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 732 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 30 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
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.”
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…”
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.”
Tech startup valuations in mid-2014 are unwarranted and unsustainable
“There's gonna be a lot of you know, broken hearts and tears are gonna fall, because I don't think that, that those valuations are warranted, are sustainable and that's too bad.”
Robbie Allen predicts data scientist roles will largely disappear by 2024
“In five to 10 years, the role, at least the role of data scientist or data engineer will largely go away, or mostly change, and it'll turn into programming systems like ours.”
Socher: AI will do for biology what calculus did for physics
“AI is kind of what Calculus did for physics. AI will do for biology in the sense that it'll help us weave back together lots of very complex pieces that build these complex systems that then have certain properties.”
Socher predicts AI will reach superhuman capabilities in any domain with simulation
“I think we can basically predict where AI will certainly have superhuman capabilities. And those are all scenarios and all domains where we can either have a simulation and or a verification tool.”
Socher: Singapore or China probably more likely to adopt AI economic modeling
“My hunch is like Singapore or China will probably be more likely to try to use those ideas. Say, hey, we all agree, or we at least make it very clear that this is our objective function. And then, you know, we're going to really try our best to set the various…”
Socher: Recursive's $410M AWS agreement will likely be its smallest compute deal
“That will probably be one of the smallest compute deals that will happen in, in our future.”
Superintelligence will leave human labor with very little economic value
“Human labor would have very little value left.”
Greenblatt: AI research taste and conceptual breakthroughs are improving and will not lag behind
“AIs seem Significantly better at engineering and grungy stuff and sort of just keeping trying than they seem to be at conceptual breakthroughs, but their ability to do sort of these. Breakthroughs, especially in easy to verify domains are improving. And like, …”
AI capabilities could rapidly jump from human-level to wildly superhuman
“Where I think a concern that we have is like on the default trajectory, you maybe go straight from like AI systems that are like competitive with humans to AI systems that are wildly superhuman in a very short period of time.”
Greenblatt: Superintelligence will not suddenly emerge from cheap compute recipes
“It doesn't look like we're going to suddenly end up in a regime where like you could train super intelligence with a really cheap recipe, as opposed to it being more of an iterative thing where like the cost keeps going down, the capabilities keep going up. Th…”
Greenblatt: Annual AI progress in 2029 will be 4x to 5x faster than in 2025
“But in 20, 29, it's actually the case that you're getting like four X as much AI progress or possibly five X as much AI progress. As you got, like, as you got in 25, sort of weighing up the relevant metrics.”
Trojanowski: Closing the agent self-improvement loop will be close by year-end
“I think that closing the loop is gonna happen pretty fast.
I think you'll have, like, I don't know about the entire loop being closed, but I think you'll be
Relatively close by end of year.”
Trojanowski: Scaling Verifiable Rewards Won't Reliably Automate Tax Returns
“I don't believe that if you were to train a model, you know, and you scale up the amount of pre-training computing, you scale up the amount of Like post training from like perfectly verifiable rewards that suddenly will output a model that will do a tax return…”
Trojanowski: AI models will subsume agent harness engineering in 2-5 years
“I think that how long it will take to get swallowed up. I don't know exactly. You know, I think it's probably sub five years. I don't think it's sub two years. I think it's probably sub five years.”
Katti: AI will soon design systems and chips for next-gen AI
“We do believe that the world of Likersh is not that far, where AI will design the systems it needs to train and run the next generation of AI.”
