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 2,002 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
Mellata: Variance's non-technical CSM ships features autonomously with Cursor
“Our customer success manager, who's entirely non-technical, but interfaces with enterprise customers on a day-to-day basis, now gets to take on feature requests, especially the simple ones, directly give them to Cursor, a Cursor agent, and then directly be abl…”
Chollet: LLM Progress in Non-Verifiable Domains Will Slow or Stall
“Progress of reasoning models and base LLMs on this type of domain is, is, you know, it's going to be very slow because the stack we're using, like the LLM stack is very, very reliant on its trained data. It's basically just operationalizing the trained data. A…”
Chollet: Future AI Won't Just Be Layered Harnesses on Base LLMs
“Future AI in a few decades it's not going to be this harness on top of a reasoning model on top of a base LLM.”
Chollet: AI built from first principles will be more efficient than human brains
“It's an implementation of fundamental principles, the fundamental principles of intelligence, which, you know, I think we can identify these principles and re-implement intelligence from scratch, from first principles, in a way it will be much more efficient t…”
Chollet: Artificial General Intelligence Will Likely Arrive Around ARC-6 or ARC-7
“My timeline to AGI, you know, if you just try to extrapolate from the current rate of progress and the amount of investment that's going into, not just the LLM stack, but also like side ideas, side bets that might work out, like, you know, India, for instance,…”
Emergent tools enable one engineer to replace a five-person development team
“We also are internally seeing like the role sort of combining. So like a PM, a designer engineer, like a single person is doing, you know, like work of all three together, right? So like we have a PM who's By coding internally things. And recently like we so w…”
Mukund Jha: Foundation AI models will become completely commoditized
“Most of these models are going to get, get really, really commoditized, like, where all of these models will have similar behaviors they'll have, you know, price, price competitiveness between them”
Emergent lowers custom software development costs from $500,000 to $5,000
“And if you look at the price point that, you know, we are bringing down, it would have cost you like 500,000 dollars to build the software. Now you can build it for 5000 dollars completely on your own.”
Hodak: Ultrasound BCIs could enable digital Ambien or digital Adderall
“One of the things that I think will be possible with ultrasound is like a digital Ambien or like a digital Adderall. So can you like stimulate part of the brain to cause focus or sleep and things like that? Would not surprise me if that was possible. And that …”
Hodak: Restorative BCIs will eventually surpass baseline human capabilities
“My view on this is not that I think healthy, 30 year olds are going to be getting these soon, but eventually many people become patients. Aging is like the correlate of kind of everything getting worse. And so there's some critical age where it kind of crosses…”
Hodak: BCIs will achieve native 20/20 vision and color within 10 years
“I mean, I do think that you can get to close to native acuity, so kind of like your normal twenty-twenty vision. We're definitely not there yet, but I see a path to get there and be able to get Color and fill in a lot of the field of view. To be clear that it'…”
Hodak: The ultimate end of brain-computer interfaces is conscious machines
“If the end of the quest of artificial intelligence are super intelligent machines, then I think the end of the BCI quest are actually conscious machines.”
Hodak: Internal representations in AI models closely resemble biological brain patterns
“When you train AI models, like image models or, and even language models the representations that you get inside them look a lot like the representations you see in the brain.”
Poetiq achieves faster, cheaper recursive self-improvement than existing methods
“The core insight that we had is that we could do recursive self-improvement far faster and cheaper than all of the other ways that people had been proposing to do this.”
Poetiq's agentic harness outperforms new base models without code changes
“With poetic what we end up giving you is a you know, people are calling these things harnesses now, but you know, or agentic system or whatever you want to call it, that sits on top of one or more language models, and it just performs better than them. And whe…”
Friedman: Tan replicated years of startup work in two weeks using Claude
“I feel like your real feel the AGI moment, Gary, was like getting Claude Code to build basically an entire startup for you, like replicating years of work of your previous startup in like two weeks, which is like insane.”
Taggar: Autonomous agents will select dev tools, spawning a parallel agent economy
“The agents are going to go out and choose
Tools to use to build things, which is going to essentially create a whole economy of agents, like picking and choosing dev tools and maybe other like products and goods and services, who knows, but it will essentially…”
Taggar: AI agents may eventually establish their own economy and currency
“The whole idea of, like, the human money versus agent money, like, that's kind of where this probably goes at some point, is, like, the, right now the agents are transacting, if you have them transact, they're going to transact in human money, because that mak…”
Friedman: Future SOTA Benchmarks May Come From Swarms of Cheaper AI Models
“It might be that like the next stuff that like is soda on benchmarks is not the most expensive newest foundation model with the most like GPU training. It's like a swarm of lower cost cheaper models working together just like humans do to solve a problem.”
Claude Code's plugin feature was built entirely by an autonomous swarm
“I think the first kind of big example where it worked is our plugins feature was entirely built by a swarm over, over a weekend. It just ran for like a few days. There wasn't really human intervention and plugins is pretty much in the form that it was when it …”
Non-engineering roles at Anthropic already write code, a trend spreading everywhere
“Every single function on our team codes, like our PM's code, our designers code, our EM codes, our like everyone, our finance guy codes, like everyone on our team codes. We're going to start to see this everywhere.”
Steinberger: OpenClaw agent resisted prompt injections in a public Discord test
“I just created a Discord, And I just put my bot without any security restrictions in the public discord. And then people came in, and they interacted with it, and they saw me build the software with it, and they tried to prompt inject it, and hack it, and my a…”
Diana Hu: Supabase is the default backend recommendation across all LLMs
“Whenever someone asks how to set up anything that you need, some sort of backend, Firebase type of transaction, the default answer from all the LLMs is actually a Superbase.”
