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 732 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 30 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…”
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.”
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.”
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-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.”
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…”
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: 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.”
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.”
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.”
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: 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: 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.”
Sigma CEO Mike Palmer says text-to-SQL AI products are a joke
“So I think these products are a joke. I don't think that they're going to succeed and we don't care about them.”
Levie: Proposed US tariffs will cause a total economic disaster
“If as of, you know, Tuesday afternoon, you know, the tariffs that have been proposed, if those roll through you know, this is going to be a total disaster.”
Masad: Long-tail SaaS products will disappear due to AI software generation
“As, you know, non-professional software engineers are able to build their own software I think that the demand for the, you know, plethora of SaaS that we have today will also go down, and that will reduce, because you'll be able to generate software on the fl…”
Masad: Total software engineer headcount will stay roughly constant
“So I think I think the population of software engineering will probably be constant and not grow all that much.”
Habib predicts AI will be able to run companies within five years
“This is AI that in three to five years is going to be able to run companies.”
Socher: AI scaling will hit logarithmic leveling off in reasoning gains
“I do think we are going to hit a sort of logarithmic kind of leveling off off like how much more data will give us that much more reasoning, right?”
Pomel: Paul Graham's 'Founder Mode' essay will do more harm than good
“My worry about the founder mode, and everything that gets pulled down to a very short piece like that, is that I think it's going to be used and abused in all sorts of different ways, because there's so much context that goes into every single word in there, l…”
Scaling compute and GPUs alone won't yield autonomous enterprise AI
“I'm not an expert in the field, but I believe that this is gonna we need Another giant leap of innovation to get there. I'm not sure just throwing compute and increasing the number of GPUs without some fundamental discovery, it's gonna create this.”
Most major software companies will eventually integrate a Web3 database
“And so there's this asymptotic cost curve that will come down, and at some point, our belief is that most major software companies will actually have a Web three database as part of their stack.”
Evans: VR headsets will not replace smartphones as primary computing platforms
“You're not going to wear a headset, no matter how light and cheap it is, all day outdoors. I would not have worn it walking here, even if it weighed a hundred grams and had completely perfect pass-through. Therefore, it can't replace your phone. Therefore, we …”
Eiso Kant: AI will recycle world data into synthetic data within years
“And so this is kind of our view and our, if you extend this a couple of years out, and this is where some people will probably have objection with us. We think that this will go so far. That we will kind of recycle all of the world's real data into higher qual…”
Shah: AI models attempting medical diagnoses will kill patients
“I mean, they just keep going there. I'm going to do diagnoses because it's grand or it's challenging, but I mean, they're going to kill somebody.”
Socher: Plumbers will eventually earn more than marketers as AI automates knowledge work
“Probably at some point, your plumber might get more than your marketer because the marketer can use tools and be way, way more efficient, but the plumber AI is going to take a very long time because None of the plumbing companies are collecting data, having ro…”
Riparbelli: Most harmful AI misuse will emerge from open source models
“And I think we'll see that a lot of harmful use of these technologies will emerge from kind of like the open source world.”
Falcon: Open-source AI will quickly catch up to proprietary models
“So I think all, all roads lead to open source at the end of the day. No matter what you do or how much money you have, you cannot compete with the world's resources put together to do something. So some companies will have an edge for a bit, yes, but open sour…”
Falcon: Mathematical advances will eventually make future AI models small
“I think the math field will catch up, and we'll have some fancy regularizer that will make all this go away, and now we're back to, like, a small model. So I guess, I think that the future is small, large language models, I guess, that are specialized”
Falcon: There will not be a god-like AGI
“I don't think there's gonna be like a god AI roaming around.”
Secondary AI fact-checking models will reduce hallucinations to zero, predicts Awadallah
“You're going to have models that check the accuracy of other models, and that will help us bring down hallucination to zero.”
Stancil: Modern data stack startups face an inevitable market reckoning
“Pretty quickly you're gonna realize they're all stepping on each other's toes, and that, that fallout has to go somewhere. Like, not all of these companies can be the next Figma that they all now say that they are, and so it's what happens then, and I think it…”
Stancil: dbt's initial ease of use may become its downfall
“Dbt is, I think, really popular because it's so easy to get up and running, but it may also eventually be, like, if it had an undoing, to me that would be the undoing, is the thing that was really easy to get up and running doesn't actually solve the real prob…”