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
Diana Hu: Command-line interfaces are becoming the right UX for AI agents
“CLI seems to be becoming the right UX for agents. This is why I think going back to ClockCode versus Cursor ended up doing so well. It's just so much more freedom being fully on the command line.”
Ries: Incorporating as a PBC is an absolute must-do for founders
“I think PBC is an absolute must do and kind of like an utter no brainer of all the things in the book. It's by far the easiest thing. If you want to pick one thing to do, it's the easiest thing to do. It's a two page legal filing in Delaware.”
Graham: The title of Europe's Silicon Valley is still up for grabs
“You could make it the Silicon Valley of Europe. That job is still up for grabs.”
Tan: Claude models are very good but not the smartest
“Claude Code is ideal for the ADHD CEO, but once in a while, there's a, you know, Claude Code will just BS a bunch of stuff, like Claude models are very, very good, but like, they are not the smartest, it turns out.”
Garry Tan: AI development is in its Homebrew Computer Club era
“This is homebrew computer club. You know, the moment when the Apple one came out, like The Apple one created by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak was a breadboard inside, like literally a wooden case hammered together with like nails and duct tape, you know? And if…”
Tan: We are entering the golden age of open source
“This is something that, you know, anyone can do actually, it's like this is why I think we're entering the golden age of open source.”
Chaubard: Hierarchical Reasoning Models Offer Little Novelty Over Standard RNNs
“The, this is directly in the lineage of RNNs. There's not that much novel from, like, the RNN standpoint at least in my opinion.”
Hassabis: Today's AI systems cannot invent a game like Go
“Clearly today's systems, I think can't do that.”
Massad: Visual Basic 6 was better than setting up React and Webpack
“VB six was better than setting up react and web pack.”
Massad: Progress on AI computer use models is slow and disappointing
“You know, I've been waiting for computer use models to get better. They're slowly getting better. They're like one of the things that is actually kind of disappointing.”
Tan: Physical Intelligence may bring the GPT-1 moment for robotics
“He's one of the co-founders of Physical Intelligence, which we think might be the robotics AI lab that brings about the GPT-I moment for all of robotics.”
Vuong: ImageNet was more impactful than OpenX because it solved evaluation
“I still think that ImageNet was more impactful in the vision community, and the reason for that is a few. The first is that ImageNet also allowed for reproducible evaluation, right? You know, OpenX as an effort was more about making data available for kind of …”
Mellata: Variance's five engineers output software equivalent to 25 people
“I would say we're five, but I think in terms of software output, we're probably closer to a 25 people team.”
Hodak: Humanity is fundamentally ineffective at pharmaceutical drug discovery
“Humanity isn't very good at drug discovery. Every now and then you kind of find a thing. It's amazing. Like you find a GLP one or you find like there's every, like there's a handful of drugs that are, we were lucky to find, but it's much more common that you s…”
Hodak: BCI is primarily a longevity and healthcare story, not AI merger
“There's this meme out there that BCI is an artificial intelligence adjacent story and that the goal is to, I mean, you have to merge humans and machines, and I do think that there's something to that. But I think the more immediate thing here is that I see BCI…”
Hodak: Optogenetic BCI approaches rely on risky, irreversible gene therapies
“We also don't need to genetically modify the, like, your brain. Some of the other ideas out there, for example, using optogenetics or things like ultrasound, this requires using a gene therapy to genetically modify the neurons in your brain, which First of all…”
Garry Tan: Mainstream Users Are Not Ready for Relationships With AI
“I don't think that people are quite ready to have relationships with machines, even though like, I mean, that's sort of what the headlines seem to say, like, oh, you know, the people are having Relationships with machines now, but I, you know, I just don't lik…”
French-Owen: OpenAI targets long-horizon autonomous intelligence for AGI
“Whereas OpenAI really leans into this idea of just, like, we are going to train the best model and reinforce over time and get it to do longer and longer horizon things in this pursuit of artificial general intelligence.”
Garry Tan: Claude Code enables one person to do five people's daily work
“It's like, I can do five people's worth of work in like a single day. It's like rocket boosters.”
French-Owen: Slack restricted API access to prevent third-party agentic exfiltration
“Like I think Slack locked down their API a little bit because they didn't want people just exfiltrating everything from Slack and then building agentic experiences on top of it.”
French-Owen: Claude Opus Misses Multi-File Bugs That Codex Catches
“Refreshing complex UI state and Opus often will miss it if there's many files, but Codex seems to catch it.”
French-Owen: OpenAI takes sandboxing and security more seriously than competitors
“The sandboxing, it's such an interesting question because I think OpenAI actually takes the like sandboxing and security question more seriously than almost anyone else.”
