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 464 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
Guo: Daron Acemoglu fundamentally misunderstands AI scaling and technology
“Darren's arguing about something he doesn't understand. Like he, his claim is, you know, how do we know scale works? More data won't make customer support reps better. I think like that's just a fundamental, like misunderstanding of the technology and also obj…”
Knoop: AGI progress has stalled over the last five years
“You know, my belief is that AGI progress has really stalled out over the last four or five years.”
Knoop: ARC-AGI is the only true AGI evaluation that exists
“Arc AGI to best of my knowledge is the only true. AGI eval that actually exists in the world and measures a actually good definition, correct definition of what AGI is, which we can talk about.”
Knoop: LLMs are high-dimensional memorization, not general intelligence
“Effectively what large language models do today is they are high dimensional memorization systems, right? They are trained on lots of training data. They're able to find and generalize patterns off of the training data that they're trained on and then apply th…”
Tan: SF declined because people feared advocating for basic policies
“I think that SF got very, very bad because you couldn't say basic things like, I believe in algebra for middle schoolers, right?”
Tan: Politically motivated education researchers control math curriculum debate
“There are researchers who are highly politically and ideologically motivated who have Control of the apparatus that is like, you know, sort of quote unquote science, I guess. And then you have real scientists, real mathematicians, real computer scientists at B…”
Chase: Open-source models still lag behind Claude 3 and GPT-4
“Like there's, I think we see increasingly interest in open source, but the reasoning abilities are still just like lagging behind Cloud three or GPT four. And I think like for a lot of the applications that it kind of, it probably depends on the types of appli…”
Srivastava: The ease of running CUDA workloads on AMD is significantly overstated
“I've, I personally think that it's pretty overstated how easy it is to run something that looks like CUDA or CUDA in some form on an AMD chip seems, seems like a challenge to me.”
Liberty: OSS Vector Database Competitors Are Already Struggling With Commercialization
“And in fact, we already see, even though new players in the vector database space that, that, that basically started to try to take us down, all took the open source angle. We already see them, even young as they might be, they are already struggling, struggli…”
Mensch: AI safety should regulate application makers, not trust big model labs
“And the way you make this healthy competition is not By trusting a couple of companies to do their own safety, it's rather for, it's rather the way you do it is to ask application makers to comply with some rules.”
Hoffman: AI Improves Humanity's Overall Risk Portfolio Against Pandemics and Climate
“When you get to pandemic, maybe the only way to solve pandemic is AI. Well, a certain help for climate is AI. It's net, I think, strongly in the positive column. It doesn't to say that it might not add some existential risk characteristics to the overall portf…”
Hoffman: Intense AI regulation enshrines the past and harms humanity
“Generally speaking, regulation is enshrining the past against the future, and if you look at every industry that goes really intense in regulation, it's, it slows down intensely on innovation, and if you say, well, that's what we should be doing in AI, it's li…”
Mensch: Banning open-source AI enforces regulatory capture for incumbents
“Today going, banning open source, preventing it from happening is really a way, well, to enforce regulatory capture, even though the actors that would benefit from it, Don't want it to happen. But by design, if you actually ban small actors from doing things i…”
Sutskever: AGI causing universal unemployment is 'not impossible'
“If you believe that the technology that we are building, AGI, could potentially be so capable as to do every single task that people do, does it mean that it might unemploy everyone? Well, I don't know, but it's not impossible.”
Sutskever: Transformers can reach AGI; alternatives only offer compute efficiency
“So it's better to think about it in terms of compute efficiency rather than in terms of, can it get there at all? I think at this point, the answer is obviously yes.”
NVIDIA is extorting customers amid AI chip shortages, says Cerebras CEO
“I think they're now in a situation where they're extorting customers. They're extremely expensive. They're unable to ship. And that has, among other things, opened the door for many of us who have alternatives.”
Uszkoreit doubts humans will ever achieve full mechanistic understanding of biology
“I don't have very high hopes for humanity to develop that conceptual understanding to the level that we would need it in order to do all the interventions we want to do.”
Slootman: Graduates should avoid management consulting for real economy operating roles
“Don't go working for some consulting firm, you know, out of school, right? Try to get a real job in the real economy, building real products, selling real products. He says, you really need to feel what it's like, you know, to sort of be in the drive train of …”
Pomel: Everyone buys security software but nobody is more secure
“Everybody's buying security software. Nobody is more secure as a result.”
Schimpf: China holds a decisive military advantage with longer-range missiles
“China has been able to modernize and build new technologies and sort of like they're pretty decisive advantage in countering the way that U S fights the longer range of their missiles. Like all of these things are pretty substantial. So there was a degree of l…”
Google should be worried because its traditional search model will fail
“You know, if I was Google, I would be pretty worried because that old school system does not look like it's going to be where we're at in 10 years time.”
Silicon Valley must embrace European-style democratic oversight for AI models
“You know, the Valley probably needs to be a bit more open to the European approach. The reality is that, you know, we have to figure out as a society which bodies we trust to make decisions which influence recommendation algorithms or AI algorithms, right? And…”
Only About 100 People Worldwide Possess Skills to Train Foundation Models
“There's only like a hundred people who can train models in the world. Like it's not really a science. It's more an art, like losses explode all over the place when you try to do something.”
Large AI Model Runs Should Be Registered Like Dual-Use Biological Weapons
“I think that a productive outcome of that regulation is anything above a certain level of flops needs to be registered similar to, well, bio weapons and things that have the potential for dual use.”
