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 31 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 2 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
Azhar: Studies lack adequate causal evidence that social media harms public discourse
“There's more evidence from the digital humanities, the digital social scientists to say that we don't have adequate causal evidence That social media has actually come in and soils the public sphere with quite the degree that we thought it did four or five yea…”
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…”
Azhar: Companies ignoring AI and automation shed jobs, while adopters grow
“That the data seems to show is that companies who invest in robotics, automation, AI grow. But it's companies that don't that shed the job.”
Azhar: AI and robotics will make cities food self-sustaining
“High intensity urban farming, which is fundamentally a game of data, genomics robotics and AI will for the first time since we actually had cities in from 9000 BC, allow cities to be self-sustaining in their food”
Azhar: Mobile data growth should reach 90,000-fold over the next 20 years
“Over the next 20 years, which is two lots of 10 years, we should, if it was, if it grew at the rate it grew over the last decade, it would grow 90,000 times, 300 squared. So if you think it's going to be less than a 90,000 fold growth, you have to have quite a…”
Azhar: Corporate boards are more engaged on AI than ever before
“Having spoken to companies for many, many years is I can't remember a time where the boards and the sea level was as switched on and had as many projects in the pipeline from the technology as what I'm seeing now.”
AI optimism is 70% in China and India, 30% in US/UK
“Where 70% of people in China and India are optimistic. Only 30% optimistic about these topics in the UK and the US. They actually explicitly want to have less AI.”
Azhar: Consumers won't be able to opt out of AI
“I suspect that that people won't really have a choice because their interface with the world is effectively largely mediated by private companies. So if you have an iPhone and you'll have an AI, if you me using salesforce.com for your CRM, It will have AI func…”
Azeem Azhar: US will maintain and accelerate its AI lead
“So, so I think the U S will, I could be persuaded otherwise, but we'll, we'll maintain a lead and the lead ought to ought to accelerate.”
Azhar: Mistral matched GPT-4 quality far more computationally efficiently than US firms
“Mistral, which is this Parisian company has been doing some, you know, remarkable things, had done a couple, two things that I thought were really interesting. One was that they were able to get close to GPT-IV quality much more computationally efficiently tha…”
Azhar: Iranian drones costing $20,000 require $1M missile interceptors to destroy
“A 20,000 dollar Iranian drone having to be shot down by a million dollar missile intercept.”
Azhar: US Ticonderoga cruisers hold 90 missiles and take 3 weeks to re-arm
“A U.S. Ticonderoga class air defense cruiser has 90 missiles on board. So shoot down 90 drones, and then it has to go to a major US port to be re-armed, which will take three weeks while it's there.”
Azhar: Meta is the weakest of the major big tech companies
“And what's true for Facebook, which is the weakest of the big tech companies is As true for Apple and Google and everyone else.”
Azhar: US antitrust law fails by focusing solely on consumer prices
“And that is where the antitrust law has fallen afoul, certainly in the U S because it was focused fundamentally on cost to consumer, but we know that there are costs that are embedded elsewhere in the system.”
Azhar: Exponential compounding cost drops extend far beyond silicon chips
“We saw those patterns in, in other areas. You saw it in, in terms of the amount of bandwidth that you could put over an optical fiber, you saw it in terms of storage densities, and we saw it in areas like genome sequencing and in areas like lithium-ion battery…”
Azhar: Giving AI software personality helps users get work done
“Having something that has a little bit of a personality absolutely helps you get your work done.”
Azhar: AI cannot be understood through corporate PowerPoint presentations
“This is not a technology that you can learn through PowerPoint that your juniors have presented to you, and you tick off. This is like the internet in 93 or 94, which unless you actually used it and started to grok what it meant, You would not be able to expla…”
Azhar: AI adoption will lead traditional companies to operate like Amazon
“I suspect companies start to look a lot more like, or they'll behave more like Amazon does or more like, you know, Facebook when it was Facebook rather than Meta, which is that there's just lots of experimentation on the edges.”
Azhar: 80% of regional maritime traffic is rerouting around the Horn of Africa
“80% of ships that go through that region are now going around the Horn of Africa.”
Azhar: Over 90% of new US electricity capacity added was renewables
“The vast bulk, more than 90% of all the new electricity generation was brought on power in the US was renewables.”
Azhar: Four new tech platforms will supplant 20th-century technology foundations
“And the contention that I have today is that we are at a point and just past a cusp where there are new general purpose technology platforms that are going to supplant the ones that define the 20th century. And those are the broad technology platforms of compu…”
Azhar: Exponential technology platforms improve 10% to 50% annually on price-performance
“And by improving, I mean, on a price performance basis, they get better by 10, 20, 40, 50% per annum compounding.”
Azhar: COVID-19 was most people's first exposure to non-tech exponential growth
“COVID and its moments of exponential growth at the different waves was the first time that many people would have seen this outside of technology, and there aren't processes like that that we see.”
Azhar: Human evolution selected against the ability to comprehend exponential growth
“There are lots of reasons why, from an evolutionary perspective, exponential understanding would have been selected out.”
Azhar: Tech pace has outpaced institutional adaptation over past 10-15 years
“It's really just been in the last 10 or 15 years where that pace, the difference in that pace, has been so rapid that the gap becomes more and more present.”