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
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.”
Tan: Jeff Lawson was ousted from Twilio 199 days after voting protections expired
“Our friend Jeff Lawson at Twilio built that company from nothing. To four billion dollars in, you know, actual revenue, like stock up 390% since IPO. I mean, by all accounts, you know, smash rip roaring success. And then his super voting shares expired after 1…”
Ries: Mission-controlled governance outlasts founder or investor control models
“What I really think is that we shouldn't be just building Investor controlled companies or founder controlled companies. There's a third way. Interesting. We can be building mission controlled companies where the mission itself has sovereignty and these compan…”
Ries: Philip Morris generates $600B in annual US external costs
“They have something like eight billion dollars a year in net income. But there's been all these studies. They create six hundred billion dollars a year in costs just in the U.S. That have to be borne by others. I think it's three hundred billion in direct heal…”
Ries: Founders Forget VC Investment Ties Control to Firms, Not Partners
“You forget that you take a venture investment from a venture firm. You're not taking investment from that individual person. You're taking investment from a company. Then that person leaves. And now you're stuck with some new person and you've given all these …”
Ries: Shareholder primacy was never enacted by statutory law or referendum
“In the history of the world. Shareholder primacy has never been subject to any referendum, any legislative action, nothing. So it's weird. If you learned in school, how a bill becomes a law, There's no law for shareholder primacy.”
Ries: Founder control is not a viable long-term governance model
“Founder control is not that great either, because I know a lot of people who are like basically trapped They can never quit their company because they're like the one, they're like literally the human shield blocking every, that's too much. And of course peopl…”
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.”
Ries: Novo Nordisk would have canceled R&D without foundation merger veto
“So we know for sure That if they had not done this, all of the major R&D programs of Nova Nordisk would have been canceled. We know because the company they were going to merge with two years later was bought by Merck, and that's what happened.”
Ries: Foundation-owned companies are 6x more likely to reach year 50
“Companies with this structure are six times more likely to live to year 50. 10% versus 60% probability.”
Graham: YC startups returning home are half as likely to become unicorns
“YC now has a lot of data about this, and the startups that go home after YC don't do as well as the ones that stay. Startups that go home back, startups that go back home after YC are only about half as likely to become unicorns”
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…”
Garry Tan: Tokenmaxxing will permeate all knowledge work across society
“I think now it's going to permeate every part of society. Like, every thing that we would call knowledge work could be token maxed.”
Garry Tan: Tokenmaxxing will not replace humans because human agency remains essential
“I don't think that it means that we're going to get rid of people. I think it means that people need to still supply the agency.”
Tan: Agentic engineering fails when developers put Markdown logic into brittle code
“All of the difficulty in energetic engineering today is when people try to do things that should be in markdown in code and it fails because code is brittle.”
Tan: Technical people with taste benefit most from tokenmaxxing AI agents
“It's very significant for people who are technical because it actually raises the bar on like what you are capable of doing. Like all the people who are attacking me about lines of code, they particularly are, The people who are most likely to get wings if you…”
Tan: Founders should willingly spend $500 daily on AI tokens
“One of the key maxims for YC is You know, how do you find good startup ideas, live in the future and build what's missing? Right. And so this is a profound version of that where all you have to do is commit your brain to look at, you know, spending 500 dollars…”
Chaubard: HRM scored 70% on ARC Prize 1 without pre-training
“There is no pre-training at all. This starts from, like, literally Tagula-Rasa weights, and it can outperform at that time, if we go back, you know, we had O-three, if you remember back, way back when. And it, O-three gets zero. Literally zero, and this got, l…”
Chaubard: Recursive models discover problem-solving strategies without human teacher forcing
“That's the most important part, is that if we had Sudoku, and we know how to solve Sudoku, because like we were just, you know, dumb homo sapiens that didn't know how to solve Sudoku, like it would just have solved it. And that's why it's cool, because it actu…”
Chaubard predicts running recursive reasoning models inside giant LLM latent spaces
“What you can imagine is we found mapping from token space or from vision, from pixels, Some really cool latent space where, like, things are just nicely semantically separated, and we can, you know, makes it really easy for downstream tasks to do, but now in t…”
Hassabis: Current AI paradigms will be part of final AGI architecture
“The components that you just mentioned, I'm pretty sure will be part of the final architecture for AGI. So I think they've come such a long way now and we've proven out so many things about what they can do. I can't see a world in which we will sort of realize…”
Hassabis: 50% chance AGI requires one or two new big ideas
“It could be that there's still one or two big ideas left that need to be cracked. I don't think it's more than one or two, if there are out there. And I think You know, my betting is about fifty-fifty if that's the case.”
Hassabis: Next few years of AI advances will come from RL and search
“And I think a lot of those ideas, both from AlphaGo and AlphaZero are really, really relevant to where we are with today's foundation models. And I think a lot of that is what we're going to see of the advances the next few years.”