Gil: Elon Musk's AI moratorium call was self-serving given his LLM startup
“Musk was asking for a six month moratorium on progress, which seems to me very self-serving if you're simultaneously starting an LLM company, you know.”
Zaharia: Model quality experiences diminishing returns from parameter scaling
“And also there's usually, there are usually diminishing returns from scale in, in terms of quality of models in general. And you can also kind of see it in other areas, like in computer vision, for example, we don't have, you know, trillion parameter models.”
Denis Yarats says sacrificing work-life balance is required to beat competition
“It's kind of like work life balance, maybe not the ideal but you know, but that's the only way to sort of like beat competition and sort of like iterate very fast and do great things.”
Aravind Srinivas says pursuing an AI PhD is a terrible career choice
“Especially a PhD student is one of the worst Jobs you can go for in a time when AI is so hot and so highly paid and you can do a startup or join a startup.”
Ramaswamy: Amazon Search Is a Joke Polluted by Misleading Ads
“I find Amazon search experience a joke because it is so full of ads and it's actually misleading ads where it's really hard to find what is going on.”
Ramaswamy: Big Tech Claims That Ads Democratize Access Are Entirely Self-Serving
“I find this whole thing of ads enable Google to make free products or ads enable Facebook to be available for Ecuadorian people made by billionaires sitting in Palo Alto to be entirely self-serving.”
Haas: AI compute capacity is not even close to oversupplying demand
“The bubble in terms of, are we over oversupply to demand? Not even close. And I think again, that's because the demand is insatiable.”
Taylor: Most Nuclear Startups Are Just Modeling and Simulation Companies
“So if you look at the nuclear industry outside of Valor, it's mostly a modeling and simulation industry. Like, when you think of a nuclear company, right, there's, like, nuclear companies out there that everyone knows the name of, and you kind of look under th…”
Taylor: TRISO helium-cooled reactor geometry is humanity's safest reactor design
“A triso-fueled, graphite-moderated, helium-cooled reactor of the geometry that we've built it here is just about as safe as humanity knows how to build a nuclear reactor.”
Sarah Guo: AI making human skill irrelevant is complete nonsense
“I think the idea that human skill is no longer relevant in the world of superhuman AI, just as a product of the technology itself is nonsense.”
Gil: Late-stage AI investors wrongly assume startups have trillion-dollar trajectories
“One is for the mid to late stage technology markets, people are continuing to invest as if there's velocity to get to a trillion for many companies where I don't think there's a velocity. Again, I think the, Some of them will get to 20, some will get to a hund…”
Gil: Fear of frontier labs drives founders into derivative niche markets
“And I think that's why you're seeing a flight to hardware companies. Oh, the labs will never do this hardware thing. And so we'll do that. And American dynamism and niche applications of AI and something that should be provided by an inference cloud. And et ce…”
Gil: Anthropic and OpenAI Should Never Sell in the Near Term
“There's a handful of companies that should never, ever sell, at least any time in the near term. If you're anthropic, you shouldn't sell. If you're opening, you shouldn't sell. You know, there's a handful of these things that should never sell.”
Guo: Compute and complex data are bigger AI limiters than algorithms
“The question of, like, how you are going to go gather that data for less verifiable, more complex domains, or do you run into the actual constraints on the, like, physical compute accessibility side? Like, I think that's probably more of a limiter than this be…”
Gil: The 'death of SaaS' narrative is overstated due to token budgeting
“That's why I think the death of SAS is a little bit overstated because why would you use tokens on a bunch of SAS stuff that you're not actually paying that much for per year relative to the outcome of those same tokens being invested against a core product or…”
Gil: 1970s Safety Lobby Killed Abundant Clean Nuclear Energy in the US
“We had a safety lobby in the seventies basically kill abundant clean energy for us, right?”
Tokmak: Gen Z job candidates obsess over a permanent underclass mentality
“I see, especially Gen Z in these days when I'm, you know, looking at hiring, obsessed with this permanent underclass mentality. If I don't make my money in the next 18 months, or if I don't learn everything in the world in the next six months, then I am foreve…”
Zuckerberg: A Centralized Superintelligence Will Not Solve Science
“Our vision is not that there's going to be like some central super intelligence that solves all of science.”
Nadella: Many open-weight models look good on benchmarks but fail in practice
“In fact, that's one of the challenges of a lot of the open-weight models is they look great on one benchmark or two, but they're not great on practice.”
Nadella: Multimodal agent harnesses achieve higher real-world performance
“I would claim that you can have a multimodal harness that can in fact be more performant in the real world.”
Nadella: Private AI evals may be an enterprise's biggest IP
“Every company having private evals may be the biggest IP, right? I think about it, like what's that private eval that you can then use even a frontier model to hill climb on and not leak the traces. Maybe one of the biggest drivers of IP.”
Helberg: Pax Silica's private-sector model is more ethical than state-led alliances
“And because we're approaching it by putting our companies in the driver's seat it's actually, you know, in, in a lot of ways, it's much more ethical because the deal is structured in a way that's really meant to be you know, a true joint venture and one that w…”
Helberg: Replicating Semiconductor Fabs Abroad Makes No Sense Before US Completion
“There's a whole host of reasons why it wouldn't necessarily make sense to try to replicate that elsewhere because it's highly technical. The global talent supply of talent available in that area is very finite and limited. And it's also extremely capital inten…”