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 3,106 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
Howard: AI growth will continue tailing off as low-hanging fruit disappears
“The amount of people and money being put into AI, it's going to keep going up, but again, the low hanging fruits being done now. So yeah, I think we'll continue to see the tailing off of growth.”
Sigma CEO Mike Palmer says text-to-SQL AI products are a joke
“So I think these products are a joke. I don't think that they're going to succeed and we don't care about them.”
Levie: Proposed US tariffs will cause a total economic disaster
“If as of, you know, Tuesday afternoon, you know, the tariffs that have been proposed, if those roll through you know, this is going to be a total disaster.”
Chollet: 50,000x LLM scaling yielded flat progress on ARC benchmark
“Because between, like, GPT-II and GPT-IV. There's been this 50,000 X scale up of base models that has resulted in, in, in basically a flat curve. On Arc.”
Ada uses runtime guardrails to prevent inaccurate AI responses entirely
“Increasingly, we make those assurances in runtime, so it's actually not possible for ADA to deliver an inaccurate response.”
Masad: Long-tail SaaS products will disappear due to AI software generation
“As, you know, non-professional software engineers are able to build their own software I think that the demand for the, you know, plethora of SaaS that we have today will also go down, and that will reduce, because you'll be able to generate software on the fl…”
Masad: Total software engineer headcount will stay roughly constant
“So I think I think the population of software engineering will probably be constant and not grow all that much.”
Habib predicts AI will be able to run companies within five years
“This is AI that in three to five years is going to be able to run companies.”
Delangue: China is likely the current leader in open-source AI
“China has been publishing much more open source AI lately. I would argue that they're probably the leader today of open source AI which is surprising to some, but for example, in, in video, they've been leading in, in open source AI.”
Socher: AI scaling will hit logarithmic leveling off in reasoning gains
“I do think we are going to hit a sort of logarithmic kind of leveling off off like how much more data will give us that much more reasoning, right?”
Socher: Half of competitors' AI search citations are random, irrelevant links
“Some of our competitors, half of their citations are Independent, random links that have nothing to do with the sentence that they're behind.”
Pomel: Paul Graham's 'Founder Mode' essay will do more harm than good
“My worry about the founder mode, and everything that gets pulled down to a very short piece like that, is that I think it's going to be used and abused in all sorts of different ways, because there's so much context that goes into every single word in there, l…”
Scaling compute and GPUs alone won't yield autonomous enterprise AI
“I'm not an expert in the field, but I believe that this is gonna we need Another giant leap of innovation to get there. I'm not sure just throwing compute and increasing the number of GPUs without some fundamental discovery, it's gonna create this.”
Most major software companies will eventually integrate a Web3 database
“And so there's this asymptotic cost curve that will come down, and at some point, our belief is that most major software companies will actually have a Web three database as part of their stack.”
Evans: VR headsets will not replace smartphones as primary computing platforms
“You're not going to wear a headset, no matter how light and cheap it is, all day outdoors. I would not have worn it walking here, even if it weighed a hundred grams and had completely perfect pass-through. Therefore, it can't replace your phone. Therefore, we …”
AI content creation now surpasses the bottom 80% of marketing employees
“AI can generate content that has gone from laughably bad to, like, better than the bottom 25% of marketing employees to, like, maybe better than the bottom 80% of marketing employees and on a trajectory to continue progressing there.”
Eiso Kant: AI will recycle world data into synthetic data within years
“And so this is kind of our view and our, if you extend this a couple of years out, and this is where some people will probably have objection with us. We think that this will go so far. That we will kind of recycle all of the world's real data into higher qual…”
Goshen: Scaling LLM size is already showing diminishing returns
“And we're already start seeing diminishing returns. I mean, you take the architecture, you increase the size of the models or, and you see that At these levels of scale where, you know, we are dealing with things, diminishing returns, we start seeing it.”
Shah: AI models attempting medical diagnoses will kill patients
“I mean, they just keep going there. I'm going to do diagnoses because it's grand or it's challenging, but I mean, they're going to kill somebody.”
Socher: You.com solved AI hallucinations before anyone else
“We figured that, I don't know, problem of hallucinations out before anyone else.”
Socher: Microsoft Bing copied You.com's AI image generation feature
“That was eventually copied, and Bing also has that feature now within Bing.com.”
Socher: Plumbers will eventually earn more than marketers as AI automates knowledge work
“Probably at some point, your plumber might get more than your marketer because the marketer can use tools and be way, way more efficient, but the plumber AI is going to take a very long time because None of the plumbing companies are collecting data, having ro…”
Riparbelli: LLMs are not production-ready for 95% of intended tasks
“They're not production ready for 95% of the tasks that people think that they want to use them for.”
