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 1,567 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 43 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
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…”
Wang: The path to AGI resembles curing cancer, not a vaccine
“My biggest belief here is that the path to AGI is is one that looks a lot more like curing cancer than developing a vaccine. And what I mean by that is I think that the path to build AGI is going to be in, in, you know, you're going to have to solve a bunch of…”
Wang: AI gets no positive transfer across modalities like video to text
“My understanding there's no positive transfer from learning in one modality to other modalities. So like training off of a bunch of video doesn't really help you that much with your text problems and vice versa.”
Wang: No strong evidence that video creates useful AI world models
“I don't think there's strong scientific evidence of that yet. Maybe there will be eventually.”
Ejeckam: AI data center demand will crash the grid without novel cooling
“We believe that a consciousness that if a material science and more specifically a physics or chemistry approach to solving the heat problem is not used today, that the needs of AI data centers around the world is based on projections today will crash the grid…”
Huang: In 2-3 years, every science breakthrough will use generative AI
“If we give ourselves another couple, two, three years, the world's going to change. There's not going to be one paper There's not going to be one breakthrough in science, one breakthrough in engineering where generative AI isn't at the foundation of it. I'm fa…”
Mansour: Kalshi is the sole legal, regulated US election trading exchange
“So we won this month, and the cool thing now is, like, it's the first time in a hundred years that betting on the election, trading on the election is actually legal in the U.S., It's finally back to actually being legal, and this time it's actually regulated,…”
Mansour: Kalshi predicts daily weather better than most stations
“Like we can predict daily weather more accurately than most weather stations.”
Khan: FTC Finalized Rule Banning Most Employment Non-Compete Clauses
“A few months ago, the FTC finalized a rule that would ban non-compete clauses in the vast majority of employment contracts.”
Steinberger: It will eventually be responsible to replace human CEOs with AI
“There'll be some CEO system, and then, like, the responsible decision will be to, you know, like, have that thing be the CEO, and then, so that will happen at some point.”
Franceschi: Human-level AI will eliminate the need for traditional ERP systems
“And I think as you bring a lot of that data with, you know, assuming AI will get there and essentially operate with human level performance, you won't need anymore this concept of an ERP, and then you effectively have sort of this real time layer into what's h…”
Knoop: Purely scaling language models will not achieve AGI
“Scaling language models purely will not get there.”
Knoop: ARC solution will likely need under 10k code lines, not massive LLMs
“It's quite likely actually that the solution it can be like written in like 10,000 lines of code or less. And it's not gonna require these like, you know, gigantic You know, two hundred billion large parameter models in order to solve it.”
Alexandr Wang: Achieving AGI will take multiple decades of solving individual problems.
“My biggest belief here is that the path to AGI is is one that looks a lot more like curing cancer than developing a vaccine. And what I mean by that is I think that the path to build AGI is going to be in, in, you know, you're going to have to solve a bunch of…”
Alexandr Wang: Cross-modality training produces no positive transfer between video and text.
“I think the main thing, fundamentally, is I think there's very limited generality that we get from these models and even for multimodality, for example my understanding there's no positive transfer from learning in one modality to other modalities. So like tra…”
Scott Wu: AI will lead to more software engineers, not fewer
“I think if anything, there's going to be more engineers, not less and I'll kind of give two reasons why. I think the first is there's just so much demand for engineering out there and so much demand, honestly, even in ways that we don't always think about, rig…”
Peebles: Sora will evolve into interactive world simulators with autonomous humans
“And so looking forward, as we continue to scale up models like Sora, we think we're going to be able to build these, like, world simulators, where essentially, you know, anybody can interact with them. I, as a human, can have my own simulator running, and I ca…”
Peebles: Video models will eventually surpass humans as physical world models
“We're optimistic that Sora will, you know, supersede that kind of capability and will, you know, in the long run enable it to be More intelligent one day than humans as world models.”
Mensch: LLMs are not marginally more dangerous than web search
“Nothing is showing that LLM is actually marginally better than a search engine to find knowledge on, on topics that would enable bad use.”
Mensch: AI bioweapon risk narrative relies on unscientific circular citations
“No scientific studies in proper form was published, but then policy papers started to cite Non-scientific papers arguing that these were scientific evidences that the bioweapon narrative was actually true. And then policy papers started to cite the other polic…”
Mensch: AI will not trigger the next pandemic; climate change will
“I don't think AI is going to be the one triggering the next pandemic. It's always going to be climate change.”
Mensch: Zero evidence AI development is headed toward a singularity
“If we can make a model which is growingly intelligent, then maybe you're at a singularity level. There's no evidence whatsoever that we are on the way of doing that, of making that happen.”
Gil: SARS leaked from laboratories four times in first two years
“Because SARS, they both snuffed out with the original form, but then it leaked four times in the first two years after it was cultured in a lab. It kept leaking from what eventually became the Wuhan Institute of Biology when they moved it from Beijing to Wuhan…”
Polosukhin: AI agent CEOs will run organizations and replace middle management
“I really think one of the most interesting cases is organizations that are run completely by AI, right? Where quote unquote CEO role is taken by AI agent. Who's tasked by, you know, by community or board of directors or whatever is oversight governance is to, …”
Scott and Altman suspect the next trillion-dollar company is founded in 2023
“You know, one of the things that Sam Altman and I have talked about a lot is like, I suspect that this year, like the next trillion dollar company gets founded.”
