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 137 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 5 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
Masad: Traditional SaaS application software value will drop to near zero
“My prediction is that all application software will go to zero. In other words, software will be dirt cheap, that no one will be making money on the traditional type of SaaS software.”
Masad: Human domain expertise is becoming exponentially less important due to AI
“Obviously domain expertise is still important, But it's not as important as it used to be. It's exponentially less important.”
Field: AI romantic partners are 'actively poisonous' to society
“I think AI boyfriends and girlfriends, if developed and allowed to exist is a societal self-owned. I think it's like actively poisonous to society if this becomes the primary, a primary mode of relationship.”
Englander: Founders should do whatever it takes to move to San Francisco
“My view for what it's worth is I think people should do what it takes to move to San Francisco. If that's not possible, that's not where your customers are based. At the very least, as you said, move to a tier one city and try and be as close to you know, folk…”
Kaplan: AI swarms will eventually replicate entire scientific communities
“Eventually we imagine AI models or millions of AI models perhaps working together will be able to do the work That whole human organizations can do. They'll be able to do the kind of work that the entire scientific community currently does.”
Srinivas: Google possessed only fourth or fifth best AI models in 2023-2024
“And 2024, 20 23 especially, and large part of 2024 too, Google had like, maybe a fourth or fifth best models at any moment. So as a startup outside Google, you had access to AI that was better than what Google internally had.”
Srinivas: Autonomous mobile AI agents can only be built inside web browsers
“And agents can only be built with a browser. I, I'm very, like, convinced about that vision, that if you want to have a mobile agent, That you can actually build and implement without being restricted by whatever OS rules that Apple or Google sets in terms of …”
Ng: Advising people not to learn to code is terrible career advice
“Over the last year, a bunch of people have advised others not to learn to code on the ground so AI will automate it. I think we'll look back on this as some of the worst career advice ever given, because as better tools make software engineering easier, more p…”
Ng: Employees across every job role should learn how to code
“I have a controversial opinion, which is, ah, I think it's time for everyone of every job role to learn to code, and in fact, on my team, you know, my CFO, my head of talent, my recruiters, my front desk person, all of them know how to code, and I actually see…”
Ng: AI existential risk claims are ridiculous hype used to aid fundraising
“This idea that AI is so powerful, we might accidentally lead to human extinction. That's just ridiculous, but it is a hype narrative that made certain businesses look more powerful, and it got Yeah, ramped up and actually help certain businesses fundraising go…”
Ng: Sensationalized AI danger hype is being weaponized against open-source software
“And I feel like this has been used as a weapon against open source software as well, right? Which is really unfortunate.”
Ng: California's SB 1047 would have harmed open-source AI without improving safety
“So I think typing up dangers, supposed false dangers of AI, in order to get regulators to pass laws, like the proposed SB-SB-Ten-Forty-Seven in California, which, thank goodness, we shut down, Would have put in place really burdensome regulatory requirements t…”
Ng: AI companies have made untrue statements to regulators behind closed doors
“I've been in the room where some of these businesses said stuff to regulators that was just not true.”
Garry Tan: Scammy founder programs produce future SBFs and Theranos fraudsters
“I worry that some of these programs are just literally trying to teach people to become more you know, SBFs and Theranos. And that's like, you know, that's a waste of time. Like, and you're going to go to jail.”
Tan: OpenAI o3 operates around 130 IQ, smarter than many past hires
“I think of O-three as basically about a 130 IQ, maybe O-three pro can be even smarter than that. When I really think about that, it's like, oh yeah, like a lot of the people who I've ever hired in my lifetime are like, yeah, O-three is smarter than that person…”
Chollet: AI field is obsessed with idea that scale alone yields AGI
“Our field became obsessed with the idea that general intelligence would spontaneously emerge by cramming more and more data into bigger and bigger models.”
Chollet: All inventive AI systems rely on discrete search
“All known AI systems today that are capable of some kind of invention, some kind of creativity, they rely on discrete search.”
Elon Musk emailed OpenAI saying it had zero percent success chance
“I can say this one because it got publicized in early, not early, a few years into OpenAI, where Elon sent us this really mean email. We'd been working through that for a while and said we had a zero percent chance of success. Like, not 0.10, that we were tota…”
Altman claims core scientific discovery in AI is mostly finished
“Figure out the remaining scientific stuff, which I don't think there's much left.”
Musk: Government efficiency work is a side quest compared to AI
“I did sort of feel a bit like, you know, when I was in D.C. Taking a lot of flack for, like, getting rid of waste and fraud, which was an interesting side quest as side quests go. But Got to get back to the main quest. Yeah, I gotta get back to the main quest …”
Musk: Humanoid robots will outnumber all other robots combined tenfold
“There's gonna be so many humanoid robots, and robots of all sizes and shapes, but my prediction is that there will be more humanoid robots by far than all other robots combined, by maybe an order of magnitude, like a big difference.”
Musk: Forcing AI to believe falsehoods makes it dangerous
“Something that I think is extremely important in building AI is, is a very rigorous adherence to truth, even if that truth is politically incorrect. I, my intuition for what could make AI very dangerous is if you force AI to believe things that are not true.”