Riparbelli: Most harmful AI misuse will emerge from open source models
“And I think we'll see that a lot of harmful use of these technologies will emerge from kind of like the open source world.”
Falcon: Open-source AI will quickly catch up to proprietary models
“So I think all, all roads lead to open source at the end of the day. No matter what you do or how much money you have, you cannot compete with the world's resources put together to do something. So some companies will have an edge for a bit, yes, but open sour…”
Falcon: Mathematical advances will eventually make future AI models small
“I think the math field will catch up, and we'll have some fancy regularizer that will make all this go away, and now we're back to, like, a small model. So I guess, I think that the future is small, large language models, I guess, that are specialized”
Falcon: There will not be a god-like AGI
“I don't think there's gonna be like a god AI roaming around.”
Amr Awadallah claims Vectara has solved the LLM hallucination problem
“I mean, you do have a human in the loop, so you can still qualify it, but we want it to be minimized to zero, and that's the problem that we solved.”
Secondary AI fact-checking models will reduce hallucinations to zero, predicts Awadallah
“You're going to have models that check the accuracy of other models, and that will help us bring down hallucination to zero.”
Stancil: Modern data stack startups face an inevitable market reckoning
“Pretty quickly you're gonna realize they're all stepping on each other's toes, and that, that fallout has to go somewhere. Like, not all of these companies can be the next Figma that they all now say that they are, and so it's what happens then, and I think it…”
Stancil: dbt's initial ease of use may become its downfall
“Dbt is, I think, really popular because it's so easy to get up and running, but it may also eventually be, like, if it had an undoing, to me that would be the undoing, is the thing that was really easy to get up and running doesn't actually solve the real prob…”
Eifrem: Neo4j powers 99% of all flight ticket route calculations
“99% of all flight ticket calculations, so which route should I go from point A to point B when I fly from Paris to New York? Is that a direct flight or connecting Heathrow? Like, how do I get there, right? Is done with Neo for J. 99% of our airfare.”
Pesenti: AI matching human intelligence is at least 20-30 years away
“And I don't believe anybody has a good view as to when will match human intelligence, but it's not going to happen in the next decade, not going to happen in the next two or three decades. It's going to take much longer.”
Pesenti in 2020: AI will not become accessible to non-programmers anytime soon
“I don't buy that AI will be accessible to people who don't have a programming background anytime soon, right? So, but it will be part of, you know, machine learning will be part of the tool set of Any programmers, but it would still be, you know, for kind of m…”
Wang: Regulating venture-backed data monetization models will trigger a market crash
“Any regular that comes in and blows up the business model of a ton of, like, high valuation VC stuff, they're gonna trigger a pretty bad situation.”
Pedro Domingos predicts Backprop alone will not reach general AI
“I actually do not believe that that's the case. I think Backprop will not get us there.”
Marcus: Deep learning models are giant correlation machines without causal understanding
“These systems are just giant correlation machines. They have no understanding of causation.”
The traditional 80% margin enterprise sales model is going away
“I think that model is basically going away. It's being eaten on the bottom by bottom up, which we can talk about later, and I believe on the top it's been eaten by services.”
Cloud giants will turn backend open-source software into a corner case
“So I just think Amazon, Microsoft, and Google are, like, absolutely, like, moving far, far away from the pack in terms of their ability to create infrastructure software. So I feel like from now on it's like their game to write our databases and our message qu…”
Joe Lubin says Ethereum is orders of magnitude ahead of Cardano
“There, there's just I think several orders of magnitude at this point between Ethereum and let's say a project like Cardano, or R-Chain, or DFINITY, or Zilliqa, or others.”
Bob Muglia: Hadoop will not see much incremental investment
“So I think Hadoop is, is, is a past technology. I think it's, although it's still gonna, people will still use it still has a place, I think it's not an area where there's gonna be a lot of incremental additional investment.”
Investors funding AI startups without scientific competency will lose money
“So I think as, insofar as that continues to happen, Those people are gonna lose a lot of money.”
Big tech companies will lose massive amounts of money on ML APIs
“I do not think that these numbers are going to be good for these machine learning APIs. And I think those bigger companies are going to lose a massive amount of money over the next several years.”
Rebecca Lynn: AI will probably outperform all but the top 10% of doctors
“You could imagine a case where, you know, maybe the top five percent of physicians, you know, you're not going to get better then, right? Maybe not the top 10%. But as you get down that stack, you know, AI's probably going to do a better job, right?”
Groschupf: Data center operating systems will be the next Hadoop killer
“That's a data center OS, and I really think that's the next Hadoop killer.”
Big data infrastructure startups launching in 2014 will lack successful exits
“If you're coming out as a Vertica today, you're not going to have a happy ending.”