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
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.”
Scholl: Boom needs more software engineers post-AI because development costs dropped
“At Boom, we need far more software engineers in a post AI world. They would need it in a pre AI world. Why? Because the cost of software development has dropped. Anybody, including hardware engineers can now become a coder. And we need software engineers to ma…”
Altman: AI agents build in seven minutes what took startups three months
“What took three months to build at the time that we, each company built over the whole YC startup, could now be done with, like, in, like, seven minutes by a coding agent”
Altman: Startups will prevent AI power from concentrating in few companies
“In fact, if we are right that AI is going to be such a big change, startups will be much more important to making sure that The power of this technology gets widely distributed throughout the economy and society, and it's not just concentrated in a few compani…”
Altman: AI tool fluency will beat traditional experience for founders
“I would bet that this generally will cut against many years of experience in favor of people who have a lot of fluency with the tools.”
Altman: AI loss-of-control accidents are not entirely theoretical
“Loss of control, accidents are not entirely theoretical things.”
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: 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: 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.”
Cherny: Claude Opus 5 Can Run Autonomously for Months Without Scaffolding
“For five, one example of something it does that I think no other model has done is it runs for a very long period of time. And especially when you combine Opus Five with auto mode, it's just like incredible. Like it can go for days, weeks, months at a time. It…”
Cherny: Claude Is More Intelligent Without System Prompts
“And what's interesting is that the model is actually a little bit more intelligent without these prompts. That's something that we've been finding.”
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…”
Cherny: Modern models can rewrite essentially any codebase into another language
“One example is the model can now rewrite essentially any code base from one language to a different language.”
Cherny: Anthropic uses Claude routines to maintain its own apps via Slack
“We actually have Cloud maintaining itself now. And the way we do this is we have a Slack channel where we just had Cloud start a bunch of different routines to maintain its own code base. And we actually do this for the CLI, for the iOS app, for the Android ap…”
Jensen Huang: Starting technology matters less than confronting reality and learning
“And so long as you're able to confront the reality, so long as you are able to learn the technology itself actually doesn't matter.”
Huang: Founders should adapt the organization to themselves, not standard practices
“Whatever it takes to fit the car to you, whatever it takes to fit the organization to you, that's what you ought to do. And the next CEO, whatever the personality is, they can figure it out.”
Huang: 'Founder mode' can scale a company to five trillion dollars
“Founder mode could scale for 34 years. From zero to five trillion.”
Huang: Most software will be built agentically, elevating systems thinking
“In the case of software most software is going to be done agentically anyhow, so you have to be much more able to think abstractly about systems.”
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: AI automates tasks rather than destroying entire jobs
“The narrative about AI destroying jobs is exactly backwards. AI eliminate tasks. AI automates tasks away. But it doesn't necessarily eliminate jobs. And the reason for that is because the job of a person has a purpose, and that purpose has many tasks. Some of …”
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…”
Pomel: Culture flows from leadership actions, not written value lists
“What we said instead is culture flows from the top. So we exemplify the culture, we hire, we promote, we hire based on the culture, and today, that still works.”
Pomel: Inquiring on random support messages forces managers to stop managing up
“Well, what I do is I just pick up those random emails or, you know, Slack or whatever, and I just reply with a question, you know. I was like, I don't understand what's going on. And then, you know, and then, you know, the, what happens is that, there's two th…”
Pomel: A manager's job is knowing their domain, not pleasing their boss
“Your job is not to understand what I want, As a boss, your job is to understand what's happening within your span of control, and understand it very, very precisely. What's, what's working and not working?”
Pomel: Solo engineers using AI do six months of work in days
“We saw like literally, I mean, absolutely excellent developers, like not beginners, but people rebuild whole systems in a couple of days alone that were absolutely amazing. Things that would have been possible, but, you know, done by a team of six, over six mo…”
Pomel: European startups must enter the US market immediately after PMF
“On the other hand, I think it's absolutely critical
to go after the US market as soon as you can.
So as soon as you have a product with some form of market fit go after the US market.”
Pomel: Founders should always move faster on hiring and firing
“The one thing, the one lesson I keep learning all the time, so, is that you should always move faster, especially when it comes to hiring and firing.”
Garry Tan: Context-aware consumer AI will become a $10B-$100B company
“I mean, this is a great example of like consumer AI that is almost certainly going to be a 10 or a hundred billion dollar company. That no one's built yet.”
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.”
Tan: Write markdown teaching LLMs to code rather than calling LLMs
“And a new way to do it is actually have the LLMs just write the code you need right now. And then you write 10 or 20 times less code, but it's way more customizable. It does, you know, more and is more awesome. Between token maxing and even like, you know, don…”
Tan: AI token compute costs will drop drastically within two years
“I mean, basically because the frontier models are that good, like, you know, I think that in two years, like, That'll be a 100,000 and, you know, down to 10,000 and a thousand. I mean, basically these orders of magnitude are about to happen.”
Tan: The AI consumer revolution will arrive in 2029
“It means that the ideal consumer moment is still like
Three orders of magnitude away, but that means that the consumer revolution is actually in 2029.”
Tan: The next Meta and Snap will emerge within two years
“That's when we're going to see the new meta. That's when we'll see the new snap. That's when we're going to see all of the future and it's not even a couple of years away.”
Tan: AI allows solo founders to build year-long projects in days
“And then now it's like, actually what would take a week or a month or a year, like you literally do in, you know, minutes, hours, or, you know, at the worst, like you could build a whole cathedral of like 20 to 40,000 lines of code. Like what would take a typi…”
Franceschi: Startups Should Begin as Single-Person Companies with High AI Spend
“If I were to start a company today, I would say, okay, the premise is why can't it be just me? Like, and then you start from there and your token consumption is probably going to be a lot higher than if you said, well, I'm going to have like three people or fi…”
Franceschi: AI Commoditizes Execution; Choosing What to Build Is the Bottleneck
“The execution is out, right? The execution is gone and the model is going to do that better. The wisdom to choose is still, I think the. The missing bottleneck. And to me, that all comes from which signals are not in the models.”
Franceschi: AI Token Spend Will Become Every Company's Biggest Expense
“I think the, you know, it will be the biggest expense in a company, like easily.”
Franceschi: Bolting AI Onto Legacy Workflows Fails Compared to Ground-Up Redesign
“And I think that the biggest discontinuities in a positive way that we've had were when we said, hey, let's keep this old way here, keep putting it in a corner. And like, how would we design it if we started the company today from scratch? And then just doing …”
Franceschi: CEOs Must Personally Act as Their Company's Chief AI Officer
“I think the CEO needs to be the chief AI officer. Like it's not a engineering team thing. It's not like a product team thing. It's like, you have to understand the bounds of the technology better than anyone.”
Tan: Organizational superintelligence is built by compounding micro AI skills across all work
“How do you build super intelligence inside a company? You do that on everything you do. And it's not more complicated than that. Like, you literally just compose everything that you do, and any given thing that any given person can do, you combine that in aggr…”
Tan: $100K AI token workloads will drop to $200 in two years
“What you spend a 100,000 or a million dollars a year on now, it will be commonplace like in, in two years, right? It'll, it won't cost a 100,000 in a year. It'll cost 10,000. And the year after that, it'll be like a couple hundred bucks, right? And everyone wi…”
Koomen: AI-native software will be agents wrapping tools, not apps wrapping AI
“I think the conclusion that this essay points to is that as we get better at building AI native software. It's going to look a lot more like the agent wrapping software deterministic tools rather than deterministic software wrapping an AI.”