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 55 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
Eiso Kant: AI intelligence is going to become a commodity
“I would actually go as far as saying that intelligence is going to become a commodity.”
Kant: Foundation model labs lacking physical infrastructure are 'cosplaying' their business
“If you're a foundation model company, and you're not building physical infrastructure, you're cosplaying your business.”
Eiso Kant: Expert-created rubrics and environments will not scale to AGI
“But the singularly collecting of skills This way by creating environments and experts we don't think will scale to artificial general intelligence.”
Kant: Most vertical software and agents will disappear when AGI arrives
“A whole bunch of vertical software or vertical agents are probably gone.”
Eiso Kant: AI will recycle world data into synthetic data within years
“And so this is kind of our view and our, if you extend this a couple of years out, and this is where some people will probably have objection with us. We think that this will go so far. That we will kind of recycle all of the world's real data into higher qual…”
Kant: Next-token pre-training gains hit a sigmoidal curve and slowed down
“The first paradigm of kind of pre-training of predicting the next token on the web was becoming sigmoidal and was slowing down in terms of the gains that it had.”
Kant: If AI intelligence commoditizes, only scale and delivery cost matter
“And within this world, if you think that intelligence is going to become less distinguishable between the companies building it, And becomes a commodity probably more like oil or cloud compute than like bread at the bakery, is there's two things that matter, y…”
Kant: AI is on track to rewrite $29T of global knowledge work
“I don't think anyone has any doubts anymore that we're now on track to reach human level capabilities and intelligence. And in that world, 29 trillion dollars of knowledge work rewrites itself, right?”
Kant: AI foundation model gross margins will settle near 40%
“I'm not yet convinced that gross margins in our industry will look like a SaaS company, like 80% plus. I think when we're talking about a commodity as intelligence, that we build value added services on top. Right. It's a foundation model company. On one hand,…”
Kant: Full-stack AI infrastructure ownership cuts token costs 20-40%
“So when you take all those margins out, all of a sudden you can start seeing that you can serve your tokens, 2030, 40% cheaper than someone else.”
Kant: Internet data lacks the thought processes needed for AGI
“But the reason that never got us to AGI is because, well, the internet never actually included the data set of the thoughts and actions that created it. It's the final piece of code, it's the final article you write, but not the thoughts that you had and actio…”
Kant: RL2L will enable model reasoning much earlier in training
“We think we'll push models to a level of reasoning and thought That will happen far earlier in their training than it does today.”
Kant: AI training will evolve into continuous learning from real-world agent experiences
“And then the fourth stage of training over time increasingly will become learning, continuous learning from real world experiences of these agents. And so those are kind of the four stages that we think training will go to.”
Kant: External software and agent frameworks will collapse into base models
“But we have a phrase at poolside, which is over time, everything collapses into the models.”
Kant: AI models will equal top human knowledge workers within 36 months
“I think we have a hard time holding the point of view that models will reach the same level of intelligence and capabilities that the world's most capable people in every field have. And when you take a step back, and don't take the next 12 month view, but jus…”
Kant: Neural networks will learn human-level capabilities in our lifetime
“That it's very like that in our lifetime, neural networks will become capable of learning anything and everything that we are capable of as humans.”
Kant: Most developers will adopt AI pair programmers within two years
“Well, the first thing that I think is at this point, almost uncontested, but frankly, when I was building source, most people didn't think would happen is the fact that the majority, if not all developers in the next couple of years in the world will adopt som…”
Kant: Non-engineers will build software via AI prompts within three years
“We don't think we're more than three years out to that point where a non-engineer, someone with no coding, you know, software development background is able to come and give one of those high level vague things of what they want built, right? Cause that's what…”
Kant: Programmatic RL can scale magnitudes larger than human feedback
“And it's that RL loop that is very interesting because since it's programmatic, since we have an Oracle of truth, we can scale this up far larger, right? Magnitudes larger than what you can do with human feedback today.”
Poolside built custom distributed LLM training framework from scratch
“We didn't take Megatron or DeepSpeed or kind of the big open source frameworks for training large language models. As our base, we built our own from scratch and we built our own distributed training for our pre-training stage.”
Kant: Poolside is training world's largest models using reversible layers
“We've decided to scale up rev nets, reversible layers. So, so to the best of our knowledge, I think we're training the world's largest models using reversible layers that, that we've seen at least that nothing else that we're aware of publicly.”
Poolside found top AI talent split 50/50 between North America and Europe
“We went through about 3200 or 3200 people that we ended up putting on the list. And we had this location column, like think genuinely Google spreadsheet, you know, like where's someone based. And at some point we looked at all these locations and we're like, w…”
Kant: AI labs build general reasoning faster by focusing on single proxies
“To get to highly capable intelligence that can reason, that can do planning, that can understand the world. You're almost better off putting a set of blinders and focusing on, on one proxy for that.”
