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
Douglas predicts DeepMind will lead the world in AI science discoveries
“DeepMind, if you wanted to solve science, is the best place in the world. Like, I think that DeepMind will directly contribute to more scientific discoveries from AI than anything else, right?”
Douglas: AI application development will see another massive leap next year
“Over the next six months, over the next year, expect dramatic progress here. And like look at where we are now versus where we were a year ago. And the difference is I expect the same jump basically.”
Douglas: AI beating GDP benchmarks won't immediately alter the broader economy
“We'll probably reach like better than human on the GDP eval, and it won't change anything economically because It'll be all the connective tissue, and all the, like, you know, the context, and actually, like, the task won't be representative.”
Douglas: Individuals will manage 24/7 AI agent teams within two years
“If coding agents progress in the way I've been saying, in a year or two, you'll be able to manage a team, basically, that works 24 seven for you doing work.”
Crespo: Microsoft Excel will still be actively used in ten years
“I have a prediction that Excel will still be here in five years. And there is a good reason. You can keep that. In five years, Excel will still be there. And in 10 years, Excel will still be there.”
Valenzuela: Unified AI models will render specialized video task models completely obsolete
“Our thesis has always been that, like, you don't, that's not gonna matter. Like, it's just, none of those things will matter the moment you have a model that can learn how to do all of those things at once.”
Valenzuela: Full-stack AI companies will eventually reach 80% to 90% SaaS margins
“I think eventually you'll get to, like, best in SAS margins, like, as 80, 90% over time.”
Cherny: AI models won't need rigid sub-agent roles in 6-12 months
“But I think that the models six or 12 months from now, they probably won't need this anymore because they're all going to be pretty good and you won't have to define very rigidly what each one's responsibilities are anymore.”
Boris Cherny: Programming will shift from text manipulation to working with agents
“I think one way it will definitely play out is it's going to change programming where programming is no longer direct text manipulation, but it's more working with agents to get the work done.”
Laskin: AI models will interact with enterprise software primarily via APIs
“And so the way these language models are going to interact with any piece of software, not just Software engineering software, like Salesforce and other CRMs and creative tools and so forth. The majority of those interactions are going to be through function c…”
Laskin: Advanced AI without comprehension are 'L9 engineers with amnesia'
“What we're going to get to if we don't solve the comprehension piece is basically L-nine engineers with amnesia.”
Laskin: Principal-level AI engineers are a couple of years away
“And that the combination of this you know, L-Nine with Amnesia and the L-Nine's context core will together, you know, that will become the principal level engineer, the AI engineer. And so I actually think that that's not too far away. That's I would say in, y…”
Laskin: Reflection AI will ship research requiring 100k GPU equivalence in 2025
“Later this year we'll be shipping things that I don't think anyone ever thought a startup could do. Like, I think that we're going to be shipping some things on the research side that I think everyone thinks you need to be a giant lab with a 100,000 GPUs to do…”
Merchant APIs will require canonical intent endpoints for autonomous AI agents
“And so every merchant API is probably going to need one canonical kind of intent endpoint that accepts those structured desires instead of sort of this UI click world that we live in today.”
Merchants must expose machine-readable product schemas to sell through AI agents
“And so I think early adopters who want to sell through agentic channels are going to need to expose kind of an open product schema, like the SKU and the inventory and the price and the constraints and, you know, maybe even the wedge that you're willing to give…”
AI agents will shrink e-commerce latency budgets to a few hundred milliseconds
“I think latency budgets are gonna shrink to machine time. We talked about latency budgets in the context of the charge path, but, like, you know, people will wait three seconds for a spinner. I think an agent's just gonna retry somewhere else after a couple hu…”
Model Context Protocol is becoming the default standard for LLM integration
“I mean, it's pretty clear that MCP is becoming the default way that any single service Stripe or GitHub or Notion talks to an LLM.”
AI software pricing will shift to outcome-based models within five years
“I think it's where actually like the market equilibrium, like where clearing will actually happen, you know, two, three, five years from now is experimenting with new pricing models, like outcome based pricing and actually increasingly using outcome based pric…”
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 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: Manual code writing will become increasingly irrelevant over time
“Writing the code is going to become less and less relevant over the years”
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: 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: 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: 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.”
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…”
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 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…”
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…”
Palmer: Data stack tools will consolidate into fewer categories in 3 years
“I think if you were to fast forward three years from now, you'll see all these categories, many of these categories rolling into smaller numbers of categories.”
Arvind Jain: Large enterprises will deploy thousands of vertical AI agents
“Now on top of that, you will have agents which will proliferate and they're going to be they're going to be like thousands of these agents inside, inside a large enterprise and they are all functional and they are, you know, vertical in nature.”
Levie: US trade friction will allow international entrepreneurs to outcompete US businesses
“If you're an international entrepreneur right now and you're watching this, you're like, I can now finally outcompete the U S because they've just going to create friction for their own businesses.”
Levie: Solving enterprise AI search and governance will take years
“So, so this is the part that will take years to fully figure out and get right.”
Levie: All enterprise software will interoperate via AI agents within two years
“I think we could easily be two years from now where you just feel totally comfortable that like all the software you use can talk to all the other software in an agentic way.”
Levie: Software companies will not get an AI price premium
“You will grow faster because you're entering new markets, but you won't grow faster because there's some kind of like magical AI premium on your software. And those are two things to kind of decouple, which is like the price that you can charge because you hav…”
Ramaswamy: Consumers will use AI interfaces for auto insurance in 3-5 years
“In five years, in three years, if you and I want auto insurance, we are going to go to some conversational interface.”
Ramaswamy: Google Gemini won't become a hit unless 10x better than ChatGPT
“They can't make Gemini into a consumer hit unless it's 10 times better than ChatGPT, and that's a really tall order.”
Ramaswamy: Snowflake will gain more revenue from Iceberg than lose in storage
“I expect us, me and the team, To drive way more revenue in new things we can do with Iceberg, then we are going to lose, potentially, by some of our storage revenue going out to cloud storage”
Chollet: Commercial AI models will increasingly adopt test-time search architectures
“Increasingly, you're gonna see commercial models that use test-time search, where instead of just trying to generate one single COT to adapt to the task, they're actually gonna run through this, you know, search.”
Chollet: NDEA will solve problems previously unsolved by humans in verifiable domains
“The kind of technology we're building on, it's differential advantage that it's going to be capable of solving problems that have never been solved by humans before. That's, you know, that's a very different deal than LLMs, for instance, but effectively only i…”
Lin Qiao predicts a 10x AI cost reduction yields 100x more applications
“If this bar can be lowered by 10 times, you can imagine there's so many more, it will be hundred times more applications enter the, this arena to create a brand new experience to end consumers and prosumers. And by that, we'll see a much bigger consumption acr…”