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: Fixing AI reasoning gaps may only require one or two tweaks
“So there's just sort of huge gaps, I think, still, but it may only be one or two tweaks that are required to fix those kind of gaps, just to be clear, but I think that's pretty, pretty obvious there are there, and that's why you get this kind of jagged intelli…”
Hassabis: Active agent systems are the necessary path to AGI
“You have to have an active system that can actively solve problems for you to get to AGI. That was always clear to us. So agents are that path.”
Hassabis: AI agents will deliver full commercial value in 6 to 12 months
“I haven't seen the result yet, which I would expect once this is really delivering that full value, which I think will come in the next six to 12 months.”
Hassabis: DeepMind makes edge models open because on-device models are vulnerable anyway
“For now, what we've decided is that our edge models, the things we want to use for Android, and glasses, and robotics it's best that they're open models. Because they're vulnerable anyway on the, once you put them out on the surfaces, so they might as well be …”
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.”
Hassabis: Frontier models will call specialized tools rather than subsume them
“One thing I can think see happening is Gemini, Claude, or one of these general systems making use of alpha fold, like specialized systems as tools. I don't think we're going to have it just in one giant brain because it will have too much regression in if I pu…”
Massad: Tech-adjacent creators get the most value from Replit, not engineers
“And what we've noticed is that people that are getting the most value out of our product, Tend to be the more tech-adjacent ones. Maybe people, product managers have written code many years ago, but don't worry about the development environment setup. Don't wa…”
Massad: In 2023, Replit explicitly chose not to target traditional developers
“So at some point in 20, 23 we just made it an explicit goal of like, we're not going after developers.”
Massad: By Agent 5, Replit will autonomously build and market SaaS daily
“So I think perhaps Agent Five, or maybe sooner, you should be able to tell Replit, every day build me a SaaS company, and like, try to market it, and see what works, and make me some revenue.”
Massad: AI agents that continually learn inside an organization are far away
“And so for us to be able to, like, deploy an agent inside an organization, and for that agent just continues to get better for that org itself is, is such a powerful thing, but that just still seems far away.”
Massad: The company of the future will consist of builders and salespeople
“I think the company of the future is made of builders and salespeople broadly.”
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…”
Tan: Rebuilt Posterous with AI, Replacing 10 Engineers and $10M
“Along the way, I've essentially built all of Posturus, which took two years to build with a co-founder and a team of 10 engineers. I've essentially built all of my startup Posturus, which took two years, ten million dollars, and 10 engineers to build.”
Tan: AI Scaffolding, Not Model Intelligence, Is the Coding Bottleneck
“The bottleneck here is not Not the model's intelligence. As long as you set the models up right, they are already smart enough to do extraordinary work on your code base.”
Vuong: Full autonomy requires an incremental mixed-autonomy approach
“We think that it's going to be more like a peeling an audience analogy, where you start from a really strong base model that have all sorts of common sense knowledge and already works to some extent on your robot, and you have then a Mixed autonomy system. Ver…”
Vuong: Models perform complex robotic tasks zero-shot, saving hundreds of hours
“Today it's possible to perform tasks Zero shot. Zero shot meaning you don't collect any data. And these are the tasks that last year might have required like hundreds and hundreds of hours.”
Vuong: PI's complex robot evaluations actually run on remote cloud models
“Almost all of the robot evaluation that we run at Pi today, including the really Complicated demo that we have shown making coffee, folding laundry, mobile robots navigating around. The model actually hosted in the cloud.”
Vuong: PI integrated with robot startups without ever inspecting their hardware
“And the, one other interesting thing about our collaboration with Weave and Ultra is one, I've never seen their robot in person. Two is I have very little idea about how their robot actually works. And that's a very intentional choice. I want to stay away from…”
Vuong: Reactive AI models eliminate the need for expensive, high-precision hardware
“You don't need a incredibly expensive robot that is capable of very precise motion today to be able to do this task. And the reason why is this model really reactive? And so they can compensate for some of the inaccuracy in the actual robot movement”
Vuong: LLMs lack a fundamental understanding of the physical world
“This only works for simple cases today, and the reason why that's the case is because I think it's pretty fundamental limitation of the model that we have today, which is that they are not at the core model that take action in the world and see the consequence…”
Bilgen: MRD cancer detection shares same technical challenge as population screening
“If you can detect a microscopic level of DNA and be able to say that that is actually cancer, that is the same really technical problem as being able to detect those in healthy patients or, you know, general population.”
Mellata: AI Agents Eliminate the Need for Specialized Fraud Classifiers
“You don't need a classifier anymore because AI agents are able to read a set of standard operating procedure and reason over an image or reason over sort of unstructured data and know that this is possibly chargeback fraud. You don't need a specialized classif…”
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…”