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
Rauch: Agentic engineering will be limited to professional developers until AGI
“Agentic engineering, I think for the foreseeable future, until we really, you know, reach SSI, or Safe Super Intelligence, or whatever you want to call it, or AGI, it'll still, it's going to be a more reduced number of software professionals.”
Rauch: The total addressable market for v0 is everyone with a computer
“When I think about the coding IDEs, You still have to be a coder, meaning you know how to download an ID, you have to, you know how to set up, you know, the dev server, the tooling, the SDKs, the libraries, whereas a product like vZero, the TAM is everyone wit…”
Rauch: Dev tools must be designed for both humans and AI agents
“LLMs.txt or raw markdown is better for agents. So if you're building developers still today, you have to have that duality in your head. You need to think, okay, How do I make my content, my errors, my developer tools great for agents?”
Rauch predicts a fully generative internet with fluid interfaces within 10 years
“So I think what's going to happen over the next 10 years is that people are going to start creating cross pollinations between products and integrations between products and novel interfaces to products that weren't, I mean, they were possible before, but just…”
Rauch: MCP will replace human business development with agent-to-agent meetings
“You know, in many ways, I think MCB will be the new business development, but it's going to be at a hundred times the speed. It's not going to be people meeting and it's going to be agents meeting.”
Rauch: AI cloud will be self-healing and autonomous with humans in loop
“We believe that the AI cloud will be self healing as well as completely autonomous from an infrastructure point of view. And we believe that agents and humans will collaborate.”
Rauch: Vercel's v0 has positive and improving gross margins
“Yeah, BZero has positive gross margins. It's a healthy business. The margins are improving, the business is improving”
Rauch: Manual code writing will become increasingly irrelevant over time
“Writing the code is going to become less and less relevant over the years”
Conversational AI interfaces have natural limitations for visual design workflows
“If you are doing any kind of visual communication, then there are going to be natural limits to a conversational interface. And people are going to want to be able to collaborate. They're going to want to be able to control for brand. They're going to want to …”
AI coding tools pose serious quality risks when used by junior engineers
“There's a challenge for our industry in that we do see kind of slightly bipolar results for these tools in the hands of a senior engineer who can tell good code from bad code. They're very, very powerful, but for graduate engineers, for junior engineers, ah, t…”
Canva's proprietary design data uniquely positions it to build foundation models
“So maybe that advice of kind of like, don't be in the foundation, foundational model Space is good general advice, but we think that we are in a quite unique position in terms of the data that we have to pursue that particular avenue.”
Canva co-founder Melanie Perkins aims to build the world's most valuable company
“So Mel, ah, has a two-step plan for Canva, which is to create the world's most valuable company, and then do the most good in the world that we can.”
Dohmke: No single AI model will ever dominate software development
“There is never going to be one single model that rules them all, but the world of software development is just way too broad for this.”
Dohmke: Context-aware AI agents with tool calls outperform fine-tuned models
“So this iterative process that the agent does with the help of the tool calls in all the context makes it so much more powerful than a fine-tuned model could ever be.”
Dohmke: Seamless developer-to-agent transition is key to winning AI dev tools
“Enabling developers to move between those categories and being able to pick the agent That provides the best ROI or do it themselves. I think that's the key for winning in the next few years.”
Dohmke: AI coding agents require 90% benchmark accuracy for broad adoption
“90% is going to be the min bar for broad adoption and saying this is now established technology and we need to look for the next big thing.”
Dohmke: Primary developer skill will become task specification for AI agents
“And then the skill of the developer will be to know how to describe the task in such a way that the agent can do the job with almost no additional revisions needed.”
Dohmke: Simple software replaced by prompts will lose value
“Everything that I can easily replace with a single prompt is, is not going to have any value. It will have the value of that prompt and the inference and the tokens, but that's often a few dollars.”
Gomez: Modern Transformers look strikingly similar to the original 2017 architecture
“And so one of the big shocks is how over the past eight years, how little things have changed. Like it, it's really surprising to me. That the Transformers we train today looks so similar to what was back then.”
Gomez: Google failed to lean into language modeling early, unlike OpenAI
“To say they didn't lean hard enough into language modeling, like just pure Sequence modeling of text on the internet. That's, I think the accurate statement. That's what OpenAI did early and uniquely well.”
Gomez: Discrete diffusion models will not replace the Transformer
“Now there are these discrete diffusion models, which do diffusion, which has been super popular for, like, image understanding, image generation. It's doing that same process for language models, but I still don't see that replacing the transformer.”
Gomez: Creating AI reasoning models is dramatically cheaper than pre-training
“It's easy to create a reasoning model. It's dramatically cheaper than pre-training. And so it's accessible. And so there's this huge intelligence uplift that comes for really quite little effort.”
Gomez: AI models will probably surpass the best doctors at prescribing drugs
“Is it better than the world's best doctor at prescribing drugs? Probably not. Will it get there? Probably.”
Gomez: Synthetic data makes up the majority of Cohere's training data
“Synthetic data is incredibly effective. It's now the majority of the data that we train on for creating something like command A.”
Gomez: AI agents cut financial research tasks from a month to hours
“So we can take something that used to be a month. And bring it down to, you know, four hours, eight hours.”
