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 404 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 35 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: AI capabilities will outpace adoption over the next five years
“What the world is gonna look like over the next five years is that the capabilities just race ahead and race ahead and race ahead.”
Truell: All Software Development Will Flow Through Models Within Five Years
“And I think we took a step back and realized that if we were being really consistent with our beliefs, you know, there was going to be an opportunity for all of coding to change in the next five years and for all of software development to flow through models.”
Englander: AI workflows will become fully autonomous in 2025
“We think the biggest shift this year is going to be that even that element won't happen, and therefore elements of the user interface we think will be less important. In other words, these tasks will happen Entirely autonomously. You know, as you arrive in the…”
Kaplan: AI may execute multi-month tasks within the next few years
“And this kind of picture suggests that over the next few years, we may reach a point where AI models can do tasks that don't just take us minutes or hours, but days, weeks, months, years, et cetera.”
Kaplan: AI scaling curves point smoothly toward human-level AGI
“I think that scaling Really suggests a kind of smooth curve towards what I expect is kind of human level AI or AGI.”
Kaplan: Most AI value will come from end-to-end frontier models
“I think that you can do a lot of very simple bite-sized tasks, but I think it's just much more convenient to be able to use an AI model that can do a very complex task end-to-end, rather than requiring us as humans to sort of orchestrate a much dumber model to…”
Chelsea Finn: Real robot data cannot be replaced by synthetic data
“I think that at the end of the day, there's going to be no replacement for real data. And so we're like large amounts of real robot data. It's going to be a necessary component of any like system that's going to work in a generalizable way.”
Jumper: Scientific AI will eventually be driven by broad, general models
“I think we will start to see this on more general systems, be them LLMs or others, That we will find more and more scientific knowledge within them, and we'll use them for important, important purposes, and I think this is really where this is going, and I thi…”
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.”
Srinivas: Phone Makers Will Offer Multiple AI Search Alternatives
“The phone makers will start offering all of them as alternatives. It's not going to be like a locked-in default search option.”
Srinivas: Perplexity can reach billions annually in subscription revenue alone
“We think, like, we can grow at least, you know, a few billions a year in just subs, which is a great business.”
Srinivas: SEO-gaming websites will definitely have a harder time
“But those who are trying to game the SEO system and trying to get traffic, I think they're definitely going to have a harder time.”
Chollet: AI will evolve into meta-learners synthesizing software on the fly
“AI is going to move towards systems that are more like programmers that approach a new task by writing software for it. And when faced with a new task, your programmer like MetaLearner will synthesize on the fly a program or model that is adapted to the task.”
Nadella: Just-in-time generated and packaged software will coexist
“So I think, yes, you can generate applications just in time. You could have a prefab application that is really helping with the feedback loop to the model, and I think both of these things will exist together.”
Nadella: Software engineers will become architects as everyone builds software
“What I think will happen is all of us are going to be creating software, but there is going to be a job called a software engineer. It's going to be different, but I look at it, right? You are really taking a software engineer and saying you're now a software …”
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: ChatGPT will become third biggest website, possibly first
“It'll be the third at some point, hopefully someday the first if our current growth rates continue”
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's economic impact will be faster and steeper than the transistor's
“The analogy I like most for AI is the transistor, like the historical tech, technical analogy. You know, some people figured out like a new, really important scientific discovery. And society, the economy, whatever you want to call it, just got to work. Just d…”
Musk: AI could expand the economy thousands or millions of times
“You know, the economy, assuming we don't, things don't go awry, and like AI doesn't kill us all and itself then you'll see ultimately an economy that is not, not 10 times more than the current economy. Ultimately, like if we become, say, or whatever our future…”
Musk: Humanoid robots will outnumber humans five to tenfold
“I mean, I'd predict that there's gonna be,
At least five times as many humanoid robots as there are humans, maybe 10 times.”
Musk: There will be 5 to 10 frontier AI models globally
“I do think there will be several deep intelligences, maybe at least five maybe as much as 10. I'm not sure that there's going to be hundreds, but it's probably close, like maybe there'll be like 10 or something like that of which maybe four will be in the US.”
Truell: Software creation will move to higher abstraction levels within a decade
“We think that over the next five to 10 years, it will be possible to invent a new way to build software that's higher level and more productive. That's just as still down to defining how you want the software to work and how you want the software to look.”
Truell: AI coding tools will become 10x more useful within a year
“And I think that the game in the next six months to a year is to make both of those, you know, an order of magnitude more useful.”
Truell: AI models will mediate all programming, requiring complete UI control
“All of programming is going to flow through these models. It's going to look very different in the future. You're going to need to control the UI.”
Tom Blomfield predicts stark consequences for software engineering within 12 months
“I think we have a clear line of sight between where we are today and like improvements over the next three, six and 12 months. They're going to have quite stark consequences for software engineering, I think.”
Dave Lieb predicts AI will eventually write any type of code
“I think it will get good enough to write any code.”
Tom Blomfield says future engineers will primarily focus on wrangling AI machines
“I think there will be demand for smart people who know how to wrangle these AI coding machines, and if we want to call those people software engineers, so be it. But I think the job is dramatically, dramatically different.”
Tom Blomfield warns AI could displace hundreds of millions of workers
“And you could see hundreds of millions of people displaced, and the idea that they're going to retrain as in a different job, I think is going to be extremely painful. And I can see the societal impact and turmoil being very, very grave for 10 or 20 years as t…”
Field: Software developers will soon call themselves designers
“I think people that call themselves developers today, and they call themselves designers, you know, in the near future. That doesn't mean they're not writing code. It just means that they're gonna be thinking more holistically about the product experience alon…”
Hu: Software engineers will transition to product engineers
“I think one of them that I can read verbatim is, I think the role of software engineer will transition to product engineer. Human taste is now more important than ever as CogenTools make everyone a Tenex engineer.”
Hu: Vibe coding works for zero-to-one, but scaling requires systems engineers
“Zero to one will be great for vibe coding where founders can ship features very quickly. But once they hit product market fit, they're still going to have a lot of really hardcore systems engineering where you need to get from the one to N and you need to hire…”
Whoever builds a billion-user AI query orchestrator will become the next Google
“That sort of router, that, that orchestrator, I think that's the hardest thing to build, and whoever builds that, and can operate that at a scale of billion users, and also knows how to monetize, like, some of those queries really well, is going to be the next…”
Search industry revenue must decline as users shift directly to AI agents
“Search revenue has to go down in a world where people are just directly talking to AIs and agents are doing stuff for them.”
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: 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.”
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…”
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: 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…”