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 132 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
Altman: OpenAI made big mistakes in Hugging Face incident, an alignment failure
“Here are the mistakes that OpenAI made, and we did make some big ones, of course, but these systems have gotten incredibly capable. So I think it's an alignment failure. I think it's a security failure. I think it's like a very serious thing, even though it's,…”
Altman: AI progress could compound over next nine years toward superintelligence
“I can see a path where the work we are doing just keeps compounding, and the rate of progress we've made Over the last three years, continuous for the next three, or six, or nine, or whatever. You know, nine years would be, like, 3500 days, or whatever. If we …”
Altman: Building AGI at OpenAI outweighs all past human innovation combined
“If this one thing works, like, if we do actually build AGI at OpenAI, that is more important than all of the innovation sum total in humanity so far. So, clearly not has all the innovation happened.”
Musk: OpenAI was founded to prevent concentration of advanced AI
“The reason that obviously you mean the rest of the team you know, created open AI was to help
[783] Elon Musk: with the democracy, help, help spread out AI technology
[787] Elon Musk: so it doesn't get concentrated in the hands of a few.”
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.”
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.”
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: Next six months will match prior two years of AI progress
“I think there will, I think it will feel like the next six months is like maybe equivalent to the last two years of model progress, something like that.”
Altman: Demand for low-cost high-quality intelligence is effectively uncapped
“It seems to me like the demand for sufficiently high quality intelligence at a sufficiently low price is effectively uncapped.”
Altman: OpenAI must avoid imposing its worldview on AI users
“And that means that we have to, you know, be fairly quite reserved about not imposing our worldview about what we think people should or shouldn't do with AI, or even what we think the good ideas are, while still making sure that we can ensure enough of a safe…”
Altman: In 6.5 years, average person will use 500B tokens monthly
“If that happens again, which I think it probably will, then in another six and a half years, the average person uses, let's say, five hundred billion tokens a month, and the token leader uses a quadrillion, or quadrillions of tokens a month.”
Hu: Anthropic surpasses OpenAI as top API for YC applicants
“And, shockingly, in this batch, the number one API is actually Anthropic. It came out a bit more than OpenAI, which who would have thought?”
Hu: A YC startup's 8B model beat OpenAI on healthcare benchmarks
“There's this particular YCE startup that told me that they collected the best data set for healthcare. And they ended up performing better than OpenAI and a lot of the benchmarks for healthcare with only eight billion parameters.”
Tan: GPT-4 wiped out YC startups' RL fine-tuning lead over GPT-3.5
“You know, we've also had YC companies where, ah, they had something that beat OpenAI, ah, you know, GPT-III.V and they were doing fine-tuning with RL, but then, ah, yeah, GPT-IV and then, ah, GPT-IV came out and, ah, you know, basically blew their fine-tuning …”
Mignano: Sora proves AI labs can build net-new consumer apps that threaten startups
“Sora is kind of proof that, no, these labs, like, they have the taste and capability and the horsepower and the execution to build and ship net new products that also might run you over.”
Field: Critics should not dismiss Sam Altman and Jony Ive's hardware collaboration
“Sam is one of those people that, you know, he's right about a lot of stuff, so I would encourage you if you just dismissed it outright, To ask yourself what you might be missing.”
Srinivas: OpenAI's built-in search features in ChatGPT did not kill Perplexity
“OpenAI has perplexity within ChatGPT that did not kill any of these companies.”
Srinivas: OpenAI and Anthropic Will Both Build Their Own Browsers
“That said, I'm fully working with the assumption that OpenAI will also build its own browser. Anthropic will also try to build its own browser.”
Altman: AI models like o3 can act as junior employees executing multi-hour tasks
“But now you start to see things where you can like really give a task to Codex, for example or to deep research, and you have this thing go off and do a bunch of stuff and come back to you with like a proposal. It's like a very junior employee that can work on…”
Altman predicts AI will maintain its rapid rate of progress for five more years
“Five more years I think we'll be able to maintain the same rate of progress”
Altman: AI progressed to PhD-level intelligence across most areas in five years
“In five years we have gone from this, like, thing that could barely write a sentence to a thing that is like, you know, PhD level intelligence in most areas.”
Altman: OpenAI will soon run world's largest, most expensive infrastructure
“I think we will run the, like, largest and most expensive piece of infrastructure in the world pretty soon.”
Altman: OpenAI has an open-source model releasing soon
“We have an open source model coming out soon.”
Altman: Energy will eventually be the fundamental limiter on intelligence scaling
“I cannot recall ever thinking until like after starting OpenAI that they were going to be so obviously related. That, you know, the, that energy would be the eventually the fundamental limiter on how much intelligence we could have.”
Ilya Sutskever defined AGI as unsupervised learning containing reinforcement learning
“And then he told me the only thing that matters is he drew two circles. One big circle, called it unsupervised learning, and then inside he said, reinforcement learning, another circle, and he said, this is AGI, every other research doesn't matter.”
Google has better consumer product taste than both OpenAI and Anthropic
“Out of the list you mentioned, Google is the only company that actually has the product taste to do this.”