Taggar: Gemini is more accurate than Perplexity for real-time queries
“Personally, I found it was better than all the other tools for that, and it was better than Perplexity on it, too. Like, Perplexity would be fast, but not always accurate, and Gemini was not quite as fast as Perplexity, but was always pretty accurate if I aske…”
Skates: SaaS is the best business model of all time
“SaaS, I mean, it's the best business model and the best product delivery system of all time.”
Skates: OpenAI's Sam Altman is the best salesperson of this generation
“I think Sam Altman is the best salesperson of this generation by no bar none.”
Tan: US lost consumer distribution art; top growth talent is in Eastern Europe
“You can't hire them in the United States anymore, or in the West. Like, they're all in Eastern Europe. Which is interesting. It became like a lost art. Like, we forgot how to do, ah, consumer distribution”
Mignano: AI Makes Web Browsers an Investable Category
“No, actually AI Creates like a really interesting opportunity for the browser to be an investable service.”
Tan: OpenAI's GPT Store was a failed experiment
“Like, you saw that with the GPT store at OpenAI a little bit, but I think that was a little bit of a failed experiment.”
Tan: Meta and xAI Struggle to Capture Sora's Cultural Vibe
“It is funny to see XAI and
Meta sort of like struggle to try to capture that vibe.”
Heller: Most AI app developers fail to run evaluations or study workflows
“If you just do these two things, you'll be like, 90% of your way there to building a better AI app than what most of the crap that's out there, right? Because most people never eval, and they never take the time to figure out how professionals really do the jo…”
Heller: Targeting legal tech pre-LLMs was a mistake due to low software spend
“I actually feel like in some ways for us in the early days focusing on legal, Made sense for us because I knew legal, but also it's kind of a mistake because at the time the legal software industry Pre-LLMs is actually pretty small because it was like a fracti…”
Fisher: AI code automation may raise software quality bar significantly
“I think another outcome actually is the opposite. It's like maybe all of this automation on, on generating code makes it easier to just raise the quality bar extremely high.”
Fisher: Blockchain ideas could address AI trust and compute distribution
“But I do think You know, in this world where we need trust, yeah, like, those, that's the right set of ideas. We need ideas like that in others, right? Like, you know, something that is always touching on is like, you know, AI-powered audits. Can, like, two di…”
Pollak: Crypto is not yet having its ChatGPT moment
“Candidly, no. And I think the reason I say no is because if you ask a friend or family member, I don't think they'd say, oh yeah, I have had a magic moment with crypto. I think instead they might be fearful. They might not actually know what crypto is doing on…”
Pollak: Smart contracts will become native monetary substrate for AI agents
“And I think that's exactly what we're seeing happen with crypto right now is that crypto is plugging in as a platform. That enables agents to transact natively. So instead of going and trying to operate in a browser over the legacy rails, they just call the sm…”
Masad: Software creation is shifting from expert-only to accessible to anyone
“I think today software is going through the same transition from something that only experts do to something that anyone can do.”
Masad: The AI software prototyping space is already becoming overcrowded
“And I think for a lot of the others, you know, I think it's already, especially the companies that you talk about in the prototyping space, it's already getting really crowded there.”
Friedman: FDE model is the dominant structure for AI agent startups
“It's actually become, I think the dominant way that the AI agent startups are organizing themselves.”
McGrew: Most successful FDE startups have Palantir alumni leading the model
“I think the startups, the most successful startups doing the FTE model have people from Palantir running the FTE model.”
Legora's 30 engineers outship legacy legal tech incumbents with thousands of developers
“So our ability to out ship or, you know out deliver these teams of thousands of engineers with just 30 is insane. And so we have instead managed to build a company with, I think at the time of recording, it's about a hundred where like our velocity It's way hi…”
Launching in the competitive US market pushes startups to become narrower
“The reason why we stayed in Stockholm was we needed a market to grow in, and if you go to the US, it's not only more competitive, but I think it kind of pushes you into becoming a more narrow company.”
Englander: European culture fundamentally rejects seven-day startup workweeks
“Us being from Europe working seven days a week, it's very unusual to say the least, and there's not many people that we can call on. And in fact, a lot of the people that we surround ourselves with outside of work, they fundamentally disagree with the way that…”
Arne Englander: Hiring top engineering talent is easier in Europe than Bay Area
“Whereas in the UK, I think the level is Still really, really strong, but the competition is less, so your ability to hire that top class talent, I think is probably stronger in Europe.”
Srinivas: An AI browser is much harder to copy than chat tools
“The browser is much harder to copy than, like yet another chat tool.”
Srinivas: ChatGPT's dominance prompted Perplexity to pivot to building a browser
“ChatGPT is the most successful consumer AI product out there, and so competing against it is very difficult, which is why I really want to, like, push the company more on the browser side, and I think Comet, the browser, will be an abstraction layer about chat…”
Srinivas: Claude Code appears to be far smarter than Cursor
“Claude code seems to be far smarter than, like, what Cursor is able to do.”