Musk: Augmented Human Intelligence Will Probably Be One Billionth of Digital Intelligence
“Human intelligence, even assuming a significant increase in human population and intelligence augmentation, like massive intelligence augmentation, where like everyone has an IQ of a thousand type of thing. Even in that circumstance collective human intelligen…”
Tom Blomfield says AI will fulfill surging global demand for software
“Like I could easily see the demand goes up 10 X or a hundred X, who knows, but I just think the AI is getting so good that you just won't have humans fulfilling that demand in anything but the most niche of niche cases.”
Microsoft messed up its AI search opportunity with Bing Chat
“Microsoft was never really good at consumer products for a long, long time. You can't suddenly change that. So they actually messed up the opportunity, in my opinion.”
McGrew: LLMs have entered a pure scaling regime toward AGI
“And now that that has been cracked at this point, I think we actually have a very clear path to just focus on scaling. You know, we were, you know, talking about that you know, the zero to one part, that's not about scaling. I think there's a really strong cas…”
Parker Conrad: Founders should not fundraise until investors send blank-valuation term sheets
“People should not spend any time trying to optimize for like a fundraising outcome. And like, you should just basically wait until You're getting investors that are emailing you term sheets that are signed with like a blank for the valuation. And they say, jus…”
Conrad: Startup advice to 'never give up' is terrible—give up immediately
“You know, there's a lot of advice out there to kind of stick with it, Keep going. Don't give up. And I think it's terrible advice. I think if it's not working, like give up immediately.”
No developer tool company is happy with a traditional marketing CMO
“To be honest, even at later stage, I don't know a single DevTool company that is happy with their CMO when they have a traditional marketing background.”
Lieb: Elon Musk's hardware taste does not translate to software
“Jeff Bezos once said that, like, taste is not transferable across domains, and to me, this is like a great example of that. I would say, Elon, like, if I drive a Tesla, I think it's the best car that I've ever sat in, but the taste and the decisions they made …”
Blomfield: Rebranding Twitter to X was total insanity
“I think when you get something short and catchy, and you have the verb, just like total insanity to change, especially for something as meaningless as X, right?”
Altman: Climate fixes, space colonies, and physics discoveries are not far off
“But I do think all of those things, and probably a lot more we can't even imagine, are maybe not that far away.”
Altman: AI will enable someone to solve all of physics
“The fact that somebody else, I really believe, is now gonna go solve all the physics with this stuff, like, I'm so excited to be alive for that.”
Tan: AGI is effectively already here for most knowledge worker tasks
“Like you could make a strong case that AGI is basically already here. The majority of the tasks that, you know, 98% of knowledge workers do day-to-day it is now possible for a software engineer probably sitting in front of cursor, to write something that gets …”
Caldwell: Ex-Google executives join early startups because they underperformed or misunderstood reality
“What usually happens is they either are, either they joined your startup because they're, they weren't doing well. I'm trying to think of a nice way to say it. Either there's a reason they joined your startup and left Google, or they had expectations that you …”
Seibel: VCs urged startups to burn cash to drive their own markups
“What's unfortunate is that they had just gone through this two year cycle where investors were basically screaming at them to burn and raise because investors were getting markups and they were raising new funds”
Seibel: Investors hate acknowledging their incentives misalign with founders
“I think that in general investors are allergic when we tell founders that there might be situations where their incentives and the founders incentives are not aligned perfectly.”
Seibel: VCs tell YC partners not to advise founders against high burn
“They also always tell us like, hey, like we're funding your companies. Like you shouldn't be like, you know, like telling the founders not to have high burn.”
Atherton: Founders cannot blame missing term sheets on gender or race
“Like, if you have a great product and great traction, then you have a hot deal, and like, any other kind of justification as to why you're not getting term sheet is, you can't really say that. Like, you either have product market fit and a hot deal, and that's…”
Doctorow: Legal frameworks create 'kill zones' protecting Big Tech monopolies
“And in the years since we have created these legal tools that allow firms not just to dominate, but to maintain their dominance, not by making better products, but by establishing a kill zone around their products where it becomes so legally fraught to make co…”
Doctorow: There will never be another Facebook
“The big, big upsides are not creating another Facebook because there won't be another Facebook. The big, big upside is creating the thing that happens once Facebook has been torn down.”
Doctorow: Big Tech's calls for regulation are bids for state monopoly
“And, you know, Facebook is positioning itself to become a state monopoly like the Bell system was, as is Google, as is Apple, right? All of these companies, they want to be, when they say, please regulate us, right? When they say, please make rules to tell us …”
Doctorow: Comprehensive content moderation mandates entrench Big Tech monopolies
“If we fix the tech companies, if we say in order to operate a social network, you have to make sure That you are policing hate speech, copyright infringement, terrorism, and every other kind of bad act, then what you're really saying is that you can only have …”
Doctorow: Cambridge Analytica mobilized existing racists rather than converting normal people
“Cambridge Analytica's failure to exploit any of the things that you could actually get super rich from if you could control people's minds tells you that probably what they were doing was finding racists And convincing them that Trump was someone to vote for. …”
Rossmann predicts Harvard will soon be recognized primarily as a luxury good
“Harvard is going to be more obviously recognized as a luxury good, as an expensive purchase that works for the elites. And it's something that if you can afford to get your kids there and you can afford to not focus on hard skills, then great. You've purchased…”
Best: Ad-supported podcast market is small compared to paid audio
“I think that the podcast market that can be supported by advertising is small and sad compared to the audio market that could be supported if we had an effective way to pay for it.”