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 560 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 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: Most investment firms struggle to reject profitable, harmful companies
“If there's a company we look at where we think we'd make a lot of money, but it'd be, we think it might be bad for the world, we won't touch it. Which most other investment firms unfortunately have a hard time with.”
Benet: 2013-2014 blockchain thought in New York and Europe far surpassed Silicon Valley
“I think in 2013 and 14, a lot of the blockchain tech was being built in New York and Europe and far ahead of Silicon Valley. And I remember having a lot of conversations with people here in New York and Europe and just the level of thought outside of Silicon V…”
University Entrepreneurship Centers Accept Non-Technical Teams That VCs Would Reject
“Over the past two weeks, I've talked to a number of, kind of, directors of entrepreneur centers, and the constant thing that I'm surprised by is that they know these things that I'm talking about, but they still accept teams that don't abide by these rules. So…”
Zaremba: Universal basic income is the only viable path as automation grows
“So, I believe that we'll have to offer to people a basic income. I super strongly believe that actually that's the only way.”
Altman: Most VCs give founders bad advice on employee equity
“And this is one place that your investors will always give you bad advice. I think, not YC, but all other investors give bad advice here, most do.”
Jeff Dean: AI models have reached junior engineer capability level
“The models have been getting a lot better at sort of agent-based, longer-running coding tasks, and it seems pretty clear that they are now actually pretty capable, and depending on exactly your definition of junior engineer, it seems pretty spot on, I would sa…”
Scholl: Boeing is no longer building new or innovative airplanes
“Well, no, they're not even building new airplanes anymore, let alone innovative new airplanes.”
Scholl: The US cannot beat China by repatriating legacy manufacturing
“Is it possible for America to actually compete with China on manufacturing at scale? Yes, absolutely. The but we have to do it smartly. It won't work to try to repatriate the manufacturing that left the US.”
Altman: AI loss-of-control accidents are not entirely theoretical
“Loss of control, accidents are not entirely theoretical things.”
Cherny: Claude 3.5 Sonnet Is Terrible by Modern Standards
“This was like Sonnet 3.5. At the time, that was an incredible coding model. That was like the best coding model that exists. Nowadays, it's, you know, a pretty terrible coding model by modern standards. But I think that was like the first great coding model th…”
Huang: OpenClaw is an AI Linux moment enabling custom model development
“In a lot of ways, open claw to me was very Linux moment to me. And now everybody can build their own AI.”
Huang: Robotics had its ChatGPT breakthrough moment years ago
“I would say the chat GPT moment of robots happened a couple of years ago already.”
Huang: Computing technology reset makes this the best time to start companies
“Obviously, this is the greatest time in the last 60 years to start a company. The whole industry has changed. It's a complete reset from a technology perspective. The single most important technology in human history, the computer has been completely reset. An…”
Pincus: There is no proven distribution path for consumer startups today
“From a standpoint of proven, there's, there is no proven path for distribution right now in, I would argue in consumer.”
Pincus: Distrusts consumer CEOs who do not know their product best
“I don't trust the CEO of a consumer company that doesn't love their product and doesn't know their product better than anybody else.”
Pincus: 'Founder mode' applies to every founder, not just elite exceptions
“Founder mode is for
Every founder. I like to say to founders, you went and became a founder to bet on yourself, and now you don't, you shouldn't abdicate that to somebody else, to your board or your investors.”
Ries: Traditional corporate governance 'best practices' destroy corporate value
“The thing I didn't really understand is how much evidence we have that these so-called best practices suck. They're like literally value destroying.”
Ries: A 2-2-1 startup board structure effectively gives investors control
“So if you have a board, like classic Silicon Valley board would be two VCs, two founders, and an independent. That's supposed to be fair because it's two and two balance. That is basically just investors control your company.”
Tan: $5 to $10 of Opus calls replicates human research and annotation
“Basically, for the equivalent of, like, Five or 10 dollars of opus calls. I mean, I would estimate that it does the work of like, you know, a real human being that would have to like go painstaking through dozens of articles, read entire books about certain su…”
Hassabis: All leading foundation models are poor at playing games
“That all the leading foundation models are pretty poor at games, which is quite interesting.”
Hassabis doubts inference will ever be free due to Jevons' paradox
“Yeah, I'm not sure inference will ever be essentially free. I mean, there's sort of Jevon's paradox and other things about like, I think we'll just end up using All of us will end up using whatever we can get our hands on, and you could imagine millions of age…”
Hassabis: Frontier AI has not yet made a massive scientific discovery
“I've yet to seen anything so far, and we all tinker with same things, you know, some math problems that are a little bit harder than IMO and so on. I haven't seen anything yet that is a true genuine, You know, massive discovery. That's my personal opinion.”
Massad: Sales is one of the most defensible jobs against AI automation
“So when salespeople are more like, I mentioned earlier, like more like evangelists, more like educators, but I don't think that part is going to go away because a lot of other companies will want to talk to someone, will want to learn from someone, right? That…”
Chollet: Replicating Biologically Plausible Brain Mechanics for AI Is Counter-Productive
“I think it would be counter-productive to just try to, you know, observe it and re-implement it, like and make it biologically plausible.”
