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 34 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
AI capabilities would have been achieved even without inventing transformers
“I think if we hadn't invented the transformer, we would have gotten there with whatever LSTM you know, state space model, whatever, anything else people were developing, we would have gotten there.”
Dubois: Current models with optimized harnesses would feel like AGI
“If we froze the models that we have right now, and you really worked on the harness, and, like, maybe, like, we also spend more time, like, training with, like, a great harness I think people would really feel the AGI in every single domain, or could already f…”
Patel: U.S. CHIPS Act would not have passed without COVID car shortages
“Chips Act did not get passed, only got passed because that happened. And people are like, oh my God, the semiconductors are why cars can't be made. If that didn't happen, we wouldn't even have the Chips Act.”
Levie: The AI wave would not have happened without ChatGPT
“Without chat GPT, none of this would have happened.”
Rieseberg: A less prudent company would have rushed Claude Mythos to market
“And I think there's an alternative universe in which maybe a company with a less steady hand would have Race to get it onto the market as quickly as possible, put a very expensive price tag on it, and just like reap the benefits.”
AlphaGo would have probably lost to Lee Sedol if played earlier
“And I think if we had done it a few months earlier, we would have probably lost.”
Douetteau: Silicon Valley groupthink would have killed Dataiku's platform strategy
“A thing that it required then some will or independence of mind, which was easier for us because I'm not sure if I have had the will or the mind power to Keep this line of thinking if I had been in the Bay Area. Because around me, everyone would have had a dif…”
Socher: Transformer results would take 10x compute and engineering with LSTMs
“Probably if it wasn't for transformers, it would have just been like 10 X more engineering and data needed to get to similar results, even with like past models like LSTMs and so on.”
Turck says Inflection AI would not have pivoted if commercial performance was strong
“If they had something unbelievable going on, they would probably not have made that decision.”
Restricting GPT-2 access would have cost years of AI progress
“It would have been really sad for the world, I think, if at the point of GPT-II, we had decided, hey, you know what? This is too dangerous. No one can have access. Cause we would have missed out on all of the past two or three years of incredible progress.”
Elsamadisi: A working single time-series table eliminates need for 20-30 data engineers
“If a single time series table worked, you wouldn't have 20 or 30 data engineers building tables to answer questions.”
Groschupf: New computation frameworks should be built on Mesosphere, not YARN
“And if I would have to rewrite kind of the code I wrote in 2006, I would not necessarily write it on Yarn. I would maybe write a whole new computation framework on Mesosphere.”
Steier: Modern data warehouses wouldn't exist if 1980s spreadsheets handled big data
“If in the early eighties, You know, if we could go back and go into a time machine and deliver to the past a spreadsheet that worked on unlimited amounts of data, would things have happened the way they happened? You know, yes, somehow data governance would ha…”
Bourgeau: Would not have bet heavily on scaling laws materializing
“I, I'm not sure if I would have bet a lot on, on that actually materializing and being where we are today.”
Lambert: Scaling AI 10x alters post-training, not pre-training methods
“If like, if we were to train a model that was 10 times as big, like all this post-training stuff would change. But the pre-training And mid training and long contacts, I think would actually become looking pretty similar.”
Tworek: Someone from 10 years ago would view today's ChatGPT as AGI
“If you talk to someone from 10 years ago and show them chat GPD from today, they would probably call it AGI”
Douglas: TSMC bottlenecked desired AI chip acquisitions in 2024
“Even if you, as much as you wanted chips last year, it would have been impossible to get them because TSMC was, you know, booked out and so forth.”
Building a US-facing startup from Europe was impossible before COVID-19
“I think that would not have been possible to be honest, before COVID.”
Pedregal: Cutting Granola features post-launch would have been nearly impossible
“I think that would have been impossible or extremely hard to do if we had been publicly launched.”
Failing to abstract region-based storage early cost Canva a monumental re-architecture
“Very early in Canva's architectural journey, we put a quite good abstraction in over our AWS infrastructure, but I do think back now and wonder, oof, we could have just spent a little bit more time Really abstraction, abstracting region-based storage. It would…”
Sitting out the dot-com boom meant missing foundational tech companies
“And if you would have sat out then you would have, you know, maybe avoided a couple of busts, but you would have also missed on some of the most foundational companies of our lives.”
Hitchcock: Traditional database engineers rarely rewrite backends from scratch
“If you were to have come from a database background, you probably wouldn't say, yup, we'll rewrite the entire database backend.”
Dines: Early UiPath automated tasks in minutes that took days in competitor software
“It would have taken days in other software, using very cumbersome process, it's days.”
Falcon: Modern generative AI would not exist without open-source research
“None of this wouldn't exist if Google hadn't put published transformers and put the paper out there, right? None of this would have existed if Ah, the attention stuff would have been out there if the Anno hadn't been created, if TensorFlow hadn't been created.”
Kimball: Most database problems at Square were solvable with Spanner
“If you looked at all the problems Square was having, and they had something like 70 externally facing use cases when we joined them, most of the problems that they were struggling with could have been solved with the use of something like Spanner.”
Lowin would have built Prefect within Apache Airflow if possible
“And if I were able to do the things that Prefect does in airflow, I would have.”
Gong likely would have failed if launched in 2013 due to AI limitations
“I think if we started a company two years before, I'm not sure that it would have been successful.”
Cell phones would drop calls 1,000x more often without Bayesian probability bounds
“You would drop calls a thousand times more often if there were, if cell phone receivers didn't found uncertainty in one patient.”
New Relic wouldn't have reached $100M without its early sales hires
“Those two guys you know, not single-handedly, but we would not have gotten to a hundred million in revenue without them.”
HealthTap could have been profitable in 2014 by serving ads
“HealthUp, HealthUp could have been profitable more than a year ago by serving ads on the pages, which was everyone, when we were on University Avenue in Palo Alto, and everyone around us is doing ads, right, so it's like the easiest thing in the world, turn it…”
Eric Frenkiel: MemSQL would not exist if launched as an open-source project
“Fundamentally I don't think MemSQL would exist if we had to go into it the open source way.”
Hitchcock: I would not have started SurrealDB knowing it takes ten years
“Probably not. Definitely not. No, definitely not.”
Traditional power delivery would carry 40,000 amps and melt Cerebras's processor
“We would have 40,000 amps, and that would actually melt the part if we chose to do it that way, so we had to bring some of the geometric thinking beyond how we think geometry in the models into this three D structure.”
Legacy compliance review for a healthcare client would have cost $4 million
“Had they used the status quo method, which is very much based on search terms and manual review, it would have taken them about 20 weeks To review all these documents. Ah, we later showed them that their search would have missed about 10% of the sensitive info…”