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 24 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
Howard: Closed US AI ecosystems will cause China to move faster
“Whereas, oddly, the US companies that used to lead the way have all drawn up the drawbridges, and that's gonna cause China to keep moving faster, because when you're in that more, both collaborative and competitive environment, you just Go way ahead, as we've …”
Howard: OpenAI compute spending grows exponentially while model utility scales logarithmically
“They kept on kind of exponentially increasing the amount they were spending on their models, whilst the Return, you know, the kind of utility of those models was only increasing logarithmically, and you kind of very quickly hit this point where it's like, oh, …”
Howard: Test-time compute scaling will hit diminishing returns within two years
“It's a thing where you get most of the juice out of it in the first year or two, so we're still in that. Phase at the moment, and we'll start to hit the curve off point pretty soon. Just like we did for training.”
Howard: No more evidence for near-term ASI today than 15 years ago
“I don't think we have any more evidence that ASI might be close now than we did 15 years ago, 15 years before that.”
Howard: AI growth will continue tailing off as low-hanging fruit disappears
“The amount of people and money being put into AI, it's going to keep going up, but again, the low hanging fruits being done now. So yeah, I think we'll continue to see the tailing off of growth.”
Howard: Traditional AI labs favor paper citations over bold innovation
“It's very different to a research lab, which is like, hey, let's try and get lots of citations on a paper in a field that's so highly recognizable to its peers that they recognize it as being something they want to appear at their next conference, you know, wh…”
Howard: Autonomous AI coding agent Devin produces low-quality, useless software
“Devon's an agent you know, a bunch of tools, tool calls, and tied together with an OpenAI model, if I understand correctly. Yeah, and it actually ended up definitely supporting our thesis, which is, there are so many places we wished we could have got involved…”
Jeremy Howard sees no reason to believe Artificial Superintelligence will occur
“I have no particular reason to believe that will happen, and for every point until we get there, if we ever get there, by definition, there's going to be humans interacting with AI, and so that's what I care about, is how do we do that In an optimal way.”
Howard: There was no technological breakthrough 'DeepSeek moment'
“For me, there was no technology DeepSeek moment.”
Howard: OpenAI is shutting down GPT-4.5
“I think they're shutting down that product or they've shut down that product, if I understand correctly.”
Jeremy Howard: Academic approaches to predictive modeling are far less successful than practical experience
“Much to my surprise, the academic approach is, was way less successful.”
Howard: Answer.ai aims to launch 5,000 successful products with 14 people
“If we're going to have 12 to 14 people create five to 10,000 extremely commercially successful products, we're going to have to be extremely efficient, you know, at every level.”
Howard: Answer.ai has completely diverged from mainstream academic AI research
“Quickly realized, actually, we've gotten so far off the, you know, academic normal research check now that No one cares about anything we care about on the whole and vice versa.”
Howard: Non-autoregressive AI architectures will deliver major performance gains
“But I think it probably will work. And I think that'll probably be a significant jump in performance when you can sketch out the entirety of the solution first, and then fill in the blocks and gradually increasing levels of specificity.”
Jeremy Howard: Humans and AI produce better results collaborating in shared environments
“Humans and computers work better together than separately, and then there are various things that kind of come out of that, and one key one, for example, is that the human and the computer should be able to see all of each other's work and be operating in the …”
Jeremy Howard: Autonomous AI agents are only useful for small, simple tasks
“There are certainly situations where, like, Scripts, spreadsheets, VBA, access databases are useful, you know, but nobody like builds them as the components of their technology, you know, strategy. They're the things you use for little tools. It's small, well-…”
Howard: Answer.ai team uses AI at a more advanced level than anyone else
“Definitely I feel like we are more, I can tell we're more advanced users of AI than anybody else, because people can keep complaining about all the problems with AI, and I'm always like, I don't have any of those problems, you know.”
Howard: Answer.ai operates with no offices, roles, or professional managers
“We're not going to have offices and departments. We don't, you know, we don't have any roles. We don't have any professional managers.”
Jeremy Howard: OpenAI's Deep Research is still the best tool available
“Their deep research tool is still the best.”
Howard: Answer.ai is an Edison-inspired R&D lab, not a research lab
“So it's definitely not a research lab. This might sound minor, but it's an R and D lab, but they feel and look extremely different as was Edison's Menlo Park lab was an R and D lab.”
Answer.ai has 14 employees but aims to operate with only 12
“Yeah, maybe 14 now. 14 We're kind of aiming to be around 12. There was a couple of people we found we couldn't say no to.”
Howard: FastHTML enables rich web applications in a single Python file
“So we created this thing called fast HTML, which brings all these ideas together. And lets you create arbitrarily rich, sophisticated web applications in a single Python file.”