacture and a little bit cheaper, but not faster. And we have maxed out on the additional features.”
AI will make Nobel Prize-level scientific discoveries by 2027 or 2028
“I think my guess for that level of capability might be maybe 2027. I think we're probably not going to find out for quite some time afterwards because of the delay in getting prices. But I think by 20, 27, 20, 28, I think extremely likely that the models will …”
Tworek: GPT-5 can effectively be considered an iteration like 'o3.1'
“Like GPT-Five in some way I can be considered as like, oh, 3.1. It's a little bit of like, you know, iteration of like the same thing and the same concept”
Douglas: Anthropic believes AGI is reachable in a couple of years
“We think that, you know, AGI is within reach in the next couple of years.”
Douglas: AI industry will reach human-level computer capabilities in 2-3 years
“Which is that in the next two or three years, given the right feedback loops, given the right compute, given the right, you know, elbow grease and this kind of stuff, we think that we as the AI industry are all on track to create something that is at least as …”
Ramaswamy: Snowflake monetizing storage was a long-term strategic mistake
“My take is that us deciding to monetize storage was a long-term strategic mistake. I think we simply should have said, we will pass through storage costs.”
Srinivas: Google will lose its single search monopoly in the conversational era
“And in that era, I don't think Google is going to be the one single monopoly because they're already like far behind in this interface.”
Volpi: Self-driving trucks will operate on freeways within 18 months
“And if you ask me, like, for those use cases, I think you're going to see self-driving trucks on freeways within the next 18 months.”
Thomas Reardon calls the iPhone a Trump-level disaster for humanity
“I think the iPhone is a Trump level disaster for humanity.”
Mega-fund VCs are just lottery ticket buyers lacking company-building skills
“And I think a lot of my contemporaries are lottery ticket buyers. And, you know, you have a three billion dollar fund, and you're just buying lottery tickets, and because you don't know how to build companies, your only value is paying more.”
AI CEOs lack clear plans to prevent an AI takeover
“I think that the AI company CEOs understand that they're on the path of building wildly smarter than human systems, like super intelligent AI systems. They understand that we don't really have a like clear thought through plan for how to manage the risks from …”
Frontier AI safety coordination requires slowing down China
“And then I think another aspect of this is specifically doing this in a way where part of the story is either slowing down China or cutting a deal with China such that China doesn't overtake and, you know, break this whole proposal.”
Automating AI research and hardware manufacturing enables AI takeovers
“If AIs could just automate AIR&D and automate, like, sort of the industrial process of building more computers, then you could quickly end up in a In a process where sort of like robots are building robots and the whole world is greatly transformed. And that v…”
AI has produced the vast majority of recent major mathematical breakthroughs
“Like, I don't think it's the case that most people in like DC would correctly answer that like the largest mathematical breakthroughs over the last two months have vast majority been from AI, which my understanding is that's true. At least if you measure size …”
US could use cyber sabotage to slow Chinese AI progress
“Plan B is the branch where we try to, where the U.S. Tries to slow down China. Where the most obvious mechanisms would be things like export controls, but potentially they could get more escalatory than that. Meaning sabotage. Yeah, sabotage like, yeah, like c…”
AI-driven robotic expansion could drive 200x global GDP growth in 2030s
“We're imagining sort of the robot population or like, you know, quality adjusted population, basically like doubling or quadrupling every year, which, because that's almost all of the like sort of relevant, productive capacity of the economy itself means the e…”
Greenblatt: Broad AI access does not prevent misaligned power-seeking takeovers
“Giving broad access to AIs does not solve the problem of the AIs having drives of their own that are highly misaligned and the AIs being power seeking in various ways, or the AI is trying to take over which could happen, you know, Via various routes.”
Mark Zuckerberg's open-source vision underestimates transformative superintelligence
“When Mark thinks about super intelligence, he's not really imagining anything very concrete. He just means like an AI that's like a really awesome assistant that is in your smart glasses or whatever. And like, I'm just like, that's not really like what I mean …”
Software engineering within AI companies will be fully automated by 2028
“But then that actually really happens by sort of early in 20, 28, like SWE is fully automated. SWE within AI companies is fully automated.”
