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
Liemandt: A $500 student incentive program can fix US test scores
“For 400 dollars, maybe 500 dollars of incentive. Remember average education, right? We spend lots of, we spend up to 20 grand a kid. 500 bucks. We can totally fix and change the trajectory and all these bad test scores and all of that by making sure we're moti…”
Kushner: An Israel-Saudi Deal Could Have Finished in 3 to 6 Months in 2021
“When President Trump left in 2021, ah, a deal with Saudi could have been done in three to six months, and that was basically what I passed over to the previous, ah, administration, ah, during the transition.”
Kushner: Trump and Witkoff Will Successfully Resolve the Gaza Conflict
“We need to get the Gaza issue resolved, and I know President Trump and Steve Wyckoff are working incredibly hard on that, and I do believe that they will be successful, and then big progress will be made soon thereafter.”
Kushner: Second Trump term lower-level hires exceed first-term top-level talent
“The people that they're hiring now at like third and fourth levels into the government are better than the people who are willing to come work for us at the top levels in the first administration.”
Nadler: Psychoanalyzing the trauma behind your motivation destroys your propulsion system
“I mean, I think there's a lot of truth to that except you don't want to go too close to that stuff because you'll actually kill the propulsion system in analyzing it.”
Gil: Many big tech companies could shrink by 70% and improve
“If you look at the big tech companies, for example, right now, many, not all of them, but many of them could probably shrink by 70% and be more effective, right?”
Patel: Hyperscalers cannot replicate CPU and storage profit margins in GPUs
“Their ROIC is, like, extremely high on CPU and storage, and to assume that it can, like, translate over to GPUs is, is a bit of a fallacy, which is why a lot of these companies are moving in, right?”
Patel: Microsoft's AI hardware programs fail because Microsoft lacks model understanding
“There's a reason why Microsoft's hardware programs suck, right? Because they don't understand models at all.”
Patel: AMD cannot catch NVIDIA due to poor software, networking, and co-design
“Why is AMD not catching up despite being awesome at hardware engineering? Well, yeah, they're bad at networking, but also they suck at software and they can't do hardware software co-design.”
Patel: Microsoft dropped Stargate for OpenAI due to slow execution
“Microsoft is not building
Stargate for OpenAI, right? It's because it would have just been too slow, and they're doing it the lame and old way.”
Patel: Huawei Obtains TSMC Wafers via Shell Companies
“Huawei is still getting you know, wafers in Taiwan from TSMC through, like, shell companies, right?”
Prince: Cloudflare will soon publicly expose misbehaving AI scraping companies
“So, you know, watch our blog, and I have a feeling that some prominent AI companies that are misbehaving are Can get called out pretty soon.”
Prince: Regulate pathogen printers, not open-source AI models
“I'm actually quite skeptical of the, if we allow open source models, the world is going to end arguments. That seems histrionic to me. There are things we should worry about. Like it is, you know, I think some of the you know synthetic pathogens and other thin…”
Prince: Nvidia's power stance mirrors Intel's hubris in 2010
“When we talk with the folks at Nvidia, it feels a little bit like talking to Intel back You know, in our case in 2010, or Apple's case in 2005, where they were like, you're doing it wrong if you care about power efficiency.”
Krishnan: Passing SB 1047 Would Have Ended American Open-Source AI
“You know, like until last a year and a half ago, I was in California, along with all of you, California almost passed SB, which if that had happened, it would have been the end of open source, by the way, in the United States, we would not have a Lama. We woul…”
Krishnan: Biden Administration Attempted to Demonize and Ban Open-Source AI
“The Biden administration really, really tried to scare people about open source, talk about how unsafe it was. SB. And obviously tried to kind of basically ban it in many ways.”
Krishnan: Biden AI Policy Sought Centralized Control Across Four Companies
“One, very fundamental difference I think we have with the Biden administration is the Biden team really looked at AI as something to be centralized and controlled. Everything was about how do we make sure that we regulate these three or four companies and only…”
Krishnan: Climate Lobbyists and Doomers Blocked US Nuclear Development for Decades
“Nuclear, that's another case where I think for decades and decades, the climate lobby and the doomers that kind of stop any real efforts over there.”
Krishnan: Biden Diffusion Rule Effectively Banned US GPU Exports to Allies
“Under the Biden era, there was something called the Biden diffusion rule, which basically was a 200 page document, which basically made it illegal for America to export GPUs. It was really hard for you know, if you're Jensen or if you're Lisa Su to really kind…”
Gil: Closed-Source AI Labs Use Existential Risk Narratives for Regulatory Capture
“It's a very traditional form of regulatory capture. If you have a big pharma company, they work with the government to prevent other entrants into the industry. And this is exactly what it felt like is at least partially happening. In the AI world. Now that ma…”
Chen: Many YC Founders Only Care About Fundraising Brags and Headlines
“Like, if you talk to a bunch of YC founders or whoever it is, like, what is their goal? It really is to tell all their friends that they raised ten million dollars and show their parents they got a headline on TechCrunch. Like, that is their goal.”
Chen: LMSYS Chatbot Arena is a giant plague on AI
“One of the things I think is a giant plague on AI is Elimsis, Elimarena.”
Laskin: Enterprise AI coding tool productivity impact is negligible or negative
“Within enterprises, when you know, they're adopting coding tools and you see the impact that this is having on their actual productivity. And I think it's much lower than people expect. So it's in fact, it's sometimes negative, sometimes negligible.”
Laskin: Teaching AI agents to take action is mostly solved
“To me, it seems like really, 20% of the problem is teaching these agents how to act, and it's more or less solved.”
