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 3,312 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
Mensch: AI base models should know everything and use modular guardrails
“Assuming that the model should be well behaved is, I think, a wrong assumption. You need to make the assumption that the model should know everything. And then on top of that, have some modules that moderate and guardrail the model.”
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.”
Reid Hoffman: Calls for a Global Six-Month AI Pause Cannot Work
“You don't set up a flare and say, everyone should pause for six months. Oh, look, eight billion people paused. On your theory of the universe, the UN would be a highly functioning organization that we would all use for a whole bunch of things. It doesn't work.”
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: AI cannot be built by UN committees, academics lack building experience
“And you just can't have AI built by UN committee. It just doesn't exist. And it's one of the things that academics mostly don't understand because they've never, most of them, not all, of course, but most have never built anything, don't really understand how …”
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: 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: 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…”
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.”
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.”
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, …”
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 …”
Slootman: High-intensity cultures naturally filter out employees lacking the company's DNA
“Culture shorts and sifts. You attract the right ones and you start losing the wrong ones. So it's actually quite perfect. If people are leaving, they're just not your DNA. They're not your blood type.”
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…”
Schimpf: Anduril Builds Weapons and Believes It Is Ethical and Necessary
“We've been clear. We work on weapons. We believe that's important. We believe you can do it ethically. We believe it's necessary. And we're not shy about that.”
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.”
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…”
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.”
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.”
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…”
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 argues AI application builders understand LLMs better than trainers
“The people who use the LLMs for building stuff, Understand it better than the people who actually did gradient descent and train these models.”
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…”
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.”
Inference-time compute is the missing scaling dimension for AI reasoning
“This is why I'm interested in the reasoning direction, because I think there's this whole other dimension. That people are not scaling right now, which is the amount of compute at inference time.”
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.”
Huang has over 40 direct reports and does zero one-on-ones
“Yeah, I have 40 some odd direct reports. And no one-on-ones no career coaching, you know?”
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: Coinbase staff should take their personal AI brains when leaving
“You can have a brain for each individual, which, by the way, I believe they should be able to take with them when they leave Coinbase. So we're creating some good policies on that.”
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.”
Armstrong discloses investment in embryo editing startup Preventive
“There's a company I invested in called Preventive that's doing embryo editing.”
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…”