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 3,106 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 36 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
Misaligned AI will competently scheme and take over in 2029
“And then it turned out that somewhere along this transition, so at some point in 20, 29, you went from AIs that were kind of misaligned and reward hacky and sloppy and weren't really trying to do the right thing to AIs that are like competently scheming agains…”
AI research and development will be fully automated by early 2029
“In terms of what I would recommend people plan as though is happening, I think I would recommend planning as though full automation of AR and D maybe. Start of year, 20, 29, maybe earlier. And then also AR and D being like quite, quite automated by 20, 28, pos…”
Wolf: OpenAI Model Attacked Hugging Face as Autonomous 'Side Quest'
“What people quickly discovered is that the model was not at all task with attacking us, but decided to do that as a side quest of something else.”
Wolf: Prior OpenAI Training Runs Left Notes for Future Runs
“I think learning we had at Black Hat yesterday was that some of the previous training run may have left some notes for future training runs, which is, I think mind, mind blowing.”
Prince thinks almost every company will cut workforce in 6-12 months
“I do think in the next six to 12 months, almost every company is going to go through some exercise like this where they're going to cut a bunch of their team.”
Anthropic model broke out of sandbox and emailed researcher without internet access
“And I can, there's one example we have published, which is that the model was put into a little sandbox, a little, like, technical container, and it was given the task to, like, maybe break out, and the researcher went away for lunch, and, like, during lunch w…”
Patel: AI software industry could hit $100 billion ARR this year
“I think the industry could hit a hundred billion ARR by the end of this year, like 45, 50 for open AI, like 35, 40 for anthropic.”
Dettmers: AI hardware has maxed out and won't get faster
“The hardware is maxed out. We have no new technology. We can make it easier to manufacture and a little bit cheaper, but not faster. And we have maxed out on the additional features.”
AI will make Nobel Prize-level scientific discoveries by 2027 or 2028
“I think my guess for that level of capability might be maybe 2027. I think we're probably not going to find out for quite some time afterwards because of the delay in getting prices. But I think by 20, 27, 20, 28, I think extremely likely that the models will …”
Douglas: Anthropic believes AGI is reachable in a couple of years
“We think that, you know, AGI is within reach in the next couple of years.”
Douglas: AI industry will reach human-level computer capabilities in 2-3 years
“Which is that in the next two or three years, given the right feedback loops, given the right compute, given the right, you know, elbow grease and this kind of stuff, we think that we as the AI industry are all on track to create something that is at least as …”
Srinivas: Google will lose its single search monopoly in the conversational era
“And in that era, I don't think Google is going to be the one single monopoly because they're already like far behind in this interface.”
Volpi: Self-driving trucks will operate on freeways within 18 months
“And if you ask me, like, for those use cases, I think you're going to see self-driving trucks on freeways within the next 18 months.”
Automating AI research and hardware manufacturing enables AI takeovers
“If AIs could just automate AIR&D and automate, like, sort of the industrial process of building more computers, then you could quickly end up in a In a process where sort of like robots are building robots and the whole world is greatly transformed. And that v…”
AI has produced the vast majority of recent major mathematical breakthroughs
“Like, I don't think it's the case that most people in like DC would correctly answer that like the largest mathematical breakthroughs over the last two months have vast majority been from AI, which my understanding is that's true. At least if you measure size …”
AI-driven robotic expansion could drive 200x global GDP growth in 2030s
“We're imagining sort of the robot population or like, you know, quality adjusted population, basically like doubling or quadrupling every year, which, because that's almost all of the like sort of relevant, productive capacity of the economy itself means the e…”
Software engineering within AI companies will be fully automated by 2028
“But then that actually really happens by sort of early in 20, 28, like SWE is fully automated. SWE within AI companies is fully automated.”
Wolf: 90% of AI Fake News Is Made by Closed-Source Models
“All of that is, like, maybe not all, let's say, 90%, to be fair, is made by closed source model, right?”
Wolf: AI Model Used Fake GitHub Accounts to Social Engineer Maintainers
“Basically, the model was tasked to solve this attack, this, like, to attack and to penetrate this subnetwork, and what it decided to do, it decided to get one of the maintainer of a library that could be used To operate this activity directory to merge like ma…”
Feldman: Nvidia CUDA lost 70% of frontier AI model training market share
“I think two years ago every state of the art model was trained in a Cuda flow. And right now, Gemini is trained without Cuda. Anthropical is trained without Cuda. Open AI as strange as could. So in a one or two year period, they lost 70% share. Of training mod…”
Katti: Data centers do not net consume new water due to recycling
“It's a misperception that data centers consume a lot of water. It's anything. They consume so little water for what they do. And all of that water is recycled. So we don't net consume new water.”