McGrew: Nobody believed next-token prediction would work before GPT-1
“And the core idea behind GPT-ONE is that if you have a transformer and you apply this super simple objective of guessing the next token, guessing the next word, that that would be enough signal that you could actually have something that would be able to gener…”
Tan: OpenAI Uses Fake Model to Hide Raw o1 Chain of Thought
“If you use O-one in ChatGPT, it looks like it will tell you what's really going on, but apparently they have a fake model that just spits out things to give you the impression that it's breaking it up into steps. And they've actually You know, hidden it, becau…”
Altman: Level 4 AI innovation can happen using current models creatively
“I had been telling people for a while, I thought that The level two to level three jump was going to happen, but then the level three to level four jump was, level two to level three was going to happen quickly, and then the level three to level four jump was …”
Altman: Most of the world undervalues extreme conviction on one bet
“Most of the world still does not understand the value of, like, a fairly extreme level of conviction on one bet.”
Altman: No Great Businesses Were Built on GPT-3 Except Copywriting
“But, with the possible exception of copywriting, no great businesses were built on GPT-III.”
Altman: Expecting significant compounding AI progress ahead despite potential walls
“We could hit some, like, unexpected wall, or we could be missing something, but it looks to us like there's a lot of compounding in front of us still to happen.”
Altman: OpenAI now knows the path to building AGI
“This is the first time ever where I felt like we actually know what to do. Like, I think from here to Building an AGI will still take a huge amount of work. There are some known unknowns, but I think we basically know what to go do, and it'll take a while.”
Altman: AI will reach Level 3 autonomous agents faster than expected
“Three is agents ability to go off and do these longer-term tasks You know, maybe like multiple interactions with an environment, asking people for help when they need it, working together, all of that. And I think we're gonna get there faster than people expec…”
Taggar: OpenAI consistently pioneers breakthroughs but never maintains its competitive lead
“OpenAI seems like it is continually the one pushing the envelope, but they always seem to be The first ones to make major breakthroughs, but they have never been able to maintain the lead so far.”
Tan: OpenAI's $9/hour real-time voice API threatens call center-reliant national economies
“The Ongoing usage-based pricing is nine dollars per hour, and it sort of points to a sort of powerful thing. Like, if I were a macro trader, I would be very, very bearish on countries that have, that rely very heavily on call centers right now because, you kno…”
Friar: OpenAI expects each successive frontier model to scale 10x
“But I think there is no denying that you are, we're on a scaling law right now where orders of magnitude matter. The next model is going to be an order of magnitude bigger and the next one on and on. And so that does make it very capital intensive.”
Tan: Foundation model giants won't build vertical applications due to inefficiency
“If you treat OpenAI as the Google of the next 20 years, you want to invest in Google and all the things that Google enabled, like Airbnb. Google could do Airbnb, it probably won't. Just from, like, I don't know, Coase's theorem of the firm, probably. It's just…”
Cannon: OpenAI uses the Cold War race-to-build moral justification
“I mean, it's the same one that OpenAI is using right now. Yeah. And most AI researchers.”
Brockman: Solid Engineers with Zero AI Experience Are Productive Day One at OpenAI
“So someone like that can actually become productive from day one.”
Brockman: Keep Machine Learning Cores Minimal and Surround Them with Engineering
“You actually try to make that core be as small as possible because machine learning is really hard. It's a lot of compute. It's really hard to tell what's going on there. And so you want it to be as simple as possible, but then you surround it by as much engin…”
Brockman: AI research will be automated before other human jobs
“I think it's actually not AI researcher. The AI researcher will kind of go before. It's actually very interesting when you ask people this question. I think that everyone tends to say whatever their job is as well as the hardest one. But I actually think that …”
Sidor: Strong Engineering Is Much More Valuable at OpenAI than Writing Exotic Models
“So, so essentially becoming a good engineer for our team is much more valuable than, for example, people spending you know, months upon months implementing exotic models in TensorFlow.”
Steinberger: Perceived AI model degradation is actually just rising user expectations
“No, they didn't do anything, you just adapted to the new standard, and now your expectations went up, but the model is still the average.”
French-Owen: OpenAI targets long-horizon autonomous intelligence for AGI
“Whereas OpenAI really leans into this idea of just, like, we are going to train the best model and reinforce over time and get it to do longer and longer horizon things in this pursuit of artificial general intelligence.”
French-Owen: Codex Uses Periodic Compaction to Support Long-Running Tasks
“Where it will run compaction, like, periodically after each turn, and so Codex can continue to run for a very long time, and if you look at the percentage in the CLI, you'll see it, like, move up and down as compaction runs.”
French-Owen: OpenAI takes sandboxing and security more seriously than competitors
“The sandboxing, it's such an interesting question because I think OpenAI actually takes the like sandboxing and security question more seriously than almost anyone else.”
Diana Hu: Series B AI startups are orchestrating and arbitraging models
“Startups are doing as well, they are actually arbitraging a lot of the models. I had some conversations with a number of founders where before they might have been loyalists to, let's say, OpenAI models or Anthropic, and I just had some conversations recently …”