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
Lin Qiao: The future of AI modeling belongs to open-source models
“The future of the future of modeling sits on open model side. And I believe that side is gonna be much more active in creating those hundreds or maybe thousands of expert models that is specialized delivering much better quality in certain domain.”
Kiela: AI systems will probably never reach 100 percent accuracy
“When are we getting to a hundred percent accuracy? And I had to give them the bad news that probably never.”
Misra: AI video generation will eventually make cameras obsolete for creators
“So once, as AI Creator develops and becomes perfect, you will not use to use the, need to use the camera anymore, right? So you'll just be able to generate all the footage that you want.”
Misra: Captions can build better video models than frontier AI labs
“We are making the unique bet to say that we can actually build a better model than they can because of our unique data sets.”
Gaurav Misra: AI could allow a solo editor to create theatrical movies
“I think for video editors, there's a small chance that it actually becomes the most important profession of them all. It actually is possibly the profession that rules them all because suddenly one video editor sitting in their basement can make A movie that g…”
Murchison: AI agents will soon face zero technical action limitations
“I think we're very soon going to be in a position where there's really no action that a, that, that ADA can't perform on behalf of a customer. And the limiting factor will be whether or not the business wants that action to be automated.”
Unified customer-facing AI will soon outcompete humans in sales and support
“There will just be a single customer-facing AI that most businesses deploy, and that AI will not only serve as well or better than a human, but it will sell as well or better than a human too.”
Murchison: Ada will autonomously ship product updates from customer service inquiries
“I fully expect that in collaboration with some of the code generation agents, for example, Ada will be able to go from customer inquiry To new product being shipped fully autonomously.”
Masad predicts Replit will eventually reach one billion users
“Our vision, again, it's like, I think we're going to be able to get to, at some point, like a billion users.”
Masad: The tech bottleneck will shift from execution to ideas
“My Prediction, ah, is that the bottleneck will become on the idea side of things, which is counterintuitive because the Silicon Valley dogma is like, ideas don't matter, only execution. And maybe in the future, it'll be more like, execution doesn't matter, onl…”
Borgman: Databricks will not control or kill Apache Iceberg
“Iceberg has, you know, is, is bigger than Databricks, honestly. And it will continue to be, I think, the ubiquitous format. You know, so if they had hopes of, like, killing it, I don't think that worked. If they had hopes of controlling it, I don't really thin…”
Rogojan: Apache Iceberg is becoming the de facto open table format standard
“Iceberg as the de facto, like if we're going to use an open, open table format, that's going to be likely the one people will, I assume, pick since everyone's now supporting it, right?”
Rogojan: SQL will remain essential as LLM raw data-dumping approaches fail
“The next one I said SQL isn't going anywhere, and I kind of said that for more than one reason. One, I feel like someone's going to tell us it's time to revamp data lake v one again, where we'll just dump everything in there and we'll let an LLM figure it out …”
Douetteau: AI model quality won't be the key bottleneck in 2-5 years
“I, for instance, don't think that the problem two years or five years from now of agents will be relevance, per se, as in the quality of the models. The problem will be very boring stuff, such as, is it the right data, or have we actually updated the data for …”
Douetteau: Enterprises will always need traditional predictive ML models
“You will still always need as an organization to be able to build those models because there are actual business decisions in them. Like actual risk profile with conscious decision in it.”
Benaich: Humanoid robotics progress will be a long slog like autonomous vehicles
“I feel like it's going to be self-driving. Like the progress so far looks exciting. The demos look good, but we obviously don't see everything that's happening in the background, and I think it's going to be like a long slog.”
OpenAI aims to reach $100B in ARR by 2029
“The company has extraordinary ambitions to be at a hundred billion dollar in ARR in 29”
SaaS will not die, but evolve into wrappers around AI intelligence
“We think that SAS It's not going to be dead. We think that SAS is just going to have to evolve dramatically. And if you think of SAS being largely a wrapper around a database, and you could argue that's what Salesforce is, you know, a lot of, like, workflow an…”
Bernhardsson: LLM inference compute is shifting toward specialized chips like crypto mining
“I do think it's kind of fascinating how it's like kind of going in the same direction as like crypto mining towards more like specialized hardware.”
Bernhardsson: AI inference spend will dominate model training spend long-term
“It's obvious that like in the long run, like inference spend will dominate just for like the obvious reason that like, that's where you make the money, right? Like, you know, when you're training a big model, that's like, you know, you, you're spending a lot o…”
Open data formats like Apache Iceberg will pressure incumbent database margins
“I think that's going to be hard for the incumbents, and I think it's going to be a net benefit to the, you know, kind of the people that are coming in with new with new tools and new ways of doing things, and it's going to put pressure on margins which again i…”
Delangue: Every company and use case will have its own optimized model
“So the same way today, every company, every product has its own code base. Tomorrow every company, every use case is going to have its own model optimized.”
Delangue: There will ultimately be more AI builders than software engineers
“I think ultimately there's going to be more AI builders than software engineers, right?”
