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 185 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 7 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
Helberg: DeepSeek lied about compute capacity and distilled ChatGPT weights
“The main takeaways of how DeepSeq achieved the performance its performance was Incremental efficiency gains. They lied about their compute capacity because they have a billion dollar cluster, and they distilled ChatGPT's model weights.”
Prince: Prominent AI companies use state-hacker tactics to bypass scraping blocks
“In fact, some really prominent companies That do some very, very, very shady things where they basically say, absolutely, we follow the rules of the road, but when push comes to serve, if it turns out they're blocked, then all of a sudden they're doing a bunch…”
Caruso: Mayor Bass cut LAFD budget, leaving equipment mothballed in lots
“The city didn't even have enough equipment because they've underfunded the fire department for so long, and Mayor Bass cut even more out this last budget cycle That they had equipment mothballed in parking lots.”
Stability AI Has More Compute Available Than Microsoft or Google
“The reality is we have more compute available to us than Microsoft or Google.”
Taylor: Nuclear is a fake industry charging 100x margins
“Everywhere you look, it's a fake industry that has not been building anything for 40 years, and the little bit that they have been building, they're charging a 100 X margin on.”
Overnight AI intelligence explosion unlikely due to test-time compute bottlenecks
“And I don't think we're headed to that world largely because of the fact that the models rely so much on large scale test time compute. In order to achieve their greatest intelligence. If you, if it requires so much test time compute to unlock the full capabil…”
Tan: President Trump asked him to resign over conflicts of interest
“Well, the most surprising that I don't learn from my previous job or even training is one day early morning, President Trump asking me to resign and a conflict of interest, and there's no exceptions.”
Zuckerberg: Curing all disease by end of century is too conservative
“But still, I mean, people thought that by the end of the century was a stretch. Now I think it's, like too conservative.”
Huang: DeepSeek paper was Silicon Valley's most important recent read
“This is, you know, let's face it, Deep Seek was probably the single most important paper that most Silicon Valley researchers read from in the last couple years.”
Patel: Anthropic has surpassed OpenAI in API revenue
“Anthropic has eclipsed OpenAI and API revenue, and their API revenue is primarily not thinking. It's clawed for, but it's not in the thinking mode.”
Chen: Researchers Degrade AI Factuality Just to Boost LMSYS Rankings
“A lot of researchers, they'll tell us that their VPs make them focus on increasing their rank on LMSYS. And so I've had researchers explicitly tell me that they're okay with making their models worse. Add factuality works at following instructions as long as i…”
Slootman: Customer success departments are the 'biggest bullshit' in Silicon Valley
“Yeah, we, I did kill customer success at every company I've been in. I think it's the biggest bullshit thing that goes on in Silicon Valley.”
Armstrong: The agentic economy will surpass the human economy
“It kind of stands to reason that the agentic economy will be bigger than the human economy at some point in the not too distant future as well.”
Armstrong explores cognitive enhancement therapies for adults, children, and embryos
“One idea I've been contemplating a little bit is around cognitive enhancement. And there, you know, there's been these things people have realized, like if you, I think in, in development of children, like if you give them enough folic acid and like certain nu…”
Armstrong predicts having children without embryo editing will eventually be considered abnormal
“I think it'll be more normal over time. And at some point it'll be abnormal To have children without doing this kind of screening and editing, because it'd be like, well, this is so risky.”
Ehrlich says legacy data tools cannot handle noisy AI agent data
“So you need tools that are able to both understand data from multiple locations, clean the noise, and make sure all of these data that's been created is actually usable. It doesn't apply with the old tools that were very, some of them were incredible. Five Tro…”
Taylor: Valar Atomics will turn on a new reactor every few minutes
“And we will get it down to minutes. This company will get, we'll get to the point where we have a new reactor turning on every few minutes.”
Taylor: Valar Atomics could be worth $500B in 10 years
“And, you know, we're sitting here right now, you know, less than three years from the founding of the company, and I think if you look back at 10 years in 10 years from now, and, you know, Valor's worth five hundred billion, something like that you will be abl…”
Taylor: Nuclear Fission Will Make Energy 1,000 Times Cheaper
“I know that nuclear fission will make energy a thousand times cheaper than it is today. Somebody will do that.”
Gil: California is discussing an exit tax on departing residents by 2028
“And my sense is in 28, there's increasing talk about also trying to add a exit tax in California. So if you actually try and leave, they'll, they'll try and take a big chunk as sort of a penalty for that.”
Noam Brown: AI Model Outputs Are Arguably More Trustworthy Than Humans
“I use it day to day for a lot of this kind of stuff, and I think they're at a point now where They've actually been at a point for a while now where I feel like I can just trust the outputs, arguably more than I could trust the output from a human.”
Nadella: Data center buildout will ultimately lower energy prices long-term
“In fact, if anything, it's bringing down prices because long-term there's going to be a better grid. There is going to be more energy.”
Helberg: Belt and Road countries frequently default, yielding equity to China
“It is Chinese workers, Chinese companies, you know, and a lot of the times it's Chinese equity because the debt converts to equity if, you know, the host country defaults. They do a lot of the times.”
