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 5,759 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 49 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
McGrew: LLM pre-training scaling will inevitably hit a data wall
“It is definitely the case that there is a data wall and that if you take the same techniques that we were using to scale LLMs you know, at some point you're going to run into that.”
McGrew: AI founders should build with frontier models first, distill later
“Yeah, I would say if you're a founder, the right approach is to start with the very best model you can, because, you know, your startup is only going to be successful if it exploits some, something about AI that realistically is going to be on you know, the fr…”
McGrew: AI impact is not visible in productivity statistics
“I mean, yes, AI has had some effects, you know, particularly on people who write code, but, you know, I don't think you can see it in the productivity statistics, unless it's about how big the data centers are that we're building.”
McGrew: Future human jobs will bifurcate into 'genius' and 'manager'
“I think that the role that we're going to be playing, You know, one, I think there's going to be two roles. One will be something like a lone genius. You know, the Alec Radford of the world working alone at his computer, coming up with some crazy idea, but now…”
McGrew: Robotics will see a 'ChatGPT moment' within five years
“Robotics companies now are where, you know, LLM companies were five years ago. So I think in five years, you know, or even, even sometime in the next five years, we will see the chat GPT moment for robotics.”
McGrew: AI will automate scientists before physical experimenters
“I think weirdly we're going to end up with, you know, automating the scientist, the innovator before we automate, you know, the experiment doer.”
Conrad: Compound software suites solve organizational problems better than point solutions
“A lot of the sort of deeper problems within organizations can't really be solved by very narrow point solution software products. And that if you can build A whole suite of really seamlessly interoperable applications. You can build much better products for bu…”
Conrad: Future software market will consolidate into far fewer, larger compound winners
“I think it's possible that compound software businesses are the wave of the future. And also like, there will be three of them, you know, and there's not, it is actually an argument for many fewer businesses. But much larger and more successful ones, if that's…”
Conrad: Effective AI SDRs will overwhelm and destroy outbound sales
“What'll happen is it'll just destroy outbound the, as a channel, it will cease to work and cease to function because it'll just get so overwhelmed at that point.”
Conrad: AI will allow large companies to operate with 10x smaller teams
“AI is going to help companies like 2000 person companies be run more like 200 person companies and 200 person companies be run more like 20 person companies.”
Conrad: AI's reading and context ingestion is far more valuable than generation
“And so I think that the fact that these systems can read and their context windows are so large is actually Much more powerful for B to B software than the fact that they can write. Like the generative AI is actually really a misnomer. It's actually the, it's …”
Conrad: Founders should only practice 'founder mode' when critical systems break
“One, I think you need really good executives and you don't want to do the founder mode thing unless something's broken. You know, like you kind of want, cause you can't do it everywhere. Like you need people to help you run the company and like, and so you wan…”
Lieb Secretly Designed Google Photos Despite Orders to Build Google+
“I kind of just didn't do what my bosses asked me to do. And it created a ton of conflict. I was definitely not the model employee. I just kind of did it on the back burner. I would go every day and do my day job, and then in the afternoon, I'd go spend some ti…”
Charging for support incentivizes open-source startups to build overly complex products
“And finally, some open source companies charge for support and services, but I would actually discourage you to follow that monetization path because your incentive becomes to build the most complex product possible so you can charge for support and services. …”
Dev tool founders should reach $1M ARR before hiring their first salesperson
“As a rule of thumb, I would wait to get to about one million AR before hiring your first salesperson.”
Algolia scaled to $10M ARR without ever using a sales deck
“At Algolia, we didn't have a sales deck before we got to ten million ARR.”
Gary Tan: Sam Altman directly estimated AGI is 4 to 15 years away
“Seeing him on Monday, he actually directly estimated, you know, between four and 15 years.”
Taggar: AI Is on Track to Design Chips Better Than Humans
“At some point, the AI will get good enough to just, like, design chips better than, like, humans can, and then it will just, like, eliminate one of its bottlenecks for, like, getting greater intelligence, and so it feels like that's already kind of, like, We'r…”
Tan: AI startup moats come from proprietary data for domain evals
“You can almost Argue that anything that is consumer and publicly available on the internet, that's going to be in the base model. So then your moat ultimately is for all of the other things that are not already online, whether it's, you know, for case techs be…”
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: 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: 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: The world is astonishingly asleep on the AI platform shift
“I think that's why I'm so excited for startups right now. It is because the world is still sleeping on all of this to such an astonishing degree. And then you have, like, the YC founders being like, no, no, I'm gonna, like, do this amazing thing and do it very…”
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: 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: 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…”
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.”