Drone delivery competitors have spent billions without serving a single customer
“There are other companies in, you know, the drone delivery industry that I think have taken more of a moonshot approach and they've spent billions of dollars and have not served a single customer yet.”
All Base Foundation Models Will Ultimately Open Source Their Pre-Training Phase
“So my take is that foundation models will all be open source for the deep learning phase.”
Emerging Market AI Systems Will Outperform the West Within Five Years
“I am certain that system will outperform anything in the West within five years.”
Small Hive Architecture AI Models Will Massively Outperform Large Monolithic Models
“I think that small models will outperform large models massively, like I said, the Hive model aspect”
Gil: AI poses no existential threat to humanity within ten years
“So you need physical form for the AI in order for it to truly be an existential threat. And that's why if I were to focus on an area, it'd probably be robotics or something like that, because that's where you suddenly give physical form to something. And if yo…”
Srinivas: AI search will incentivize publishers to create higher-quality content
“I think it's just going to incentivize people to publish higher quality content. In order to get cited by an LLM powered answer, like Substack or things like that try to do, like you want to own your content and you publish it and make sure it's high quality a…”
Armstrong predicts AI agents will outnumber humans in near future
“I, there'll be more agents than humans in the not too distant future.”
Armstrong: Private credit, treasuries, and deposits will all be tokenized
“Private credit and treasuries and bank deposits, like everything's going to get tokenized. And it, it's just going to mean that financial services is going to have modern, modern rails to run on.”
Haas: Nvidia, Amazon, Microsoft, and Google Backed Arm's Physical Chip Strategy
“So whether it was Nvidia, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, All people who build ARM-based server chips, they were all on board, and I think the ultimate proof point was when we announced the product last March, we had Jensen, we had Ronnie Boker, we had Amin, we had…”
Haas: AI Could Automate Simple Chip Design to GDSII in 5+ Years
“I don't know if it's in two to three years away, but five plus years, can you go from idea to a GDS two file being the file that you actually send to the fab to go get built. For certain designs, quite possible. So it takes that whole design piece out of the w…”
Haas: AI Won't Push-Button Design Frontier Chips Outperforming Leading Architectures
“Now, if you go into the tool and say, design me something that's 10% faster than Vera Rubin, 20% cheaper, and 30% more efficient on this model, You're not gonna get press a button and have it happen right away.”
Arm CEO Rene Haas: AI chip supply constraints will last 3–5+ years
“That's not going to stop in 12 months. It's not going to stop in 24 months. I think we're going to be in this constrained environment for Three to five years at least.”
Haas: Edge AI Will Be a Sweet Spot for Arm Architecture
“And in fact, as you get to the smaller footprints, where more and more AI is going to take place, that's going to be a sweet spot for Arm, because the CPU's table stakes anyway, you have to have it to do all the things that are required in the edge device. But…”
Hodak: Science is the first to restore form vision in blind patients
“Nobody had previously ever been able to restore a form vision image in the mind's eye of a blind patient in this way.”
Hodak: Science aligns animal brain recordings with AI model representations
“We use that constructively at science like that. So we know that that is. That is true because we can get alignments between animal brain neural recordings and AI model internal representations.”
Hodak: Cardiovascular disease and non-brain cancer are attackable via organ replacement
“The two leading causes of death though, are cardiovascular disease and cancer is not metastasized to the brain. And I think both of those are going to be really attackable through this type of work.”
Taylor: Valar Atomics Will Scale Fission to Make Energy 10x Cheaper
“We have nuclear reactors that are more manufactured than constructed and they're extremely safe. And we think the combination of these two things is going to allow us to scale nuclear fission and make energy 10 times cheaper for humanity.”
Taylor: Nuclear energy causes fewer deaths per unit of power than solar
“Nuclear energy is the safest form of energy, empirically. If you look at the amount of power generated versus the amount of deaths it's even safer than solar, which is very strange, because how does someone die from solar? But actually, most solar is installed…”
Valar Built a $5M Nuclear Reactor Component In-House For $400K
“And we were quoted about five million dollars and we were told it would take about two and a half years to build. And so we said, well, all right, maybe I'd be willing to pay five million dollars, but I'm certainly not going to wait two and a half years. And s…”
Taylor: Valar Atomics will reach fifth reactor while competitors seek debt financing
“We are willing to go build reactors on equity balance sheet because that's going to allow us to prove it years ahead of anybody else, right? Where, where our competitors are still trying to convince, you know fundamentally risk averse you know, financers to fi…”
Taylor: AI and robotics will make energy the sole cost of goods
“When we figure out AI and robotics that allows us to do semi-autonomous manufacturing, energy will become the cost of all things, right?
The cost of buying a thing will become the cost of energy used to make it.”
Guo: Researchers have predicted ASI is 18 months away for five years
“The data I have is that a number of very smart and even very self-aware research scientists have felt that, you know, there was some knee in the curve on recursive self-improvement or ASI, 18 months away, every 18 months for the last five years.”