Kant: Frontier AI won't be winner-take-all, but limited to few labs
“I don't think it's a winner takes all market, but it does seem to be that it's a small number of companies who are able to get there.”
Kant: Poolside's Project Horizon is an expandable two-gigawatt data center campus
“So Project Horizon, in a nutshell, is today announced a two gigawatt campus. We can actually go far beyond two gigawatts on the site that we're in.”
Kant: Poolside starting construction on 250MW natural gas data center in 2025
“And so what you're seeing from us is that before the end of this year, we're starting construction on a 250 megawatt data center. It's natural gas powered with grid connection as a backup, and it will house an incredible amount of compute, but it will be the f…”
Kant: A 250MW AI data center costs roughly $8 billion to build
“To energize, 250 megawatts is about half a billion dollars worth of physical infrastructure. So in the case of gas turbines, it's gas turbines, but there's different paths to it. Building a data center, like the powered shell that brings together all of the eq…”
Kant: Founders entering new domains should interview 100+ candidates per role
“And what I found to be one of the best advice I got a very long time ago, whenever you find yourself in that situation, well, this is when you want to start finding the experts to join you, but how do you find the experts? Because you yourself aren't. And here…”
Kant: Poolside is building a 250MW data center with under 450 workers
“When we're building 250 megawatts, We're doing it with a less than 450 person on site workforce with very skilled tradesmen and construction workers that we're bringing over there and we're housing over there versus a world where you might need traditionally 2…”
Kant: Poolside first compute online late 2025, 250MW by Q1 2027
“So at the beginning of Q four, end of Q three, so next year, we've got the first compute coming online. And then we're finalizing in Q one, 20, 27, the first you know, 250 megawatts, but already next summer, the next 250 megawatts starts construction. It's a s…”
Eiso Kant: Renewable-only data centers with battery storage are not economically viable yet
“Renewables only, in combination with the battery capacity that you would need to power a data center if you want renewable only, it's just not economically viable yet.”
Kant: AI models and AI agents are effectively the same thing
“Models and agents to me are effectively the same thing.”
Kant: Linearly adding GPUs to train larger AI models causes exponential training delays
“It is not that I can linearly add more GPUs and train increasingly a more larger model. If I do so, the time it takes becomes exponentially longer.”
Kant: Poolside's Malibu agent matches initial Gemini 2.5 Pro SWE-bench scores
“But if you think about the Malibu agent as a coding agent, for instance, right now, it sits at a level of like sweet bench verified, for instance, where Gemini two and a half pro was when it came out.”
Kant: Executable source code allows automated AI model feedback
“Source code is one of the very few things that we generate with neural networks. That we can actually execute an introspect. It doesn't require human feedback to evaluate it. It doesn't require humans to step by step reason through it. We have built compilers,…”
Kant: Model capabilities determine 80-90% of AI product value
“The capabilities of these products are determined today by the capabilities of the models underneath, right? About 80, 90%.”
Poolside will launch a direct competitor to GitHub Copilot X in 2024
“But in terms of what we're delivering to the end user, we're starting with a direct competitor to get up Copilot X. And so natural language, multi-turn dialogue system. Where developers give instructions of what they want done while they're in their editor. Th…”
Kant: The three critical AI stack layers are energy, compute, and intelligence
“There's three layers of the stack that fundamentally are going to matter. It's energy, it's compute, and it's the intelligence built on top.”
Kant: CoreWeave is the anchor tenant for Poolside's new data center
“They are the anchor tenant on our data center.”
Kant: Large-scale data center construction is concentrated among very few players
“What was particularly interesting to learn about the infrastructure space over time is that it's an incredibly small world. Everybody knows each other. It makes tech feel like a big world, right? The construction of data centers at scale has really only been d…”
Kant: Expert RL will lift enterprise agent quality to 90% in years
“And I think what we'll see in the next couple of years is a lot of model companies ourselves as well. We go into these enterprises. We find high value use cases. We use our agents to get to 60 or 70% You know, of quality, and then use additional reinforcement …”
Kant: Foundation models currently cannot perform single-sample learning
“Foundation models today can't do it, and we don't yet have a path In them successfully doing so in a way that, like, really improves it.”
Kant: Poolside aims to power all knowledge work globally
“And so we're starting to open up much more broader outside of software development and come back to what we've always said, like we want to be able to power all of knowledge work in the world.”
Kant details Poolside's Laguna model training timeline and 41,000 GB300 cluster
“That's our upcoming family of models, Laguna, where we'll have a small, a medium, and a large. So small is finishing training in a couple of weeks, medium actually starts training this week and large starts training as our 41,000 GB 300 come online.”
Kant: Poolside operates inside defense SCIFs and air-gapped servers
“So we today operate on workstations that go into SCIFs. We operate on servers that are, you know, on-prem or even as far as air-gapped.”
Kant: 95% of Poolside's researchers sit outside Silicon Valley
“And still today, if we look at where, like, researchers for pool sites sit, they sit predominantly, you know, 95% outside of Silicon Valley.”