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 2,831 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 26 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
Luan: AI cyber attack risk is 10x to 100x larger than disinformation
“I think it's like 10 x larger than the disinformation problem, if not a hundred x larger. In a world where these models are much more easily used as a mechanism for attack than a mechanism for defense, there's gonna be this period of time over the next couple …”
Tech founders are inherently responsible for how users use their products
“What I learned from my time at Tinder was the minute you encourage someone to use a piece of technology, You are inherently responsible.”
Suleyman: Google avoided launching LaMDA to protect its core search business
“We tried really hard to get that launched at the time, but there just wasn't the appetite for taking the kind of risk. It was pretty clear to a lot of people at Google That this was potentially going to unseat Google's existing search business. It's super hard…”
Suleyman: AI scaling will deliver humanity's greatest productivity boost
“And if that trajectory continues over the next decade and more, and we see no reason why it won't, that is going to be the most incredible boost to creativity and productivity in the history of our species.”
Read: WPP US Office Occupancy Lags Global Hubs at 15–25%
“Shanghai, we're running at 75%. Mumbai, 64% average occupancy. Here in London, 52%. Milan, 45. And New York, 24. And in the US, I'd say we vary between 15 to 25% occupancy.”
Mark Read: Dropping fossil fuel clients risks free speech criticism
“I also think though that if we were to resign those clients, we might be criticized for, you know, a violation of free speech and not enabling them to talk.”
Suleyman: Google's LaMDA Was 'ChatGPT Way Before ChatGPT'
“So in many ways, it was ChatGPT way before ChatGPT, and we were completely blown away with how good your seventh and 10th turn of conversation was with the model, because it obviously had the prior turns of interaction in its working memory.”
Suleyman: Google Bard Uses LaMDA's Search-Grounded Model Architecture
“And actually that's what you now see in Bard, you know, Google's new AI. It's pretty much exactly the same model.”
Suleyman: A Personal AI Will Become the Web's Primary Interface
“I think that the future of the web and future of digital interactions in general will be that you just ask your AI. I think everybody is going to have a personal AI, and what you really want is to make sure that it is aligned with your interests, on your team,…”
Suleyman: Inflection AI Forbids Using Its Assistant for Romantic Relationships
“One of the things that you and I have talked about a lot and that we're very clear on is that, you know, we don't want to let pie be used for romantic relationships, right?”
Suleyman: Inflection Will Deploy the World's Largest Supercluster by Autumn 2023
“And we also just announced our new funding round where we've been lucky enough to be able to raise 1.3 billion dollars. And we'll be using that to build the largest super cluster in the world, which we'll have up and running by the autumn of this year.”
Suleyman: AI Will Massively Boost Productivity but Severely Destabilize Society
“If this was true for AI, that is both going to be the most incredible boost to creativity and productivity in the history of our species, but also potentially an incredibly destabilizing time.
Because anybody who has an agenda, who wants to amplify their narra…”
Suleyman: LLM Reliability Issues Will Be Ironed Out by 2026
“And I think that it's going to take us another two or three years to really iron out these weaknesses in the models.”
Ahrendts: Private equity firms often mistakenly think creative founders are "stupid"
“So many private equity, so many companies go in and they buy these companies and they think the founders are stupid because they don't talk the same language. They don't understand who they are.”
Nadella: Stack ranking deprives managers of judgment and punishes high-performing teams
“The principal issue of any system like StackRank has is it doesn't leave room for judgment, which is who said that a team cannot have all about average performers? We all know that performance is in some sense relative. The world measures us that way. But at t…”
Nadella: No country will allow two or three companies to monopolize AI
“In fact, I say, if it was, oh, wow, the two companies in the world or three companies in the world have AI, that's not a world that any of us want to live in. In fact, that's a world that won't exist. No country will allow that. It is a silly way to even conce…”
Krawcheck: Women hold 30% of white male wealth; Black women hold 1%
“Women have 30 cents of wealth to every dollar a white man has. Black women have a penny.”
Hoffman: Sudden leap in AI intelligence is quite unlikely
“Do we know if it's going to suddenly become, you know, much more intelligent? It's like, well, I can't guarantee it's not going to, although it seems quite unlikely, and it seems that there's a bunch of stuff under our control and people asking the right quest…”
Hoffman: Calls for AI Pauses Have a Net Negative Impact
“Because asking for a six month pause, the people who deeply care about humanity, they all slow down and the other people don't. Your letter has a net negative impact.”
Hoffman: Multiple AI agents will coexist rather than one dominant winner
“My view is we're going to actually have a world of a number of different agents. I don't think there's going to be one agent to rule them all”
Hoffman: 10x AI productivity will not cause massive job loss overall
“If you kind of walk through a corporation and say, if you make everybody 10 X more productive, how does that cause you to reorganize? And by the way, that doesn't cause you a whole lot of job loss. Some, you know, like I think customer service will both reorga…”
Khosrowshahi: Turnarounds demand painful personnel changes to establish seriousness
“The minute when you actually make painful changes is when the organization in a turnaround knows you're dead serious.”
Schmidt: 80% of management turns over in a corporate turnaround
“The number is 80% of the management team will turn over in a turnaround.”
Schmidt: Leaders have six to nine months to change company culture
“The other thing I learned, and this is from Lou Gerstner, Who said, who had written a whole book on this, and his IBM turnaround, he said, you only have six to nine months to change the culture of a company before you're stuck with it.”
