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 26 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
Gourley: Information propagation in networks is central to Russian military strategy
“And it's important to know the context of where information came from, because as information is seeded into the networks, it starts to propagate, and this becomes key attack vectors that are actually unfolding, and if you listen to some of the major Russian g…”
Gourley: Algorithms can briefly wipe $1 trillion from financial markets
“Sometimes the algorithms get together and decide collectively to wipe about a trillion dollars of market capitalization off the global financial markets only to return it about 15 minutes later with nothing really happening in the world around that.”
Sean Gourley: Wikipedia has a massive recall problem despite high precision
“And this is actually not just endemic to Andre, there's nothing particularly about him, but it's actually, Wikipedia has a massive recall problem. We think a lot about its precision, and we measure its precision, but its recall is actually pretty bad when it l…”
Gourley: Machine-generated content is becoming indistinguishable from true reality
“And it's important to do this because we're living in a world, which I would term, of the generation age, where it is increasingly cheap and easy to generate a reality that is almost indistinguishable from true reality by machines.”
Gourley: Primer cut bank analyst report summary time, saving $6M
“We're able to reduce that down to about 25% of the time. And that nets out at about a six million dollar saving for that bank.”
Firms spent $300M on fiber cables cutting NY-London latency by 5ms
“Ships now laying new fiber optic cables between New York and London to show five milliseconds of round trip time at the cost of three hundred million dollars.”
A fake AP tweet about White House explosions wiped $200B
“And a fake news report from AP Newswire comes out, says there's a bomb in the White House, and then this happens. The algorithms leave the market because they go, I don't really know what's going on here. I know something to do with the bomb happened, and prob…”
Sean Gourley: 61% of internet traffic is non-human
“61% of the internet traffic is now non-human. It looks something like this. And it's increasing. Last year it was at 51%.”
Facebook's infrastructure cost $1.20 per user annually versus $13 for Google
“It costs about buck 20 to run a user on Facebook for a year. That'll vary a little bit depending on which country you're in in the world. It costs 12 bucks, 13 dollars, for a user on Google.”
Gourley predicted consumers would eventually pay subscriptions for algorithmic control
“I think we're going to see subscriptions. I think we're going to see people coming out and saying, you know what, I want a little more control of this algorithm, the information that it gives me, the friends that it chooses.”
DARPA and intelligence agencies fund automated narrative manipulation research
“The KGB's just put money into this. IAPA and DARPA have got money going into this stuff.”
Gourley: OpenAI's GPT-2 was not fact-aware
“Some of the colleagues out of OpenAI released GPT-II. That was language generation, but it wasn't fact-aware.”
Gourley: Primer headline generator achieves 84% okay-or-better rating versus 87% for humans
“So on humans, we do about 87% are okay or better. At Primer we do about 84% are okay or better.”
Gourley: Primer headlines beat human writers 29% of the time in side-by-side tests
“If we do this in a side-by-side comparison we can see around 20, 29 percent of the time primer is better and we can see around 44% of the time on the high-volume model that humans are better.”
High-frequency algorithms execute over 60% of US equity trades
“U.S. Equities market of all completed trades is now somewhere north of 60%, done by high frequency algorithms.”
Gourley: Knight Capital lost $440M in 45 minutes from a rogue algorithm
“The case in point of Knight Capital a couple of years ago they released an algorithm onto the market. It was never supposed to be on the market. It was an algorithm that was meant for testing. It somehow makes its way off the staging machine and into the real …”
Gourley: Algorithms that read the news will inevitably start writing it
“Now, of course, if algorithms can start to read the news, they'll, surely, they'll start writing the news.”
In 2014, Google generated $30 per user annually versus Facebook's $6
“Google makes about 30 bucks a year per user. Facebook is doing a little bit worse. They're at six dollars per user”
Gourley: Primer can condense 17,000 Russian documents into a one-page report
“We can take a set of 17,000 Russian language documents talking about Syria, and we can write a one-page report as an output.”
Primer generated 40,000 new scientist profiles using RNNs and scientific papers
“So we took 30,000 scientists on Wikipedia and took their profiles as of January 18. And then input into this, we put 650,000 scientific papers and around 1.2 million news articles that talked about the scientists. And then we used an RNN-based generative model…”
Sean Gourley: Early deepfakes fail to simulate natural human blinking patterns
“He doesn't quite blink enough, by the way, if you've actually kind of followed this. The blinking is, is not quite right.”
Human reaction speed tops out at 650 milliseconds for expert chess players
“For an amateur chess player it's about 900 milliseconds for the brain to register whether or not the king is in danger. For an expert chess player, it does increase. It does, you know, get faster, but it tops out at 650 milliseconds.65 of a second.”
Gourley: Trading algorithms exit markets during Fed report releases
“They're all pre-programmed. To get out of the market when a Fed report comes out about the unemployment rates because they don't know how to read it.”
Gourley: Google includes Wikipedia on page one for 85% of common searches
“Google actually returns Wikipedia 85% of the time with the most common searches on the first page.”
Gourley: Primer has raised $54M to date, led by Lux Capital
“And you know, we've raised about fifty-four million dollars to date, most notably led with a Series B by Lux based out of here in New York.”
Gourley: Wikipedia had no page for Andrej Karpathy when Primer built his bio
“Well, we could actually compare that to what was on Wikipedia at the time when it was generated, and the answer was nothing. Right? Now, if you go there now, he's taking care of this. We brought it up with Tesla, and their PR department got onto this, but ther…”