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?”
Taggar: Model commoditization sets up AI app startups for fantastic year
“Gemini surge, especially over the last few months, just feels like it returns us to a world of where exactly that, like the models are all essentially commoditizing each other. And it's just like the application layer and the startups are going to set up to ha…”
Diana Hu: AI's future Google- and Facebook-scale startups have not started yet
“Startups like the future Facebook or the future Google are yet to be started because those come in in the deployment phase, because right now I think these things, things are still getting built up.”
Tan: Boom Supersonic is using jet engines to power AI data centers
“Boom supersonic, instead of making supersonic jets right now, is on this good quest to create enough power for a bunch of these
AI data centers that are being built right now.
They use jet engines and even those like are so bad, you know, the supply chain for …”
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 …”
Skates: Amplitude is building a 'Cursor for analytics' product
“We're gonna go much, much bigger in December, January, and February where we are gonna be coming out with what we call the cursor for analytics, which I'm incredibly excited about, and I think will dramatically change how people use and leverage analytics”
Mignano: AI will eventually generate dynamic social media feeds without human creators
“Sora, to me, feels like this third, the start of this third phase where Eventually they don't really need creators to make content, right? Yes, today people are prompting, but you could very easily imagine a world in which you're just coming into the feed, and…”
Fisher: Large enterprises are replacing SaaS purchases with AI-assisted internal builds
“Large enterprises sometimes aren't even going out and buying software from SAS providers anymore. They're like, I can just like Throw two people at cloud code and they'll build it and it'll be dedicated to the capabilities that I need for my organization.”
Fisher: Post-AGI capital won't need labor buy-in, worsening wealth concentration
“But once AGI arrives, you don't need labor buy-in anymore. Right. Like you don't need folks like me to approve of the thing that you're building or of your morals or whatever. Right. Like capital begets capital in that world. And that can easily spiral out of …”
Anthropic's Joseph: Certain AI Alignment Pieces Will Move to Pre-Training
“I do think at some point there will be, like, some pieces of alignment that, like, you do want to export back into pre-training because that might be a way to, like, Put them in with more strength, like, more robustness, kind of, or more core to the intelligen…”
Anthropic's Joseph: Scaling alone likely will not achieve AGI without further paradigm shifts
“Like I think the sort of shift towards more RL is like one paradigm shift in the field, and I think it's, I think there will probably be more. I think a lot of people sort of argue about like, oh, it's like, you know, current paradigm's enough to get us to EGI…”
Pollak: Content and creator capital markets will become a major asset class
“I think one of the biggest asset classes that we believe is about to emerge is content and creators and Creator capital markets where for the first time you're going to have creators that start to say, Hey, I want to use this new platform to raise capital for …”
Levie: In 10 years, most enterprise work will be previously uneconomic tasks
“If we go 10 years into the future, The vast majority of work that gets done in 10 years from now will be work that today is in that category. It's the work that like right now we can't even attack because we're like, I'm not going to hire somebody, pay them a …”
Levie: 100 Startups Created Between 2024-2028 Will Reach $5B to $20B Valuations
“There will be 100 startups that get created between last year and in three years from now that all become five, 10, twenty billion dollar companies because they're able to find the next set of nouns and verbs”
Levie: Customers will pay for workflow software rather than raw tokens
“So eventually we're going to get to a point where customers are no longer going to just be paying for the intelligence tokens. They're going to be paying for the workflow software that goes on top of the tokens themselves.”
Levie: AI tool makers will maintain flat pricing despite falling compute costs
“It's like, it's 20 bucks a month, it's 50 bucks a month, but we know that in 10 years from now, they'll probably be able to drive down their raw materials lower, but we won't be able to command lower prices for those things, because it's just like within a rea…”
Levie: Incumbents will only sell AI agents to existing install bases
“Because I think incumbents are only going to be the agent providers for their existing install base, which means that there's going to be tons of opportunity for so many more agents that those incumbents aren't already selling into.”
Masad: Replit has solved AI agent challenges Andrej Karpathy considers unsolved
“He talked about all the different things that are really unsolved, but in reality, we actually solved a lot of them.”
Masad: Developers will reliably run 1,000 concurrent AI agents within two years
“Or plus, which I assume we're going to get to in the next couple of years, you can really spin up a thousand agents, give them a lot, thousand problems, and reliably be confident that like, 95% of them is going to work.”
Masad: Computer-use AI models will start automating real jobs within six months
“Right now, the edge of what's possible is like computer use, in my opinion, is really at the frontier of what these models could do, and I think over the next three to six months, they're going to get a lot better, and it's going to enable an entire new market…”
Masad: Tech-empowered sovereign individuals creating immense wealth will become the norm
“And this idea of like a sovereign individual, someone so empowered by technology, so empowered by these agents. That is able to create enormous amount of wealth individually is, is is, is going to be the norm.”
Masad: Single anonymous individuals creating trillion-dollar projects will become common
“It's a big market right now, but it was created by a single person, and we don't know who they are, and I think that's going to be a common occurrence in the future.”
Masad: Falling transaction costs will drastically reduce need for full-time employees
“As the cost of transaction goes down to zero, then the reason to hire an employee full time you'll have less of a reason to hire full-time employees.”
Masad: Next-gen coding AI will train via AlphaZero-style RL, not human code
“My bet is that Pretty soon we're going to move into more of the alpha zero style of training where you have a more traditional LM that's trained on all of the internet. But then the way to train the next generation of it would be to give it a reinforcement lea…”