Hoffman: If you aren't embarrassed by your first release, you launched late
“If you're not embarrassed by your first release, you released it too late.”
Hoffman: I tend to invest in companies tapping the seven deadly sins
“One thing I've been saying for the past 13 years is that I tend to invest in companies that play into one or more of the seven deadly sins.”
Hoffman: 100 users who love a product beat 1M who like it
“I believe it's more important to have a hundred people who love your product than a million people who just sort of like it.”
Altman: Growth hacking eventually stops working, leaving only word of mouth
“That's really important because startups, once they get big enough, can only grow by word of mouth. All the growth hacking eventually stops working.”
Sam Altman: True blitzscaling requires getting the product right first
“The hard kind of blitzscaling is where you try to start scaling up before the product is really great, and then most of your effort in scaling is to generate demand. So I think the number one most important insight about how to blitzscale is that the good kind…”
Sam Altman: Startups rarely turn lukewarm users into lovers later
“Everyone's like, well, I'm just going to get a lot of people to like me, and then I'll figure out how to make them love it later. In practice that's really rare. I would challenge you to think of an example.”
Altman: Y Combinator's software model can scale to AI, bio, and energy
“YC was mostly funding software companies, but I had a lot of conviction that we could apply the same thing that made YC work so well for software companies to companies in a lot of the areas that I cared about. AI, synthetic biology, energy.”
Dharmesh Shah: HubSpot designated every employee an insider before its IPO
“The decision we made was we were going to designate every individual employee at HubSpot a designated insider when we went public.”
Iovine: Chasing social media fame has degraded modern music quality
“And what's happened in the world today, I believe in music is not everyone, but too much. Fame has replaced great. And because fame is a gigantic currency, you can have a hit record or some success and then live off the fame of Instagram and et cetera for anot…”
Iovine: Music streaming services have no margins because they lack content ownership
“So now you have two companies with two different agendas and you don't have an audience and the streaming services don't own the content. So they're not making any money. There's no margins in it. So it's a goddamn mess in my opinion.”
Hoffman: Releasing without embarrassment means launching too late
“In fact, if you're not embarrassed by your first product release, you've released it too late.”
Zuckerberg: Rapid imperfect software releases outperform annual feedback cycles
“Even if not every single release is perfect, I think you're going to end up doing better over a year or two than you would be if you just waited to get feedback for a year of all your ideas.”
Zuckerberg: Let teams run any test that won't destroy the company
“On a day-to-day basis, a lot of the decisions that I'm making are like, okay, is this going to destroy the company? Because if not, then like, let them test it, right? I mean, it's, if the cost of the test isn't going to be Super high, then in general we're go…”
Schmidt: Cross-functional 'glue people' add little value and are unnecessary
“And glue people are very nice people who sit between functions and help either side, but don't themselves add a lot of value. And I thought, these are nice people, but we don't really need them. We can have these groups talking directly.”
Rottenberg: Four or five entrepreneurs can catalyze an entire startup ecosystem
“We actually see through visual touch points that four or five people can inspire, mentor, and invest in practically the entire ecosystem.”
Hoffman: Silicon Valley startup networks can take root anywhere with pay-it-forward founders
“Every successful founding team at Google, Facebook, wherever, spawns its own little network, and there's nothing magical about the networks in Silicon Valley. They can take root just about anywhere that you have a few successful entrepreneurs willing to pay it…”
Altman: LA and Seattle show more promise as startup hubs than NYC
“And yet somehow, while everyone was talking about New York as the second Silicon Valley, I think there's more evidence of any other cities. LA, Seattle. And at this point, I'd say you have that density of network, and talent, and capital, and knowledge, and ev…”
Hoffman: China is undoubtedly the next Silicon Valley
“Beyond Silicon Valley itself, I believe that the next Silicon Valley is undoubtedly China.”
Ng: Every Chinese internet company operates as a wartime company
“You know, decision making is much faster on average in the China tech world than in the US tech world. The China tech world is so competitive. I want to say pretty much every Chinese internet company is a wartime company.”
Sara Blakely: Sharing fragile early ideas invites well-meaning discouragement
“An idea is its most vulnerable in its infancy, and that's also the moment in human nature we want to immediately turn to our right or left and tell our coworker, our friend, our boyfriend, our boss, you know, I have this idea, and out of love and concern, we h…”
Butterfield: A CEO's Job Is Crafting a Story People Believe
“Because the job of a CEO is often just to come up with a story that enough people believe that you can make something happen in the world.”
Butterfield: Best software methodology is solving your own aggravating problems egolessly
“This, by the way, I think is the greatest software development methodology that's impossible to replicate, which is, don't think about what you're doing, have no ego, there's no speculation, there's no, I can imagine a user would want to spend the minimum numb…”
Hoffman: Being first scaler beats being first mover
“You don't just want to be the first mover into a new market. You want to be the first scaler. You have to seize every last opportunity for growth, even if it means serving customers on a delusional scale.”
Hoffman: Operational unforced errors are fine during rapid growth
“What's important about this story is that it's full of unforced errors, and I would argue that those errors are fine, so long as you're pursuing a massive growth opportunity. When you're moving fast, you can't say, oh, we're going to study this for six months,…”