Gil: Chinese Open-Source Subsidies Indirectly Subsidize US Enterprise AI Adopters
“At least for now, it looks like effectively the Chinese government is subsidizing at least a large subset of these models, and that subsidy or surplus is effectively just being passed on to US enterprises We're adopting these models. In other words, it's a way…”
Allaire: Double-Digit GDP Growth in the 2030s Is Achievable in Many Regions
“It does feel like we have the potential for double-digit GDP numbers in the twenty-thirties. Like, that's, that seems not unrealistic to me. Not that that's going to be uniform all around the world, but certainly in large, large parts of the world, that seems …”
Tiwari: GPU Depreciation Doesn't Matter in Fully Amortizing Contract-Backed Debt
“First is, On that depreciation question, in these kind of debt structures, it doesn't really matter because the debt's fully paid off by the end of the debt term against committed contractual you know, contracts from investment grade counterparties.”
Scaringe: Automakers failing at neural net autonomy will shrink to zero
“It's the companies that do this well will exist. The companies that don't do this well, like, I feel really strong on this. They will not exist. They will shrink to nothing. They'll asymptotically approach, you know, zero.”
Desai: Database infrastructure carries no risk of disruption from AI
“AI will still go on, and this is a layer you must have. That's it. So TAM must have layer, no risk of disruption.”
Michael: Boston Dynamics made less AI progress than Tesla Optimus
“Which is why Boston Dynamics didn't make as much progress as Optimist did in the AI. You know, the things that started later on robotics just worked better because they were more AI infused.”
Huang: Tech companies should not lobby governments to regulate competitors
“As a policy, as a practice, I don't think companies ought to go to governments to advocate for the regulation on other companies and other industries, just in practice. Their intentions
Are clearly deeply conflicted.
And their intentions are clearly, you know,…”
Huang: Without energy growth policies, US would have lost AI revolution
“If not for this entire change in, in sentiment, About energy growth in our country. We can all concede now. We would have handed this industrial revolution to somebody else.”
Huang: Natural gas is probably the only viable power solution this decade
“We're going to need nuclear. Wind is not going to be enough. Solar is not going to be enough. Let's just all acknowledge that we'll take it. We'll take everything we can. But the fact that matters, I think for the next decade, natural gas, you know, is probabl…”
Huang: Chinese military is unlikely to use American tech
“And so that American technology, although general purpose it is unlikely to be used by their military because their military is too smart, just as our military is too smart to use their technology.”
Huang: China contributes more to open source than any other country
“No country in the world contributes more to open source than China.”
Johnson: 2026 Will Be the Year YOLO Dies
“Ok, my prediction for twenty-twenty-six is it will be the year that YOLO dies. We will begin transforming ourselves from a you only live once to don't die.”
Hendrycks: U.S. and China may launch preemptive cyberattacks on data centers
“I think that later on, it becomes so destabilizing that China just says, we're going to do something preemptive, like do a cyber attack on your data center. And the U.S. Might do that to China.”
Dell: Cheap solar and storage will make nuclear economics unviable
“My opinion is that the rate of solar deployment will go up so fast as the costs continue to go down that it might just not matter. That we'll have so, it'll be so easy and low cost to deploy solar and storage that the economics of building nuclear reactors jus…”
Arora: Product managers are effectively glorified UI managers
“Product managers are effectively glorified UI managers, so we're trying to make sure that us common folks can interact with data and some sort of engineering algorithm behind it because we're not smart enough to talk to the engineering algorithm ourselves.”
Nikesh Arora: Incumbents will squeeze AI security startups out of existence
“The current startups you mentioned like startups that are trying to do what AI wrappers are trying to do on LLMs. And over time we're going to get better and better where we're going to squeeze their capability over time that you wouldn't need them.”
Arora predicts 80% to 90% of customer support eliminated in 2-5 years
“I think in concept from a north star perspective, we should be able to take 80, 90% of customer support out in the next two to five years across the landscape.”
Liemandt: Alpha School yields top 1% academic performance in two hours daily
“And so we built a learning engine that teaches kids 10 times faster. It's all based on the principles of learning science. And so then now we can commit to kids. You just need to do two hours a day and you're going to crush your academics. So top one percent p…”
Liemandt: Private school A-students test up to three grades behind
“Your student academically
On our standard, on standardized tests that we use are somewhere between one grade level ahead.
If they had a straight A transcript transferring in to us, one level, one grade level ahead to three grade levels behind.
And if they're a…”
Liemandt: Mastering a grade-level subject takes 20 to 30 hours
“The average grade level subject combo, so fourth grade math, takes between 20 and 30 hours
To master.
That's it.”
Alpha School Pays Middle Schoolers $1,000 for Reaching Top 1%
“We have a system where if you're not top one percent, Coming into our middle school, we will pay you a thousand dollars when you hit top one percent in your subject.”
Liemandt: Skipping Multiplication Table Memorization Dooms Students in Advanced Math
“If you're an advanced math problem, and you're doing seven times eight, and seven times eight to you is still a calculation. Right? You're doomed, right? There's just, there's no way around it. You'll start making careless errors.”
Liemandt: 90% of Students Given ChatGPT in School Will Use It to Cheat
“If you give kids ChatGPT in school and academics, 90% will use it for cheating.”
Liemandt: Critical Thinking Impossible Without First Imparting a Factual Base
“If you don't give them a fact base, then their opinions are just making stuff up. You have to reason over a fact base.”
Liemandt: EdTech fails because school systems ignore academic outcomes and products are poor
“The problem with EdTech today and why it's failed and nobody wants to invest in it is you're trying to sell to a school system who actually doesn't care about academic outcomes back to the bundle. And you can't change the metrics that matter. And so you can't …”