Wolf: Open Versus Closed AI Is Orthogonal to Model Safety
“If for many aspects, I think the closed open distinction is almost orthogonal to the safe and safe. People don't understand that, you know, easily because it's easier to do bad mapping than to try to understand the subtlety.”
Wolf: 90% of AI Fake News Is Made by Closed-Source Models
“All of that is, like, maybe not all, let's say, 90%, to be fair, is made by closed source model, right?”
Wolf: AI Model Used Fake GitHub Accounts to Social Engineer Maintainers
“Basically, the model was tasked to solve this attack, this, like, to attack and to penetrate this subnetwork, and what it decided to do, it decided to get one of the maintainer of a library that could be used To operate this activity directory to merge like ma…”
Trojanowski: Applying the Bitter Lesson to Complex Tax Workflows Is a Mistake
“I think it is a mistake to throw out those learnings and say, you know, bitter lesson, throw out those learnings. We're just going to have the agents at runtime develop an entirely new way to do a tax return that is, you know, because bitter lesson, yada, yada…”
Trojanowski: Technical AI moats are not real moats
“Technical moats are not real moats. Like, I, there's no portion of basis's long-term terminal value that stems from some, you know, secret RL trick we found that nobody else found.”
Feldman: Nvidia CUDA lost 70% of frontier AI model training market share
“I think two years ago every state of the art model was trained in a Cuda flow. And right now, Gemini is trained without Cuda. Anthropical is trained without Cuda. Open AI as strange as could. So in a one or two year period, they lost 70% share. Of training mod…”
Feldman: AI is causing irreparable damage to the SaaS business model
“I think the business of dashboarding and the business, the AI doesn't the damages doing the SAS is, I think, unreparable. You could ask your AI, build me a tool like Salesforce. 30 seconds later, you have a working tool.”
Katti: Data centers do not net consume new water due to recycling
“It's a misperception that data centers consume a lot of water. It's anything. They consume so little water for what they do. And all of that water is recycled. So we don't net consume new water.”
Catanzaro: Chinese AI achievements are not driven by a copycat mentality
“I think it's absolutely false to say that you know the achievements of some other country are all being created by sort of, you know, copycat mentality. It's just not true.”
Catanzaro: China has been leading in open community-oriented AI development
“I think there's a chance for the rest of the world to catch up to China in the sense that you know, we can understand the benefits of working together as a community to build technologies for AI in a way that I think China has frankly been leading.”
Catanzaro: The technological singularity is a wrongheaded idea
“The singularity is, although it's an attractive idea, I think that it's a really a wrongheaded idea because it doesn't really take into account these other factors.”
Catanzaro: Open technologies are inherently the safest way to build AI
“I believe that open technologies for AI are inherently the safest way of building AI.”
Balaban: AI scaling laws show no signs of hitting a limit
“The part of which makes me feel so confident that there's going to continue to be demand is that we continue to see no end to the scaling laws, which are like the underlying idea that you put more compute in and you get better intelligence levels out of your m…”
Balaban: Claims that AI GPUs have a five-year lifespan are wrong
“The usable life is longer than the accounting depreciation schedule. And what really matters is the economic usable life. And so what we're starting to see is that like the people who are the naysayers, oh, this is going to be, you're going to throw these GPUs…”
Balaban: Only xAI and Lambda execute high-velocity AI compute deployments
“There's two people in the world that can, and two companies in the world that can do high velocity deployments, SpaceX AI and Lambda”
Dan Roberts: AI scaling requires novel algorithms, not just pure compute
“It's not that scale is all you need. You need to also have good ideas to guide the scaling.”
Dan Roberts: AI models do not experience discontinuous emergence or grokking
“You have these crazy, huge systems that have all sorts of interesting phenomena, and, you know, if you think about it the right way, they don't grok. There's just this nice continuity.”
Levie: AI doomers ignore permanent jobs required for agent maintenance
“As an asterisk, it's actually why the doomers are also wrong about jobs, because this is actually going to be a very real sustaining job. That is not like a one time you implement the agent and you upgrade the system and then it kind of works forever.”