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 1,548 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 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
Biewald: PyTorch beat TensorFlow through developer empathy, not eager execution
“I don't think they really, I think people tell this, the story of sort of the silver bullet. Of like you know, the eager execution model. But I think the reality is they just built a product with so much more empathy.”
While the internet made distribution free, AI makes cognition essentially free
“If the web made the cost of distribution essentially free for businesses, what AI is doing now is AI is making the cost of cognition essentially free.”
Riparbelli: AI video is a replacement for text, not video production
“These types of videos Essentially became not a replacement for video production, but a replacement for text.”
Riparbelli: Monetizing AI content is a bigger opportunity than selling tools
“And I think there's lots of other things like this, but I really think that one of the biggest opportunities right now is actually not necessarily selling the tools. It's actually creating the content and monetizing that content. Because the tools are becoming…”
Alex Ratner: Enterprise data is AI's only durable moat
“Enterprise data knowledge is the durable moat in AI, I'd argue the only durable one”
Catanzaro: Second-mover AI startups can benefit from early failures
“I actually disagree with that. I think like we are learning so much literally day by day. I mean, GPT four was released yesterday. And there is possibly, you know, a second mover advantage. There will be lessons that we learn again from kind of seeing this fir…”
Catanzaro: AI startups must reimagine workflows rather than iterate existing tools
“And I think that that is the promise of LLMs and startups. It's not to build better versions of things that exist today, but rather to kind of reimagine some of the tools and systems that we use in an LLM centric way.”
Catanzaro: Most companies do not actually have big data
“Most companies do not in fact have like big data. Perhaps there are a few companies like in genomics or like astrophysics that like actually have, you know, Petabytes of data, but like most data sets are not that big.”
Kimball: Cloud services are cannibalizing the open-source business model
“Open source ate the software world, and now I think cloud services are very much cannibalizing the open source business model.”
Kimball: Mandate to open source is weaker than when Cockroach started
“The mandate to open source is not nearly as strong as it was when we started Cockroach.”
Kimball: Early exploratory sales hires usually must be replaced to scale
“As soon as that person starts to figure out what that motion looks like, you're probably going to need to replace them, because the person that can figure that out is not usually the person that can Mentor other salespeople and start to scale an organization a…”
Kimball: Buyers fear cloud vendor lock-in more than database vendor lock-in
“What they're worried about is the vendor lock-in from the hyperscale cloud vendors. They're very worried about that. So the right way to assuage their concerns isn't so much to convince them that they're not going to be locked into your system. It's to convinc…”
Dehghani: Centralized data architecture creates systems fragile to macro-level change
“Centralization of the data, centralization of the organization, functional division between the data and non-data, those are the things that have led to kind of a system that is fragile to scale and change at the macro level, not at the bits and bytes level, r…”
Ghodsi: Founders cannot pick their sales channel; product-market fit dictates it
“You don't get to pick your channel. You can, you don't get to say, oh, I want my ASP to be 50 K or 60. That's not your choice. You have a product. You have a market. If it has fit, you have to find the right channel to connect those two.”
Ghodsi: Creating open-source software gives cloud hosts a competitive advantage
“We're going to host open source software in the cloud, but the difference is we'll create open source software. That way we get competitive advantage with respect to anyone else who would want to do the same thing, right? Otherwise anyone can pick up any open …”
Ghodsi: Enterprise demand starves new innovation unless R&D teams are separated
“So you actually, or chart wise should separate those out because otherwise what happens when you're successful is that the former gets all of the resources because the big enterprises have infinite demand for your for the things that you're doing.”
Managed cloud services are the optimal open-source monetization strategy
“The best way to monetize open source is open source as a service.”
Huyen: Legacy systems prevent US companies from matching Chinese online learning
“So a lot of American, American internet companies are like a lot older than the average, like the new, like Chinese internet company. So it means it's like American internet companies have legacy systems that you from like, 20 years ago. And just have to build…”
Podjarny: Developer-first security requires building a developer tooling company
“To achieve that, you need to build a developer tooling company, not a security company.”
Podjarny: Security products require broad stack coverage to deliver real value
“A security person needs breadth. They need, if you solve the security threat, but you only solve it for 50% of my apps, you're not very helpful security. I'm going to need to buy another tool or find another solution for the other 50% because I need to cover a…”
Podjarny: Containers are the evolution of the app, not the VM
“The industry has been seeing containers as the evolution of the VM. And they've been trying to retrofit VM patching practices onto containers while we saw containers as the evolution of the app.”
Commercial entities are necessary to scale and sustain open-source projects
“It became clear to me and to many people that that to have more of a commercial engine behind Arrow and the Arrow ecosystem was important for enabling the ecosystem to continue to grow for us to be able to pour a lot more resources into the open source project…”
Cancel: COVID-19 accelerated digital transformation in Drift's market by 10 years
“We believe that we've seen a 10 year acceleration in digital transformation in our market easily.”