Laskin: New frontier labs can succeed without cloud provider ownership
“Our thought was that this was the time where you can actually start a you know, a generational frontier lab that does not need to be coupled to a, you know, to a big cloud provider because if you do it right, you'll actually be able to generate you know, suffi…”
Laskin: Machine learning generalization is just bringing test distribution into training
“There's no such thing as generalization. There's just bringing the test distribution into train.”
Parker Conrad: Founders learn far more from success than failure
“There's this sort of like idea in Silicon Valley that you should learn a lot from failures. And I, I'm not sure that I agree a lot with, I think that actually people probably learn a lot more from their successes and, you know, companies fail for like, Many du…”
Conrad: Public markets have become retirement communities for slow-growth companies
“The public markets have kind of become something of like a retirement community for, you know, very slow growth, but very profitable companies.”
Younis: Chinese Automakers Outperform Tesla on Autonomy and Features
“The autonomy stuff, you know, we go to China regularly and we test drive these vehicles. Super impressive. And better than Tesla to be like very, very clear.”
Younis: Tesla has solved autonomous business model, but Waymo has not
“The Waymo stuff is super impressive, but it is worth putting an asterisk. The business model hasn't been figured out yet. The Tesla business model has been figured out.”
Mann: Competitors ran 'code reds' to match Claude in coding and failed
“And I know that other companies have had like code reds for trying to catch up in coding capabilities for quite a while and have not been able to do it.”
Gil: Government, academia, and big tech have effectively functioned as UBI
“The degree to which we effectively had different forms of UBI or universal basic income in different sectors of the economy. Government is a clear example where there's enormous waste, fraud, grift, et cetera, happening. Parts of academia, if you just look at …”
Finn: Humanoids are overrated because collecting teleoperation data is too difficult
“On the other hand, I think that they're a little overrated, and one way it kind of to practically look at it is, I think that we're generally fairly bottlenecked on data right now, and some people argue that with humanoids, you can maybe collect data more easi…”
Hendrycks: Extreme AI export controls make a Taiwan invasion more likely
“If you turn the pain dial all the way up for China in export controls and if AI chips are the currency of economic power in the future, then this increases the probability that they want to invade Taiwan.”
Hendrycks: Voluntary AI Pauses Without Enforcement Only Benefit Bad Actors
“If you do it voluntarily, you just make yourself less powerful and you let the worst actors get ahead of you. You could say, well, we'll try and try to sign a treaty. We will not assume that the treaty will be followed. Like that would be very imprudent. You w…”
Hendrycks: AI Safety Is a Geopolitical Problem, Not Primarily a Technical One
“Safety isn't, as I've been I'm trying to reinforce not really that much of a technical problem. This is more of a complex geopolitical problem with technical aspects.”
Hendrycks: China will steal model weights even if chip controls succeed
“Even so, I still think if you really tighten the export controls, you made it so that China can't get any of those chips at all, and this is your, one of your biggest priorities, they're just going to steal the weights anyway.”
Afeyan: Traditional cancer staging has no basis in underlying biology
“Like right now, people say stage one cancer, stage two cancer, as though there's such a thing. The medical profession has created stages every once in a while, they change them. It's a joke. That's got nothing to do with underlying science and biology. No offe…”
Alidoust: Hypothesis-driven biology slowed progress, but falling costs enable unbiased data
“One thing that has been a Has been slowing the progress in bio is the fact that we have always been super hypothesis driven, and I think it has, the reason is that a lot of these experiments are expensive, you know, that they take a lot of time, a lot of resou…”
Hsu: High-throughput token generation will dominate biology over mechanistic research
“The vast majority of, you know, mechanistic data that's been generated to date is really made to ask very specific, very well scoped questions and just, you know, way more tokens per experiment is, you know, just, it's just going to be the way to do it.”
Vogt: Claims That Mostly Autonomous Systems Cannot Reach Full Autonomy Are Wrong
“That statement is, is almost certainly wrong given a long enough time span.”
Vogt: Winning Autonomous Driving Stacks in 2025 Will Not Require LiDAR
“If you're making a bet on the right technical approach in 20, 25, it does not involve a bunch of expensive LIDARs or exotic sensors. It involves the most commodity is sort of, you know, high volume, readily available sensors you can get, and probably just seve…”
Vogt: Founding a Startup to Commercialize PhD Research Is a Red Flag
“They will leave their academic program because they want to commercialize their research, which to me is like a huge red flag, because that means you are, you're saying, I'm not going to be flexible on how I solve the problem. I'm going to force my solution in…”
Vogt: China is years behind top US companies in self-driving
“I think even though they may be doing a lot of teleoperation and other things there, I do think that China is still years behind, behind the best US companies for self-driving.”
Vogt: Cruise was decimated by GM abandoning priority and support
“We got completely decimated by GM's like lack of, you know, priority and then completely abandoning crews.”
Caruso: LA reservoir was drained for repairs despite high fire risk
“There's a whole reservoir that was empty. That was drained because they wanted to have repairs on it. Well, we had a fire in Malibu, 10 minutes from the Palisades fire, three weeks before. That's probably a pretty good sign that we needed to be prepared, and w…”
Caruso: Palisades hydrant failure was caused by empty reservoir, not broken pipes
“The hydrants are empty. We're not getting water. It had nothing to do with broken pipes. It had everything to do with the reservoirs not being filled. Everything up there is gravity flow. So those reservoirs draining are coming into the hydrants, and there's p…”
Clerico: Wildfires Surged Due to Forest Management and Grid, Not Climate
“The reason that wildfires really reached a crescendo in the last 10 years, in my opinion, is not because of climate change, it's because of things like forest management, it's because of the way we've constructed our electrical grid, sort of more acute, self-i…”