Sachin Katti: AI tokens will always command a premium due to compute shortages
“So in a world where computers are shortage, therefore, tokens are always going to be at a premium, and there's a shortage of tokens that we can produce, given the limited compute that we have”
Sands: AI agents and stablecoins will make microtransactions viable
“I think when we enter a world where like the human is not doing any work to execute the transaction, you're not typing in any credentials, you're not navigating to any web pages, the agent's doing it for you then microtransactions become viable, and you pair t…”
Sands: AI agents will drive adoption of real-time metering and billing
“I think in the world of agents, what we're gonna see more and more of is real-time metering, like, what have you consumed And real-time billing”
Sands: AI agents will operate as multifaceted economic actors within 12 months
“I think the most interesting thing in the next 12 months is, I mean, I think we'll move up and I don't know if it's going to be to four or to five, But I think the more interesting thing is actually that, like, we talked about agents as economic actors, mostly…”
Prince predicts bot traffic will be 1,000x human traffic within five years
“I think that if you extrapolate this out, you know, in five years, I think you'll see a thousand times more bot traffic than human traffic. And if I had to take kind of an over under bet on that, I'd take the over bet that it's just going to, it's growing at s…”
Prince: There will never be a 14th DNS root server
“There will never be a 14th root server, and the organizations that run them will probably never change as well”
Prince: Log4j-level software vulnerabilities will be found weekly for two years
“You know, I think for the next you know, a 104 days, a 104 weeks. So two years you're going to see a log for J like vulnerability every single week.”
Prince: AI resistance among mid-career workers risks creating a lost generation in tech
“I really do worry that we're going to have this sort of lost generation of sort of either, you know, young millennials or older Gen Z folks that just, they, they're, they were sort of, they're going to have incentives to say we shouldn't use these tools becaus…”
Prince: Local newspaper to earn more from AI licensing than display ads
“My wife and I bought the local newspaper in our hometown, Park City, Utah. I think we will make more this year off AI licensing deals than we do off display ads.”
Balaban predicts the neocloud market will support multiple large players
“I think it's absolutely room for multiple very large players, just like the traditional cloud business has shown that there's room for multiple large winners and multiple large players.”
Balaban: Multimodal AI will eventually render every pixel of software directly
“I think that for a lot of the pieces of software on your computer, you might see that taking over where, you know, you can get the glimpse of the future with this ASCII art, and then eventually it'll also have a multimodal network that's generating every pixel…”
Balaban: Everyone in the US will eventually require at least one GPU
“I believe that in the future, everybody in the United States will need the computational power of one GPU or more to just do their daily work You know, enjoy life, whether it's getting access, whether it's getting entertained, whether it's being productive, wh…”
Levie: AI compute cost reductions will take 5 to 10 years
“The data center providers, the labs, et cetera, have pricing power. They don't need to lower their prices on anything. So you're not seeing the typical things that drive down the cost of compute. I'm highly optimistic that that happens over the next five to 10…”
Levie: A $5B startup will be built around AI compute ERP
“You're going to need, you know, new, new pieces of software. Probably there's probably a, you know, a five billion dollar startup waiting to happen just in like ERP for your AI compute.”
Levie: Average enterprise will use half a dozen AI models
“I think what's going to happen is you're going to have a mosaic of models in the enterprise. I think the average enterprise will certainly be using, you know, half a dozen models in their organization.”
Levie: Headless AI queries will be 100x larger than interface work
“So I think it's just going to be this sort of dual, dual model with the one nuance being probably by like you know, database queries, headless will just be a hundred times larger than the interface driven, you know, way of doing work.”
Levie: Enterprise software will combine seat and consumption models within three years
“So I think any enterprise software company in three years from now, that sort of, that, that gets through this AI transformation period, It will have a seat business model, assuming it has an end user component, and it'll have a consumption business model.”
Levie: AI agents will drive hiring as executives capture new value
“You will actually see, interestingly, if you're like an executive and you start to do this, you'll see lots of areas actually where you should hire more people because you're like, oh my God, this thing is spitting out, you know, incredible goldmine of value, …”
Dubois: Simulations will never fully eliminate the need for real-world AI training
“The problem is simulations are always going to be really hard and are not going to be truthful. So I think there will always need to be a certain, a little bit of training that will need to happen in the real world to make sure that the model realizes kind of …”
Dubois: Model capacity does not limit AI performance in legal or medical fields
“But there's nothing, I would say, in the capacity of the model That is constraining the model to be as good at legal and like medical and like other domains.”
Dubois: AI's coding discontinuity will permeate other verticals within two years
“Now the feeling of discontinuity will happen. It did happen three months ago with coding or four months ago with coding, and I think that will happen now in every other domains. Like most people are not feeling the same way Like the, like kind of the capabilit…”