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
Alex Ratner: Traditional model-centric AI development is dying off
“Tweaking the model, finding a fancier algorithm, all this kind of traditional model-centric development that, frankly, we still mostly teach in data science one-on-one courses as what data science is, is effectively dying off.”
Wiggins: Data science, not physics, won World War II
“I grew up as a physicist thinking that, you know, physics really won World War II, but now that I'm a data scientist, I realize that it was actually data science that won World War II, but that story was classified for about 75 years, which is the story of how…”
Liberty: Prompt engineering is a fad, not a long-term profession
“A lot of people believe that prompt engineering is incredibly crucial. I don't necessarily buy into that. I don't know if you remember, but people, like, thought that, like you know query building for Google would be a profession too, right? And that didn't qu…”
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: Scaling massive AI models compensates for gaps in scientific understanding
“I kind of think that the whole large scale model thing, It's really a gap in our scientific understanding of these models. Instead of looking at the math and coming up with a better loss function, we figured out that we could throw a compute at it, and get us …”
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.”
Open-core business models fail against AWS due to Amazon's manageability advantages
“Open core does not work against Amazon because open core, you're building the core open and then manageability, security, reliability. That's your pro pro Amazon is really good at that shit. Like that's the, they know how to do security. So, so it becomes very…”
Kimball: Customers with zero software issues are actually more likely to churn
“You're actually more likely to churn a customer if they never have a problem with your software. Because they look at it and like, why aren't we just using the open source version of this? There's nothing that's wrong with this. We don't need support. What are…”
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 SQL-based semantic layer is not a real semantic model
“They're moving in, like, the semantic layer tool, so basically they're saying, give us raw data, and we will tell you, like, apply semantics to it. The way that they do that now is through SQL. So, like, semantics are kind of, like, air quote semantics. It's b…”
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.”
Ghodsi: Any proprietary software company is ripe for open-source disruption
“Any proprietary software company out there is ripe for disruption by an open source competitor.”
MongoDB CEO Dev Ittycheria calls Oracle the most hated tech vendor
“Oracle is the most hated vendor in our tech industry. In the tech industry today”
Lowin: Managed hosting for open-source tools is a bad business model
“I think that that is a bad business model. And I sort of, I'm on the record of that. And for a very simple reason, which is that A company that is solving a problem needs to find the correct way to express its knowledge and its solution to that problem.”
Cancel: Traditional CRMs reliant on manual human data entry are insane
“Again, like this idea that we have today of a CRM or centralized place for, to keep all this information is a pretty insane system, right? This idea that humans enter things into one big ledger and they have to enter it in a certain format and all those humans…”
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…”
Horowitz: Hiring through separate diversity initiatives fails at real inclusion
“So if you hire somebody on race and gender through the urban talent department, instead of through the normal talent department, through the fucking side door instead of through the front door, because you can't see the talent, then you're never going to be go…”
Microsoft Azure 'cheats a little bit' when reporting total cloud revenue
“No, and Azure claims they do as well. Yeah, yeah, if you lump everything in, they claim. Right. But, yeah, they cheat a little bit. They do, and how they break out the numbers.”
Elsamadisi: Buying Looker requires hiring five to six BI engineers
“All it ends up doing is you end up having to hire a team of five or six BI engineers to write LookML and maintain these systems for you.”
Elsamadisi: Companies can replace hundreds of database tables with one time-series table
“So, instead of hundreds of fact and dimension tables, you can just have one time series table centered around a customer.”
Anthony: Autonomous driving cannot be solved with sensors and LiDAR alone
“You can't solve it with sensors. You can't solve it with compute power. You can't solve it with, ah, ah, LiDAR. You can't solve it by knowing exactly where everything, everything is.”
Volpi: Younger VCs ignore diversity and fund people who look like them
“Younger VCs will tend to ignore all those issues and just say, how do I get my hands on the best company? I don't care. Like, and generally they tend to fund people that look like them. I think generally more experienced VCs will have a little more open-minded…”
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.”
Domingos: Mandating total model explainability literally makes deep learning illegal
“And at the end of the day, you know, you can't, like the European Union, mandate that every model has to be explainable, right? Because then, if you read that law literally, it makes deep learning illegal, right?”
Neuralink's clinical-first strategy leads to grindingly slow progress, says Thomas Reardon
“Whereas if you go just to the clinical population first, which is sort of where Neuralink is going with their work, it's just grindingly slow progress.”
Marcus challenges Andrew Ng: AI cannot automate every one-second mental task
“I don't think it's true at all, so there are some things that people can do in a second that AI can automate, and there are other things that it can't”
Marcus: Drivers should not trust Tesla Autopilot because AI remains unready
“So you should not be trusting a Tesla. Elon might get on 60 minutes and take his hands off the wheel, but you should not be doing the same because the technology is not really there yet.”
Marcus: Current AI techniques are too brittle to earn public trust
“Most of why I don't think we should trust AI right now is that the current techniques that people are using are simply too brittle to earn the trust that we're giving them.”
Marcus: Deep learning models are giant correlation machines without causal understanding
“These systems are just giant correlation machines. They have no understanding of causation.”
Marcus: Deep learning cannot perform common sense, planning, analogy, or reasoning
“Perception is what deep learning does, and actually it only does a small part of perception. There's lots of parts of perception where we use our knowledge about the world that it doesn't capture. And then there are all these other things like common sense and…”
Marcus: Deep learning is a better ladder but cannot reach the moon
“Deep learning is a better ladder for sure, but a better ladder doesn't necessarily get you to the moon.”
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.”
Open-source software distribution is being superseded by SaaS models
“I almost feel like open source is just being superseded by any software as a service, and what I mean by that is the following. It's like, as soon as you host something as a service, people don't seem to ask so much about open source, right?”
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.”
Kulkarni: The big data era is over and the time series era has begun
“The big data era is over, and in fact, we're now entering the time series era for analyzing the past, understanding the present, and predicting the future.”
Ajay Kulkarni: All data is fundamentally time-series data
“It's actually because we believe that all data is fundamentally time series data.”
Horizontal AI Suites Like Salesforce Einstein Are Just Marketing Fluff
“When we hear marketing terms like Einstein, or Sensei, or pick your other dead male inventor, That, that approach applied to a horizontal set of software problems simply doesn't make sense because the interesting stuff recruiting data or hiring data or our dat…”
Ben Vigoda: Neurons and synapses are the wrong abstraction for AI
“Neurons and synapses is not the right abstraction. Models should be programs, specifically programs that simulate the system that generated the data.”
Ehrenberg: Y Combinator's adversarial founder-investor ethos is 'really shitty'
“It's against, like, the YC ethos. Like, I don't think in many ways that that attitude of it, you know, founder, it's founders versus investors, keep investors at arm's length is really healthy. I actually think that's really shitty. And does founders agree to …”