Socher: Top AI models have run out of high-quality human text data
“I think a lot of the top models, you can't add multiple orders of magnitude more text to them, because there isn't that much more text around.”
Socher: Open-source models will make value capture harder for foundation model companies
“Once others can go out into the world and an open source, a massive, large language model it's gonna be harder and harder to capture that value.”
Socher: There will never be another severe AI winter
“There will never be an AI winter again, the way we've seen in the past. If at all there will be an AI winter, it'll be like a California type winter.”
Socher: Web traffic from AI agents will surpass humans within years
“I think in the next few years, we're going to see more AI agents surfing the web. Then people surfing the web”
Socher: I bet an OpenAI founder AGI won't happen by 2026
“I actually have a bet with one of the OpenAI founders about whether we'll reach AGI I think we have like two years left for the bet, and I'm pretty sure I'll still win the bet.”
Hitchcock: SurrealDB will be the first database with multi-model time travel
“We will be the first database that enables you to time travel in your data in the different types of models that you can work with in SurrealDB.”
Pomel: Within five years, security will inevitably attach to observability
“We have a thesis that security, like, five years from now will be will be, or rather, let me rephrase it will be a no-brainer that you have to attach your security to your observability, because that is what gets deployed everywhere in your application, in you…”
Pomel: Cybersecurity software will consolidate into large platforms
“We think that it's too complex. Like, it's impossible for the customers to actually understand how to piece that together, and to integrate everything into a consistent whole that really protects them, and so we think that security is going to go through the s…”
Pomel: AI will boost developer productivity by 10x to 100x
“And I think AI on top of that is going to give us maybe another order of magnitude or two in terms of, you know, what a human can produce functionally.”
Future AI models will deliver 100B parameter intelligence at 1B speeds
“I even think there's a future where these models can be a hundred billion parameters, but at, you know, have that intelligence of a hundred billion parameters, but then have the speed, latency, and cost of something that's still one billion or seven billion pa…”
Combining MoE and LoRA will eliminate big versus small model trade-offs
“And I do think that's the future so we can get something that is incredibly smart, incredibly huge, but with the latency cost and speed of something, something tiny. So no more big model versus small model paradigm. It's potentially one in the same.”
Kahn: AI will lower average service prices while raising top-tier premiums
“So I think what will happen is the price of the average value of legal services or of accounting of marketing will go down. But if you can perform above average, I think people are going to put a real premium on that, because that's still going to be a very ra…”
Kahn: Practicing science without AI will be anathema within 10 years
“And I think in within 10 years, the idea that you can be a sort of any science in any science without using AI models to help assist what you're doing will also be anathema.”
Kahn: Open-source AI paired with consumer drones will empower terrorist groups
“The software potentially will be open sourced at some point. It can be matched with drones that can be kind of modified from commercially available. Consumer drones that can be very easily modified. And I think this will be, you know, it could be a huge, you k…”
Kahn: AI targeting in urban warfare will misidentify targets and kill civilians
“And I think when you start putting them in crowded urban environments and ask them to, You know, only kill the bad guys and spare the civilians that we're going to see mistakes being made, you know, where the systems misidentify targets.”
Kahn: Scaling current LLMs will not deliver AGI or superintelligence
“I don't think, and I actually don't, in the book, I don't think just scaling up the current LLMs will get us to, I don't, I'm not even sure they'll get us to AGI, let alone super intelligence.”
Azeem Azhar: 75% of people will use AI daily by 2029
“I think you have to be making quite a bold and, you know, heterodox claim to say that we won't all, by which I mean, 75% of us, be using these things daily in less than seven years from when ChatGPT launched, which was November the 22. And, ah, and that means …”
Azhar: AI cognitive assistants will break existing corporate decision-making frameworks
“When you start to put in people using LLens in the right kind of ways as cognitive assistance, as part of a greater collective intelligence across a company's entire corpus of Codified knowledge. And also you bring people to the, to bear with their uncodified …”
Azeem Azhar: AGI is not two years away
“The reason why Those might not matter is if you really believe you're two years away from AGI and AGI is only two years away from ASI. So none, none of this matters, but I, you know, I personally don't believe that, right? I think we've got, you know, kind of …”
Azhar: Drone swarms will scale to tens of thousands via software
“So we start to see drone swarms of 20. Well, getting to 200 is not going to be that hard because it's now a software. Getting from 200 to 2000 is not going to be that hard. Getting from 2000 to 20,000 and so on.”
Azhar predicts energy prices will steadily decline like transistor costs
“The price of energy is going to come down, and we're going to replace the way we think of energy as Something where the price jumps around based on whatever local dictator is misbehaving to something that follows the price of the transistor, which is it's cons…”
UiPath's specialized models will outperform GPT-4 on enterprise document tasks
“But in the end, we will beat, you know, any performance of GPT-IV or whatever, and they would be extremely reliable.”
Future AI systems will rely on small, dedicated models for routine tasks
“I don't think so, because I think nature is pretty smart. And if you look at how our Brain operates. We have a very good cognitive engine, but we are not using that cognitive engine to do trivial tasks. It's way too expensive. If you want to learn to swim or t…”