Fraser: Fivetran succeeded by guaranteeing data accuracy instead of selling toolkits
“And the really critical thing we did that laid the foundation for our eventual success was that we said that it was our responsibility to make the data match. Which is actually unusual in the field of data integration. Most data integration tools, they see the…”
Fraser: Hypergrowth forces quicker venture rounds regardless of capital efficiency
“No matter how capital efficient you are, you end up the faster you grow, the sooner you need to raise again, unless you want to just sit there and have, you know, one month's payroll in the bank account, which I don't think you want to when you have a lot of e…”
Big tech partnerships will not solve a startup's go-to-market problems
“Some entrepreneurs look at this as a big tech partnership as this silver bullet that's going to solve their go-to-market problem. That's not going to happen, right? It's going to be a very long journey and going to take a long time, require a lot of, you know,…”
Pesenti: General intelligence does not exist, as human intelligence is domain-specific
“Human intelligence is no, it's not general. It's actually very, very specific to our world. It's very biased. It's really customized to survival human in, on our planet. So the concept of general intelligence, I mean, yes, humans tend to have a more general in…”
Horowitz: Founders who lie in pitches also lie to employees
“If you have a founder who's, like, say, telling you, like, some pretty aggressive, not true things in the pitch, then, you know, that's gonna be a tricky founder to work for, because it's very rare to have a person who, you know, lies only to investors and not…”
Pomel: Leading with AI in IT monitoring will inevitably disappoint
“It's very hard for what we do to lead with, you know, AI because you, you're bound to disappoint, because the generic case is very, very hard to solve”
Pomel: Customers say they want false positives but hate noisy software
“When you ask, when we first visited customers to figure out what they wanted from our product. When you ask them to pick between a false positive and a false negative they'll say, oh, give me the false positive, I'll decide if it's right, but I want to know. I…”
Delangue: AI is ending human exclusivity over natural language processing
“We're really moving from a world where only humans could do natural language, which is why you have search large customer support, sales, community, communication departments in companies.”
Delangue: Collective open source can outperform tech giants like Google and Facebook
“We believe that actually if all the other companies than Facebook, Google, Apple, Amazon are actually all contributing to the same open source technology, they can actually end up with something way better than each one of these guys could build.”
Sam Anthony: Physics-only autonomous vehicles struggle to predict human intent
“So that sort of obvious inference is something that we as humans do effortlessly, and that if you just have a box, if you have an autonomous vehicle that's just, you know, rendering everything as moving physics objects in the world, Is difficult verging on imp…”
Walle: Location data is not mature enough to predict corporate quarterly earnings
“So to put it this way, we, I don't think we are ready yet or anyone are ready yet to sell to hedge, hedge funds that want to use this data to predict quarterly earnings for stock listed companies. But if you want to understand retail analytics and real estate,…”
Volpi: Open source communities replace product management, not engineering
“So the community is still very important, but it's gone from basically substituting for your engineering org to substituting for your product management organization.”
Wang: Data science is an analytical literacy rather than a job role
“Data science is not actually a job or a role. It's a literacy”
Wang: Graphical BI tools degenerate into useless complexity compared to code
“Point-and-click graphical tools are really very impoverished when it comes to expressing the full plethora of opportunities and possibilities. And what we, in fact, see is a lot of the graphical tools for, you know, advanced BI++ kinds of tools, they ultimatel…”
Wang: Individual data privacy depends entirely on societal herd immunity
“Data privacy and anonymity and the, kind of, the idea that we can live private lives, that is contingent, it's kind of a herd immunity, right? So even if you turn off all your tracking stuff and you're a super, like, crypto nerd about all this stuff, if everyo…”
Wang: Businesses cannot simply purchase off-the-shelf ethical AI
“You cannot buy off the shelf ethical AI. You can buy effective AI, but if you're not doing ethical things as a business, you're not going to have ethical AI.”
Domingos: The hardest problem in AI is learning representation
“The hardest problem in AI is coming up with a representation. Once you've done that, the rest follows, and when you don't do that, you don't really get very far”
Domingos: AI is an amazing tool for authoritarianism
“AI can be a great tool for democracy. It is also unfortunately an amazing tool for authoritarianism.”
Domingos: Dumb AI is vastly more dangerous than smart AI
“The real danger of AI is not that computers will get too smart and take over the world. The real danger is that computers are too stupid, and they've already taken over the world, right? Computers are making decisions about us the whole time, and they're dumb,…”
Marcus: Deep learning requires vast data, quick tasks, and stable domains
“If a typical person can do a mental task with less than one second of thought, and we can gather an enormous amount of data, of directly relevant data, we have a fighting chance. So long as the test data aren't too terribly different from the training data, an…”
Marcus: Deep learning models lack understanding of spatial relationships and silhouettes
“Deep learning doesn't even really fully understand the relations between parts and wholes. It certainly doesn't understand what a silhouette is, and it gets it wrong.”
Marcus: Deep learning systems cannot perform compositionality or combine separate ideas
“Deep learning can't do what we call compositionality. It can't put ideas together.”
Marcus: General AI requires hybrid models because cognition has distinct components
“There are a lot of different components to cognition, and so we have to have a hybrid model. There's just no way that one system is going to do all of these different things”
Stancil: Companies should hire social science graduates for data analytics roles
“If you want to find these folks, there's a really good place to look which is hiring social scientists. So social scientists are trained to think this way. They are analytical thinkers without some of the technical and quantitative background that a lot of STE…”
Technical founders' biggest mistake is assuming products have intrinsic value
“I think this is probably the number one error technical founders make, and it's the following, right? So, alright, so I'm in my lab, and I make my cool thing, my cool widget, whatever it is, and then the big logical fallacy we all make is that whatever, that w…”