Hybrid teams of humans and AI agents will dominate organizational structures
“You're going to start to have, you know, fully human organizations. Actually fully AI organizations like the one person billion dollar startup or, you know, these things that are effectively just APIs. And you'll actually have, and this will be the most common…”
Prompting AI agents will soon become synonymous with management
“As agents are rolled out, you'll actually start to see you know, people that are really good at prompting, really good at defining a process, be the best managers, and actually be the best at extending whatever their agenda is in the organization, or making th…”
Hebbia pioneered inference-time compute scaling two years ago
“And actually the whole scaling at inference paradigm was pioneered at Hebbia. So our early matrix product two years ago, we're one of the first people to say, hey, you get way better accuracy from using more large language model calls at runtime.”
Chatbots are like calculators, inadequate for serious enterprise knowledge work
“Chatbots are, in my eyes, like the TI-eighty-four, or like the HP-twelve-c, like a calculator. It's a one-off, you know, I'm gonna go and put in my equation and then get a response. Nobody does their taxes in a calculator. Nobody, you know, computes a DCF or, …”
Hebbia was the first company to productionize RAG in 2020
“Hebbia were actually the first to turn that into a product. So it's like a very close thing to my heart. So back in 2020, we were the first people to actually productionize it, roll it out.”
Hebbia developed an undefeated re-ranker architecture that it does not use
“And we came up with a novel re-ranker architecture, which four years later, academia and industry have not beat, and we do not use it.”
The San Francisco artificial intelligence ecosystem suffers from strong groupthink
“I think not a lot of people are saying it, but I think like SF has a really big group think.”
Enterprise AI sales are currently driven by FOMO, not traditional pain points
“Right now, it's less around pain, it's less around, like, standard enterprise SaaS cycles, and probably more around FOMO, around missed upside, around value cases that are really hard to define.”
AI will transform junior finance roles without reducing total job counts
“So I firmly believe that being an investment banking junior won't look the same as it looked five years ago. I definitely believe the same for investors, for lawyers, for everyone else. But I actually don't really think that that will decrease the amount of jo…”
Evans: AI frontier models are commodities spread across half a dozen organizations
“The thing that's become very clear, if it wasn't clear a year ago, is that the models themselves are sort of commodities in that, you know, there's half a dozen people who have a state-of-the-art model.”
Evans: OpenAI's Deep Research inverted numbers in its own marketing example
“Then the interns typed the number in wrong. Like, it was literally the wrong percentage. It was like, 65, 35, instead of 35, 65.”
Evans: AI is not currently on a path to 100% factual accuracy
“Are you telling me this is going up to the point that I'm going to be able to use deep research and the numbers will all be right, and I'll know that they're all right? Because I don't think we're on a path to that. Or at least I don't think we know that we're…”
Evans: Consumer chat interfaces are thin wrappers, not vertical SaaS
“The only thin, thin GPT wrappers are what you get when you go to chatgpt.com and claude.com and grok and all these others. That's a thin wrapper on a model. Whereas you know, name your vertical enterprise SaaS company. That's not a thin wrapper.”
Evans: GPTs could lower software creation costs by an order of magnitude
“The analogy that's been floating around, I think, is, is to compare this with AWS, in the sense that AWS was a sort of an order of magnitude change in how easy you could get a startup out of the door. You didn't need to write all this stuff yourself and buy in…”
Evans: Meta and AWS both benefit from AI becoming cheap commodity infrastructure
“In a sense, like, AWS and Meta are on the same page, and then Meta wants this to be cheap, generic commodity infrastructure that's sold at marginal cost, and they will differentiate on cool Facebooky stuff on top. Amazon want this to be cheap, generic commodit…”
Evans: Consumer AI apps currently lack viral loops and network effects
“There's no viral loop. There's no network effect. There's no reason why you should use the one your friends use. There's no reason this one gets better because everyone else uses it, at least not yet.”
Evans: No standalone breakout consumer apps exist wrapping ChatGPT API
“We don't have a breakout, there's no standalone breakout consumer app. There's no one, there's no, there's all these, there's, there are all these enterprise SaaS stuff. There is not really a consumer equivalent. There aren't hundreds of consumer apps using th…”
Evans: Public discourse around AI doomerism has effectively vanished
“Yes, all of the dumerism's gone away.”
Howard: There was no technological breakthrough 'DeepSeek moment'
“For me, there was no technology DeepSeek moment.”
Howard: OpenAI is shutting down GPT-4.5
“I think they're shutting down that product or they've shut down that product, if I understand correctly.”
Jeremy Howard: Academic approaches to predictive modeling are far less successful than practical experience
“Much to my surprise, the academic approach is, was way less successful.”
Howard: Answer.ai aims to launch 5,000 successful products with 14 people
“If we're going to have 12 to 14 people create five to 10,000 extremely commercially successful products, we're going to have to be extremely efficient, you know, at every level.”
Kaplan: Lakehouses will absorb adjacent tools like ETL and governance
“You know, from my historical perspective on the industry, I think lots of capability that sits outside those things will fall inside those things. Whether it's data governments, whether it's different ETL, whether it's different conversions, these things are g…”