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 17 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 1 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
McCormick: Cancer is probably gone in 10 years
“I think a hot take would be cancer is probably gone in 10 years, I think is one of my favorite hot takes. There's just so many different attacks on it, and CAR T cell therapies are doing well, and it's a matter of kind of scaling, scaling those out.”
McCormick: Frontier AI will settle into an oligopoly among 3-4 labs
“A lot of the VC firms are getting in multiple companies because they don't think it's going to be winner-take-all anymore. They think it's going to be much more oligopolistic for the long term, and there will be competition between the major three or four labs…”
McCormick: AI labs will become profitable hyperscalers like cloud
“It seems like the labs will Turn into sort of new hyperscalers. There will be you know, increased competition, but still very, very good businesses a la cloud.”
McCormick: AI Will Produce a Couple of $10T Companies
“There's probably going to be like a couple of 10 trillion dollar AI companies that are going to pay for the whole thing.”
McCormick: Humanoid Robotics Will Erode Margins Into Consumer Surplus
“Humanoids scare the hell out of me as an investor, because it's like this really impossibly hard thing to do with a lot of really, really smart people working on it, where like, if you pull off this impossible thing, then you're competing against these 10 othe…”
McCormick: Large VC funds will survive while emerging funds fail
“I think it's like a really, I think like the big funds are actually super well positioned and all, there's going to be a lot of these like emerging ish funds who try to compete who I just think it kind of like wiped out.”
McCormick: Any strategic crypto reserve holding Cardano is a joke
“Any strategic reserve that has Cardano in it is just, it's a joke, right?”
McCormick: AI labs obsess over competitor compute despite public denials
“And this is really, really relevant to the AI lab discussion because you can tell that even though all of the leaders of the AI lab say, I don't think about the competition. I don't talk about the competition. I'll use general terms. They're all obsessed with …”
McCormick: OpenAI and Anthropic are the most unprofitable companies in history
“These are the most unprofitable companies in human history, I think.”
McCormick: OpenAI recouped all GPT-4 training costs and more
“GPT four is the really instructive is the really instructive example because I believe that model costs like a hundred million dollars to train, and it was really expensive at the time, but then very quickly they were on a multi-billion dollar run rate, and it…”
McCormick: Models mastering complex tax and legal nuances is six months away
“This is like a six month away thing.”
McCormick: Startups can put K-12 education on a Moore's Law curve
“And I think they actually can, you can like put education on a Moore's law, like cost curve and get, make education better for less and less money.”
McCormick: Creator egos make Substack newsletter bundles nearly impossible
“That actually I think in practice, like when you, when you're like dealing with people who have kind of like egos and think that their own thing is like the thing most important are really, really, really hard to pull off in practice. Like I wouldn't want to b…”
McCormick: In five years much of finance will run on blockchains
“And I think it's like some point in five years, a lot of finance is going to run on Solana on ETH maybe on sweet or, you know, like a lot of, I think it's inevitable that, that more and more. Finance will move over to crypto stable coins and having Stripe behi…”
McCormick: OpenAI and Anthropic inference margins are healthy
“Well, it's way, way cheaper than what you pay to Anthropic or OpenAI, so they must have good margins, and everyone sort of agrees at this point that inference margins are in fact healthy.”
McCormick: Not Boring Capital is shifting toward Series A rounds
“I'm trying to make actually moving closer to the series a now and like not doing deep tech because like, I'm not the guy to underwrite the science. And if I'm like the investor that you're calling to have something that has a bunch of science risk in it, like …”