Hu: 10T parameter models will spark a GPT-3 level innovation leap
“I think the type of level of potential innovation could be the same leap we saw from GPT-II, which was around one billion Parameters that was released with the paper of a scaling loss, which was one of these seminal papers that people figure out, okay, this is…”
Friedman: Software adopted by YC startups predicts future global tech winners
“One thing that we know from running YC for a long time is that whatever the companies in the batch use is a very good predictor of what Like the best companies in the world are using, and therefore what products will be most successful. A lot of YC's most succ…”
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…”
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…”
Hu: AI has effectively passed the Turing test for phone calls
“At this point, AI has passed Turing tests and is solving all of these very menial problems over the phone.”
Friedman: AI is the fastest-improving technology in human history
“It's the fastest any tech has ever improved. I think. Yeah. Certainly faster than processors, certainly faster than the cloud.”
Koomen: Quoting Too High Rarely Scares Off Genuinely Interested Customers
“One of the most surprising things I learned was that when a customer really wants your product, it's hard to scare them away by quoting a price that's too high.”
Seibel: Startups must use tactics that would get corporate employees fired
“And like, if you play the big company game, they will always beat you. You always have to be thinking about, what would you have gotten fired for at the big company? That should be your playbook at the startup.”
Seibel: VC skill is winning competitive deals, not theoretical thesis picking
“The skill is often getting the thing taking off to take your money versus someone else's money, not picking amongst things that haven't launched yet and having feces about why one's going to do better than the other.”
Seibel: Every Successful YC Story Began With Widely Dismissed Idea
“Well, I think that's what's so funny is because that's the, every successful YC story, that's the story in hindsight, right? It's like, everyone thought the idea sucked. It was off trend because it was off trend.”
Taggar: AI Co-Pilot Startups Get Paid Easily but Suffer Low Usage
“There's so much interest from potential customers to like want a co-pilot that it's actually quite easy to start getting like inbound leads if you pitch this.
And if it's even easy to get people to pay you money upfront, but what's really hard is to get them t…”
Tan: Embed LLMs in Familiar UIs Rather Than Chat Interfaces
“While in the next five or 10 years I think we will get far more used to using it that way I think the low-hanging fruit right now is just using the large language model
To actually do the sort of knowledge work that a human being could do, and then package it …”
Tan: AI Dev Tools Suffer Churn as Incumbents Add LLM Features
“A bunch of us are funding dev tools companies that sell to AI companies and they're selling tooling, but then they might, you know, they might sell enterprise contract to someone who also upstream has a fortune 100 that said that they'd pay a 100,000 dollars a…”
Hu: Customized open models will beat frontier LLMs in specific domains
“So there's this other world where the open model that's customized, I think, is gonna win and compete versus the big one for specific domains.”
Tan: Any GPT-4 prompt workflow can be duplicated with custom fine-tuning
“Anything you do with those prompts, you can get your own model to do with a little bit more training.”
Tan: Chat interfaces are the wrong UX model for AI software
“I mean, this is why I think the chat interface is wrong. Like I actually think there is value accrued to really great UX, like good copy, good you know, interaction design, information hierarchy you know, being able to approach a product and say like, this is …”
Tan: Open-source AI access for consumers is the best insurance against tyranny
“We want all consumers to be able to have from the bottom up, ah, the same access to that same technology. And that's, ah, yeah, the best insurance against tyranny.”
Blomfield: A +50 NPS is the minimum baseline for new consumer companies
“If your net promoter score, your MPS, is not extremely high as a new consumer company, you're toast. You pretty much have to re-engineer the product to make it something that people love. The reason is it correlates extremely well with word of mouth referral. …”
Heller: GPT technology is underhyped because GPT-4 operates at postgraduate level
“So this is gonna sound probably insane to most people who hear it, but I think the GPT technology is under hyped because what we see in GPT-IV specifically as a model, and I'm assuming the same will be true as new models come out in the state of the art advanc…”