Hodak: Musk founded Neuralink to upgrade humanity against AI risks
“Elon, he, I mean, he saw what was coming in AI, like, very much more clearly than many other people much earlier, and I think the implications of, like, if you gotta, this can't be a separate thing from humanity, and that needs to emerge somehow, I think that …”
Tan: Environmental lobby abuses CEQA to halt innovation and housing
“In California we have CEQA, which is totally abused by the environmental lobby to stop all innovation and building housing, by the way.”
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.”
Fisher: Retrofitting Existing Products With Distribution May Beat AI-Native Startups
“It's natural to think it's better to build it a new product from the ground up that's AI native. Like that's like my startup mentality, like new technology revolution. You need to start from scratch if you want to build this right. But that might not be true. …”
Pollak: Four maturing unlocks have created crypto's golden building era
“Those, you know, four things
Chain scaling, regulatory clarity, stablecoins emerging as a really powerful tool, and then wallets getting simpler and simpler, I think have matured to the point where we've entered the golden age of crypto building, the golden ag…”
Masad: Anthropic's Model Context Protocol won't solve autonomous agent-to-agent coordination
“I know a lot of people think of MCP as such an agent to agent tool, but actually MCP is a more traditional RPC protocol. So it's not really going to solve this.”
Legal due diligence commoditized as clients refuse paying for manual review
“And now it's becoming almost a commodity where you're expected to do it, but clients are also not really that excited to pay for Very simple contract review when they know that AI can do, you know, 99% of it.”
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.”
Dylan Field: Figma does not view Cursor as a competitor
“I really don't think of Cursor as a competitor. I think of them as someone that, I mean, we just launched our MCP server to explicitly make it so that you can get your designs into Cursor and Winsurf and all these other, and VS code, you know, all these great …”
Finn: Generalist robotics models may outperform purpose-built models
“And we think that this sort of generalist model may work better and be easier to use than purpose-built models, just like we've seen in the development of foundation, foundation models for language and other applications.”
Jumper: AlphaFold made structural biology 5% to 10% faster
“I like to think that our work Made the whole field of what's called structural biology, biology that deals with structures, you know, five or 10% faster. But the amount to which that matters for the world is enormous.”
Srinivas: Google rebrands and announces the same AI search features every year
“The same feature is being launched year after year after year with a different name, with a different VP, with a different group of people, but it's the same thing. Except maybe it's getting better, but it's never getting launched to everybody.”
Ng: Agentic AI is the most important technology trend in artificial intelligence
“And in terms of AI tech trends, if you ask me what's the most important tech trend in AI, I would say Is the rise of agentic AI.”
Ng: New foundation models will not casually wipe out thousands of startups
“We're so powerful that by training a new model, we will casually wipe out thousands of startups. That's just not true. Yes, Jasper ran into trouble, small number of companies got wiped out, but it's not that easy to casually wipe out Thousands of startups.”
Chollet: Human exam benchmarks cannot measure progress toward AGI
“And that's the reason why using exam-like benchmarks with AI models is a bad idea. They're not going to tell you how close we are to AI. Because human exams weren't designed to measure intelligence. They were designed to measure task-specific skill and knowled…”
Chollet: AI cannot reach high capability without combining Type 1 and Type 2 systems
“I really don't think that you're going to go very far if you go all in on just one of them, like all in on type one or all in on type two. I think that if you want to really unlock their potential, you have to combine them together, and that's what human intel…”
Fei-Fei Li: AGI will not be complete without spatial intelligence
“To me, AGI will not be complete. Without spatial intelligence.”
Nadella: "Artificial intelligence" is a misnomer and AI should not be anthropomorphized
“To me, this artificial intelligence is unfortunately the worst name we could have ever picked And so I'm not into this anthropomorphizing AI at all. I mean, I think of it more. I come at it as it's a tool. It's not trying to replicate how we think.”
Nadella: AI model capability is overhyped relative to real-world impact
“That is the under-hyped story, I think. Because right now the over-hyped thing is the model capability, and the model capability is fantastic, but man, if we can somehow get the world to recognize that this is making a real difference in the lives of people ev…”
Musk: AI hype and early valuations are eye-watering, though some will pan out
“The hype level on AI is, is, is pretty intense as you've seen. You know, you see companies that are, I don't know, less than a year old getting sometimes billion dollar or multibillion dollar valuations. Which I guess could pan out and probably will pan out in…”
2025 is not the year of AI agents, it is the decade
“When I see things like, oh, twenty-twenty-five is the year of agents, I get very concerned, and I kind of feel like, you know, this is the decade of agents, and this is going to be quite some time. We need humans in the loop.”
Truell: 'Vibe coding' doesn't work for large professional codebases
“I think that the whole idea of kind of vibe coding or coding without really looking at the code and understanding it doesn't really work. There are lots of end order effects. You know, if you're dealing with millions of lines of code and dozens or hundreds of …”
Blomfield: Embedding chatbots into software is almost always the wrong approach
“I kind of hate the kind of chatbot paradigm. Like it was the easiest It was the way to bring the most basic LLM experience to the whole world. You know, we had GPT before ChatGPT and ChatGPT brought it to the mainstream, but now every product is just embedding…”
Palicha: Indian startup ecosystem suffers from post-2022 fear and lack of ambition
“I think some of the hurdles are, as an ecosystem, I think we're, like, very much, like, post 2001 right now, because we had, like, a big reality check in 22, 23, and there's still a lot of fear and lack of ambition in general”