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 485 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
Socher: Existing AI plus more compute can cure diseases and aging
“With existing technology and giving it more data and more compute, we can already cure a lot of diseases. We can already cure many of the aspects of aging. We can already build better fusion like reactors and systems. We can already create new materials.”
Tworek: GPT-5 can effectively be considered an iteration like 'o3.1'
“Like GPT-Five in some way I can be considered as like, oh, 3.1. It's a little bit of like, you know, iteration of like the same thing and the same concept”
Ramaswamy: Snowflake monetizing storage was a long-term strategic mistake
“My take is that us deciding to monetize storage was a long-term strategic mistake. I think we simply should have said, we will pass through storage costs.”
Thomas Reardon calls the iPhone a Trump-level disaster for humanity
“I think the iPhone is a Trump level disaster for humanity.”
Mega-fund VCs are just lottery ticket buyers lacking company-building skills
“And I think a lot of my contemporaries are lottery ticket buyers. And, you know, you have a three billion dollar fund, and you're just buying lottery tickets, and because you don't know how to build companies, your only value is paying more.”
AI CEOs lack clear plans to prevent an AI takeover
“I think that the AI company CEOs understand that they're on the path of building wildly smarter than human systems, like super intelligent AI systems. They understand that we don't really have a like clear thought through plan for how to manage the risks from …”
Greenblatt: Broad AI access does not prevent misaligned power-seeking takeovers
“Giving broad access to AIs does not solve the problem of the AIs having drives of their own that are highly misaligned and the AIs being power seeking in various ways, or the AI is trying to take over which could happen, you know, Via various routes.”
Mark Zuckerberg's open-source vision underestimates transformative superintelligence
“When Mark thinks about super intelligence, he's not really imagining anything very concrete. He just means like an AI that's like a really awesome assistant that is in your smart glasses or whatever. And like, I'm just like, that's not really like what I mean …”
Trojanowski: Applying the Bitter Lesson to Complex Tax Workflows Is a Mistake
“I think it is a mistake to throw out those learnings and say, you know, bitter lesson, throw out those learnings. We're just going to have the agents at runtime develop an entirely new way to do a tax return that is, you know, because bitter lesson, yada, yada…”
Feldman: AI is causing irreparable damage to the SaaS business model
“I think the business of dashboarding and the business, the AI doesn't the damages doing the SAS is, I think, unreparable. You could ask your AI, build me a tool like Salesforce. 30 seconds later, you have a working tool.”
Catanzaro: Chinese AI achievements are not driven by a copycat mentality
“I think it's absolutely false to say that you know the achievements of some other country are all being created by sort of, you know, copycat mentality. It's just not true.”
Catanzaro: China has been leading in open community-oriented AI development
“I think there's a chance for the rest of the world to catch up to China in the sense that you know, we can understand the benefits of working together as a community to build technologies for AI in a way that I think China has frankly been leading.”
Catanzaro: The technological singularity is a wrongheaded idea
“The singularity is, although it's an attractive idea, I think that it's a really a wrongheaded idea because it doesn't really take into account these other factors.”
Catanzaro: Open technologies are inherently the safest way to build AI
“I believe that open technologies for AI are inherently the safest way of building AI.”
Levie: AI doomers ignore permanent jobs required for agent maintenance
“As an asterisk, it's actually why the doomers are also wrong about jobs, because this is actually going to be a very real sustaining job. That is not like a one time you implement the agent and you upgrade the system and then it kind of works forever.”
Kolter: Neural network architectures matter less than commonly believed
“I actually think architectures don't matter as much as everyone else thinks they do.”
Evans: OpenAI has commodity tech and no differentiation but massive mindshare
“If you're Sam Altman, you've got a commodity technology. You've got, you're competing with people who have giant legacy cash flows. You don't have your own infrastructure. Don't really have any differentiation, but you've got massive mindshare.”
Zeghidour: Chinese open research forces Western competitors to publish
“And they also, you know, like the Chinese lab, I, I'm making a remarkable work, and it's a kind of, are forcing everyone to stay open to some extent because otherwise it also hurts the ego, I think, of the people who are in the labs that don't publish.”
Zeghidour: Audio watermarking is a scam and easily broken
“Watermarking is a scam. I'm sorry, I have to say it. It just doesn't work. I worked on it. We have an appendix in the Moshi paper around how we could break so easily any watermarking that was supposed to be state of the art. So people should not rely on that.”
Patel: Companies no longer need junior analysts due to AI automation
“This is Claude code now. You don't need junior analysts.”
