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 42 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
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.”
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”
Burazin: AI agent scale creates high probability of impending CPU shortages
“I don't know it goes to the extreme to where GPUs are because that is very, very, very extreme. But it is quite highly, high probability that there will be shortages of CPUs going forward.”
Patel: All major non-Nvidia AI chips will fully support vLLM by mid-2026
“All of them will have a very good UX for download model, run model on VLM by The middle of the year, I think, right? Certainly AMD is already there by the end of this quarter.”
Patel: OpenAI's next model will outperform Opus 4.5 around February-March
“OpenAI's new model, I think, will be better than Opus 4.5, and it's coming, like, somewhat soon in March-ish timeframe, maybe February, March-ish, but”
Bernhardsson: AI inference spend will dominate model training spend long-term
“It's obvious that like in the long run, like inference spend will dominate just for like the obvious reason that like, that's where you make the money, right? Like, you know, when you're training a big model, that's like, you know, you, you're spending a lot o…”
Socher: Web traffic from AI agents will surpass humans within years
“I think in the next few years, we're going to see more AI agents surfing the web. Then people surfing the web”
Kahn: AI targeting in urban warfare will misidentify targets and kill civilians
“And I think when you start putting them in crowded urban environments and ask them to, You know, only kill the bad guys and spare the civilians that we're going to see mistakes being made, you know, where the systems misidentify targets.”
Kant: Most developers will adopt AI pair programmers within two years
“Well, the first thing that I think is at this point, almost uncontested, but frankly, when I was building source, most people didn't think would happen is the fact that the majority, if not all developers in the next couple of years in the world will adopt som…”
Kant: Non-engineers will build software via AI prompts within three years
“We don't think we're more than three years out to that point where a non-engineer, someone with no coding, you know, software development background is able to come and give one of those high level vague things of what they want built, right? Cause that's what…”
Ratner: Private data models will exceed closed models in specialized tasks
“Closed source models, like a GPT-IV, five, six, seven, whatever comes, are going to be very hard to match in terms of generalist capability for, say, consumer use cases that are reflected in the web data they're trained on and the flywheels that get powered by…”
Pesenti in 2020: 10x annual AI compute scaling is economically unsustainable
“So we're still pushing hard, but it's not going to be 10 X per year. It's just not sustainable.”
Dixon: Musicians will make money selling digital virtual goods
“And so I think you're going to see musicians who now make money by selling digital virtual goods as an example, which is not a model today, and that's like a very interesting new model as an example.”
AWS is nearly certain to reach $100B in annual revenue
“And I think it's a near certainty Amazon's gonna do a hundred billion in revenue in AWS.”
Wins from top unicorns will overwhelm broader ecosystem losses
“The overwhelming positives of a few of the companies in this unicorn ecosystem will overwhelm the losses”
Majority of big data market spend will go to applications, not platforms
“The lion's share of the money spent in the market Is going to be for apps, not for the platform.”
Mike Flowers predicts future NYC mayors must burn money to rebuild silos
“The data silos thing, that's busted. So somebody's literally going to have to throw money away to reverse that. Reverse the fact that the fire department knows what the buildings department knows, what the finance department knows, et cetera. So I don't see th…”
Merriman: JSON document models will emerge as the standard NoSQL data model
“My belief, which is opinion, is that in, in the end of these NoSQL data models, that the document-oriented model will be the one that kind of converges on for standard, and specifically JSON style, or JSON based.”
Katti: Skilled labor shortages will become an increasing bottleneck for AI expansion
“No, I think there is definitely a shortage of electricians, plumbers, all kinds of trades, you name it. So anything we can do to train more folks to be able to do those, there are very well-paying jobs that a lot of us, all of the hyperscalers, all of the labs…”
Major AI firm will launch a frontier text diffusion model in 2026
“I think one company will launch a big diffusion model this year.”
Average corporate AI spend hits $500,000 and will reach $1M
“The total spend on AI products per customer kind of went up from 35,000 dollars or so maybe two years ago. Now it's around half a million dollars, and it's predicted to hit a million dollars next year.”
Tunguz: ~$80B will be invested in AI venture capital in 2024
“I think there'll be something like eighty billion dollars invested in 2024 in AI.”
Katz: ClickHouse will build a multi-tenant cloud-managed service
“And at the same time in parallel, we are going to build A multi-tenant managed service in the cloud, which will inevitably be deployed on a variety of different cloud platforms, whether it's AWS, GCP, Azure, whether we go to China, like I've done in the past a…”
Lubin: Tech will soon allow querying data while keeping it encrypted
“In many cases very soon we're gonna be able to have data that remains encrypted at all times, yet we'll still be able to ask questions of that encrypted data”
Bordes: Direct machine reading will eventually match IBM Watson's performance
“The goal is that, ah, eventually, by trying to understand the text directly, you can actually at least equal, all the information by Watson is in text, in free text.”
LeCun predicted in 2014 that AI would mediate human social interactions
“And started thinking about the next 10 years. What are the next 10 years going to be for social interactions? And it's pretty obvious to a lot of people that a lot of our interactions you know, with our friends and a lot of interactions with the digital world …”
LeCun predicted in 2014 deep learning would conquer natural language processing
“There's a kind of a sense that in the community that the next set of techniques to kind of fall to deep learning, if you want, will be natural language processing.”
Autonomous robots will perform construction site grading within five years
“We see robots being able to do that in the next five years.”
Katzenberg: External AI model pricing will fall over 12-18 months
“I think their pricing will continue to improve. So we can't just look at like where their pricing is today and assume it's going to be static over the next 12 months or 18 months. Cause like as they compete, their compute costs will come down. Like they'll, I …”
Airbus single-pilot AI search application will take a few more years
“For Airbus, the case is it's something they are working on. It's probably something that will take a few more years because it's all embedded in this overall vision of single pilot operations.”
Sarah Guo: Cybersecurity software will outgrow cybersecurity services
“And I think the other interesting thing for us to think about is, like, I think the software piece of that is going to grow faster than the services piece.”
Muglia: AWS will remain the leading cloud provider for the foreseeable future
“They're the leading cloud provider. We anticipate they'll be in that role, in that situation for the foreseeable future, perhaps, perhaps in, in, you know, certainly through my career.”
Hoffman: Privacy-preserving data querying solutions will emerge by 2022
“But I expect within the next five years, we'll probably have answers to some of those problems.”
Bordes predicts large AI models will run on mobile devices by 2017
“And next year we will run them on mobile, so.”
Kaganovich predicts multi-billion dollar companies will emerge around DNA variant measurement
“There will be multi-billion dollar companies that will figure out how to measure those efficiently, deliver that information to the patient, and get feedback from the patient.”
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.”
Moody: Social data will integrate into the $40B business intelligence industry
“The entire, you know, there's a forty billion dollar business intelligence industry that is built around these traditional data warehouses and data marts that are driving a lot of the businesses within large companies Clearly, social is going to be entering in…”
Gomez: Specialist AI models will emerge for drug creation and material sciences
“There will be specialist models that emerge to help in things like in pharma, right? The creation of new drugs in material sciences for advanced materials.”
Gomez: Cohere's Command model will soon become multimodal
“Command command a isn't currently multimodal, but you can imagine Very soon it will be.”
Ezra targets expanding to 20 cities and 60 facilities by end of 2024
“We are planning to be in 20 cities by the end of this year. We're in 22 facilities in the existing cities right now, and by the end of this year we'll be in about 60 facilities.”