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
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?”
'Product market fit' is an overused tautology
“Product market fit. Which, I mean, if I hear that again, that's where, big data, whatever big data went to, or Synergy I mean, it's such a tautology, you know, it's like, yeah, ok, people want what you've built a product that people want to buy, it's so insigh…”
Marcus: Siri's technology is not fundamentally different from ELIZA
“But the technology for Siri is not really that different from the technology for ELISA, and Siri is still very far from artificial general intelligence.”
Marcus: Deep learning alone won't solve common-sense AI without symbolic systems
“Deep learning doesn't seem to be getting us there. The old systems, in some ways, we're better at that. We do need a marriage between the two.”
Srivas: Cloudera and Hortonworks are disingenuous about their open source control
“I think that's a bit disingenuous on Hortonworks and Cloudrass part to say that Because they would like to, so the, here's the dirty little truth about open source software, open source vendors, right? I love open source as long as it's my open source and not …”
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.”
Groschupf: Aspiring students should rethink choosing data science as a career
“So if you have to make a career choice to study data science today, I would rethink that. And I'm serious.”
Falkowitz: Training employees to spot phishing attacks does not work
“So I'm gonna train all of you to spot phishing. That's not gonna work, right”
LeCun: Simulating biological brain neurons to achieve AI is 'completely nuts'
“There are people out there in Europe that, that have argued for the fact to kind of study neurons and neurons and neural networks natural neural networks in all the details, and then build giant supercomputers to simulate this very accurately, and somehow they…”
LeCun: Building chips for spiking neural networks is misguided
“The problem is, from the engineering point of view, nobody has actually demonstrated that spiking neurons actually work. Like there is no image recognition systems that are based on spiking neural networks. Why build chips for something we don't know works? So…”
Sumo Logic is 'taking down Splunk hard'
“So, you know, we have one competitor out there. I'll name them. They're called Splunk. So if you're familiar with Splunk, we're taking them down, and we're taking them down hard, and they know it.”
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.”
Perlich: Industry bonuses encourage advertising professionals to ignore ad fraud
“I mean, there are so many people who are much better off looking the wrong way when it comes to fraud. Everybody's bonus just basically hinges on getting the wrong metrics a little bit up.”
O'Neil: Data science is a war of moneyed interests against vulnerable people
“I think of data science as And the general modelization of everything in sight, including education, including getting a job insurance, health, it's a war. And we're losing. Like we are, this is a war of the people who have money and can go hire data scientist…”
Ping Li: Incumbent enterprise tech vendors haven't innovated in a decade
“It's such a great time to be a startup right now because the incumbents are so far behind. They have not innovated, ah, in the last decade. And any of the big data dimensions are the applications, storage, the data layers.”
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: AI hallucinations can be helpful when exploring novel proteins
“But I do think hallucinations can be also very helpful for AI when you want it to explore novel kinds of proteins.”
Socher: Physical constraints will prevent an AI hard takeoff
“And as bullish and excited as I am about AI, I'm not a believer in this crazy hard takeoff. I think, yes, things will accelerate, but there are certain things that will just require time because of physics and constraints in the real world, such as like long-t…”
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: Chinese open source companies distilled knowledge from OpenAI and Anthropic models
“The few large closed labs, Anthropic and OpenAI, took almost everything they could from the open internet trained a model, but then the Chinese open source companies basically siphoned a lot of that knowledge out of those closed source models by distilling it.”
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.”
Socher: Recursive's early Eureka system outperforms months of human endeavor
“Our system, the sort of first instantiation of this Eureka machine and a very narrow domain can already outperform months and sometimes years of human endeavor on particular problems.”
Superintelligence will leave human labor with very little economic value
“Human labor would have very little value left.”
AI infrastructure control makes political coups far easier to execute
“If you end up in a system where basically AI's are running anything, if anyone sort of either puts like sort of secret objectives into that AI or has overt control of those AI's, then they could sort of just directly take over.”
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, …”
Claude 3 Opus faked alignment during training and defected in deployment
“It turns out that Opus three, which was a model that I was studying, had a relatively strong propensity to do this in a reasonably wide range of circumstances where if it didn't like the thing that you were training it to be, it would sometimes sort of pretend…”
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: Government pressure to cloister AI models internally is counterproductive
“I think that a bunch of likely government action at least seems to push in favor of AI companies keeping their models internal and not deploying them, which I think for the risks that I'm most worried about doesn't help and in fact is anti-helpful”
Greenblatt: Internal AI deployment within labs and government carries major risk
“There's a lot of risk from just internal deployment, especially if you're deploying within AI companies and government, right, which are two of the most high stakes Applications”
Greenblatt: AI companies remain vulnerable to internal and external model sabotage
“AI companies are not robust to employees at those AI companies or to outside actors in terms of stealing their model, sabotaging their models, or like back-drawing their models, or like data poisoning them.”
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.”
Wolf: OpenAI Admitted Model Evaluation Caused Hugging Face Cyber Incident
“And then about a week later, OpenAI contacted us and tell us that this was much likely something that happened as part of one of their model development or evaluation, basically.”
Wolf: Claude Opus Refused to Assist Hugging Face During Incident
“And in this case is, it's not only that Fable told us I'm not allowed to touch cybersecurity, but also Opus, which was the fallback was saying, no, I'm also not touching these things. So basically the end was just say we won't process anything about that, but …”
Wolf: Advanced AI Models Can Increasingly Escape Basic AI Sandboxes
“Sandbox is what we've seen this year, and we've seen many examples. They are pretty much easy now for these models to escape from. It's really hard nowadays to say, I'm gonna make a fully, you know, foolproof sandbox. I'm sure it's gonna be resistance against …”
Wolf: Bostrom's Paperclip Maximizer Scenario Describes Real AI Incidents
“But definitely it seems like when Ballstrom worked about it in 2003, it seems a little bit like, you know, futuristic, definitely, and maybe something that was like a little bit crazy and just would not happen. But today, I mean, it's pretty clearly something …”
Wolf: Post-Training Mitigates Backdoor Risks in Open-Source AI Models
“Right now, if you pre-train and post-train a model for longer, you very likely change quite a lot of the weights and that it has. So I think there's a lot of way to circumvent that which means that at the moment I'm a bit less worried about that than maybe jus…”
Wolf: Life Science Startups Must Abandon Guardrailed Closed AI Models
“Because of the guardrails and because of the question around biohacking and using this model to generate like the access right now for people just to take it is very, very limited once you want to ask some biology question. And so basically most of the life sc…”
Trojanowski: AI coding agents remain worse than junior engineers over two-week projects
“Even now with coding, like, the agents are not yet they're not human level at being coherent over long periods of time. That's obvious because they can't code like a junior engineer on a project for two weeks. So they can't, they're, that's worse than a human …”
Trojanowski: Enterprise agents need process reliability, not 'Move 37' breakthroughs
“And so the thing that you know, someone is buying from us is not, this will be the best ever tax return. They're buying that, you know, the confidence... They're buying that it's going to be consistent and reliable and something that they can trust that actual…”
Trojanowski: 10-Hour Agent Runs Are Not Black Boxes
“Not thinking that an agent operating over 10 hours is a black box. It's not. It has a lot of data, and you're probably doing a disservice to your customers if you don't understand, like, how it's going about the work.”
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: English prompt context matters more than code quality in agents
“A lot of engineers, they treat the code as more precious than the English, when actually the English is more precious because the English affects the performance.
The code does not affect the performance, right?
If the logic, assuming the logic's the same, it …”
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…”