Fu: Current LLMs meet the definition of AGI from 5-10 years ago
“By almost any definition anyone could have written down, let's say five years ago or 10 years ago, certainly when, you know, Tim, you and I started our PhD. We basically have the vision of AGI that, that we had back then. We have things that can write code. Th…”
Izmailov: Anthropic has a better corporate culture than OpenAI and xAI
“In my mind, Antropic has the best culture of the three places.”
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.”
Valuations for OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google are fairly conservative
“If you look at OpenAI, if you look at Anthropic, if you look at Google, those evaluations, those revenue numbers are actually fairly conservative.”
Laskin: The core ingredients to build AGI and ASI are now known
“But that was only meaningful when the ingredients for how to build artificial general intelligence, or ASI were not known. I think now they're known, and so.”
Laskin: AI work awarded Physics Nobel Prize has had little impact on physics
“What's interesting is that the Physics Nobel Prize was given to something that has not really had that much impact in physics, but it is but I still buy it because it's kind of there's a physics smell to the breakthroughs that led to you know, these systems li…”
Gomez: Early AGI and EA ecosystem felt like LARPing a new religion
“The whole AGI effective altruist this whole ecosystem, it never resonated with me. It felt like cause playing. It felt like people were LARPing a new religion and all of this stuff like create God.”
Gomez: Anyone selling AI doom and gloom is wrong
“Anyone who's selling you doom and gloom, I think is wrong.”
AI hallucinations are old news; modern models outperform humans
“I think it's old news. And I think the only reason we still talk about it, it's like everyone talks about hallucinations and, you know, no one knows if it's happening or what's going on. It's like fugazi fugazi. Like, it was a problem back when the models were…”
The alpha is gone for starting new AI companies today
“I don't mean to be relatively pessimistic, but I wouldn't start a company in AI. I mean that from the perspective of, like, the alpha is gone.”
Sivulka is "very short" Accenture, consultancies, and the Big Four
“I'm very short Accenture and consultancies, but and the big four.”
Evans: OpenAI Product Chief Kevin Weil is building a thin GPT wrapper
“Kevin Wheel is building a thin GPT wrapper. I mean, I love Kevin, but like, that's his job, is to build a thin GPG wrapper.”
Evans: Elon Musk's autonomy and humanoid demos are fake
“It's bullshit. Yeah, but it's not a real demo. It's not working.”
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.”
Mike Palmer: Tableau acts as superficial wrapping paper for data
“And I think that Tableau is wrapping paper in Japan. You really wanted the toothbrush, but somehow what you really got was wrapping paper.”
Mike Palmer: Microsoft Fabric is a marketing rebrand of legacy software
“And I'm directly accusing Microsoft here. I think their application products are not good in their cloud products. I think fabric is a run it back strategy on office through 65, where they just provide a marketing name to some longstanding old products.”
Mike Palmer: Google's Looker acquisition failed by locking out non-experts
“Google's experiment with Looker has failed, and with Looker, they built a LookML, which by the way, I would say back in 2017, it was probably the best product on the market, but they built a product for experts, and they ensured that it was going to be a produ…”
Kiela: Core language model development is almost solved and plateauing
“It's not even really about language models anymore. That has almost been solved, right? That's kind of why you see things plateauing off a little bit as well.”
Kiela: Long-context LLMs are inherently incredibly wasteful
“Long context models are inherently incredibly wasteful. You're paying for all this compute, and that's maybe why some of the companies that are trying to really sell long context model, long context window models, they will make more money from that, right?”
Misra: CapCut relies on simple UI and TikTok distribution rather than AI
“Whereas I think Capco's approach is much more traditional. They're actually just trying to do exactly what Canva did, which is, okay, let's make the UI simpler and add a few more buttons and essentially bootstrap it to TikTok and distribute it like crazy.”
Misra: AI video has no positive use cases in documentary footage
“But on the documentation side, there's no good thing that AI video can do. Not one good thing, right? Like there's, it's all bad. There's nothing good.”
Masad: Traditional AI coding tools do not matter compared to agents
“So all the stuff that we built around coding AI, I don't think it matters. What really matters is being able to chat with an agent and get an application on the other end.”
Borgman: Tabular acquisition gives Databricks marketing win, not open-source control
“I think probably the biggest thing that they get out of the acquisition is the ability to tell the market, That they can do iceberg two and not look like they had made a mistake with Dell with Delta. You know, that, that they can, they get sort of a marketing …”
Benaich: The AI existential risk debate was overblown
“I felt like the extra risk kind of debate was kind of overblown .”
Bernhardsson: GPU alt-clouds are real estate businesses adding little stack value
“It's like sort of like almost like real estate, right? Like they own sort of, you know, real estate and they rent it out, arguably sort of, you know, we work, you could say, if you want to be, you know, a little cynical, but like not a ton of value, like highe…”