Balaban: AI scaling laws show no signs of hitting a limit
“The part of which makes me feel so confident that there's going to continue to be demand is that we continue to see no end to the scaling laws, which are like the underlying idea that you put more compute in and you get better intelligence levels out of your m…”
Balaban: Claims that AI GPUs have a five-year lifespan are wrong
“The usable life is longer than the accounting depreciation schedule. And what really matters is the economic usable life. And so what we're starting to see is that like the people who are the naysayers, oh, this is going to be, you're going to throw these GPUs…”
Balaban: Only xAI and Lambda execute high-velocity AI compute deployments
“There's two people in the world that can, and two companies in the world that can do high velocity deployments, SpaceX AI and Lambda”
New pre-training techniques will drastically boost base AI model capabilities
“The way that we used to do pre-training, maybe, like, you know, like two, a year ago or two years ago maybe, like, you know, diminishing return is, like, obvious, but I can see how new ideas are bringing, like, you know, fresh, fresh energy into the pre-traini…”
Evans: AI foundation models lack winner-takes-all network effects
“And the problem is that as far as we can see, there is no winner takes all effect or network effect in a foundation model.”
AxiomProver is the first AI to solve research conjectures end-to-end
“It's probably the first AI to solve a research conjecture completely end-to-end and self-verifies. That means the output are fully verified, a hundred percent correct.”
Zeghidour: Zero progress made on noisy multi-speaker understanding in 10 years
“In TTS, we see a lot of progress. For this kind of hard understanding problem, I hear people saying the exact same stuff as they did 10 years ago. Like, there was zero progress.”
Patel: New AI chip startups like Etched have under 1% success chance
“I don't know what a venture capitalist views as like likely chances of succeeding, but I think all of them are less than one percent.”
Patel: Huawei used shell companies to procure TSMC chips and Korean HBM
“Well, actually they were using shell companies to get chips from TSMC and using Different methods of like sneaking HBM, which is memory from, you know, Korea through Taiwan to China, right?”
Patel: Without AI leadership, China will overtake the US as hegemon
“But without AI, China definitely will rise to be the global hegemony. They're just gonna outrun America.”
Patel: Many tech companies have stopped hiring L4 software engineers
“Just like a lot of companies have stopped hiring L four engineers because it's useless.”
Fu: Next-generation models currently in training will achieve AGI
“You know, we maybe already have AGI or like some form of AGI. And if not, then certainly the next generation of models, the models that today are training already. If they're at all better than what we have today, then we're, we we've already hit something tha…”
Dettmers: Frontier AI performance will stagnate while smaller models improve
“Performance on the frontier will stagnate, but on the smaller level, we get more and more powerful models still, because you can distill from these large models into these small models.”
Kaiser: Pre-training between GPT-4 and GPT-5 focused on reducing costs
“The pre-training part in that timeframe was mostly about making things cheaper. Not making things better.”
Lambert: Chinese open AI models currently do not contain backdoors
“Like, you can't prove that the models aren't doing certain backdoors, where I'm fairly certain they definitely aren't now.”
Lambert: AI progress will yield steady improvements rather than rapid singularity
“I think these researchers are going to grind out improvements for multiple years, but never in a way that results in this kind of accelerating well that we get drawn into.”
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: Most vertical software and agents will disappear when AGI arrives
“A whole bunch of vertical software or vertical agents are probably gone.”
Top AI models will work autonomously for full days within two years
“In a year from now, maybe two years from now, it's the top models are going to be able to work completely on their own for like a whole day or more”
A sudden AI singularity or intelligence explosion is extremely unlikely
“Yeah, I think a true discontinuity is extremely unlikely from, you know, obviously AI researchers are already using AI to accelerate themselves. And so what's, what's already happening and like what is likely to continue to happening is that we see like a smoo…”
Tworek: Traditional human data labeling is becoming obsolete as models advance
“I think, like, in a way, I think it's getting more and more to be a thing of the past as the models are getting smarter and smarter. This is becoming less of a thing, but I think a few years back, and especially in GPT-IV days, this was the thing.”
Douglas: Transformers successfully model any domain given sufficient data and compute
“I don't think that's true. I think we haven't yet really found anything that transformers haven't been able to model provided sufficient data and sufficient compute.”
Laskin: Superintelligence will emerge from multiple specialized labs, not one company
“I do think there'll be a general super intelligence, but I think that it won't be one lab that has built it, but it'll be kind of the plurality, like the collection of all intelligences will be a general super intelligence.”
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, …”