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
French-Owen: AI Will Make Average Companies Smaller and More Numerous
“I think the average company is probably going to get like a little smaller and there's going to be many more of them doing more things.”
Tan: Gemini will never match ChatGPT's personality
“And I don't expect Gemini to ever have The personality that I would expect from ChatGPT. It just feels like a different, like, entity, you know.”
Heller: No single AI company will win entire knowledge work markets
“First of all, for some of these spaces, the market is so big because we're talking about like how much, how many trillions of dollars are being currently spent on like marketing professionals or support professionals or whatever. There's not going to be a sing…”
Fisher: Enterprise buyers will adopt AGI agents within a few years
“And I think that's actually extremely nearsighted because what's going to happen, I think open question is the buy side, the enterprises, they're going to get armed with AGI or strong agents over the next couple of years as well.”
Levie: Salesforce and Marc Benioff Will Successfully Implement AI for CRM
“It won't just be like, oh, it's CRM, but with AI, because Mark Benioff in Salesforce is going to do CRM with AI. Like he's going to figure out a way to do that. He's they're very good at executing like that will happen.”
Masad: Parallel simulation testing will increase AI agent reliability by 2-3x
“So at any given problem, generating a ton of different ways of doing it, and then testing all of them in parallel. This will bring up reliability of agents by, I think, two to three folds.”
Masad: Corporate org charts will evolve to resemble open-source project networks
“So the org chart will start to look more like a network than a hierarchy. So look more like an open source project than a, than it will look like a traditional company hierarchy with a marketing department and sales department.”
Masad: The AI ecosystem will be driven by multiple specialized expert agents
“I think multiple agents. And the reason I think that's true is because let's, let's say I'm someone with true, unique, Domain expertise. Let's say I'm a lawyer who is top in the world at solving certain cases that, that are very rare. And so I have this domain…”
Masad: AI agents won't autonomously discover and test business ideas anytime soon
“I don't think we're going to get to a point where you can go tell an agent, hey, go find me a, you know, business idea and go test all of them. I don't think we'll get there anytime soon.”
Masad: Liberal arts education will become more valuable in the AI future
“I don't think they're mutually exclusive, but I do think that the liberal arts will become more valuable.”
Masad: Future software engineers cannot afford to remain narrow specialists
“I think today engineers tend to be a little more parochial than they can afford to be in the future, because, you know, what I shot, what I showed with the kind of
The model for what the future company could look like.
Everyone becoming more of a generalist.”
Truell: Fully transforming software engineering with AI will take decades
“AI is going to be this transformative technology maybe more so than, you know, any revolution in recent technological revolution in recent centuries, but it's going to take a couple of decades, and it's going to be this industry-wide effort where there are all…”
Field: AI user interfaces are currently in their MS-DOS era
“Yeah, I think that it feels intuitively like we're in the MS-DOS era of AI right now, and that, you know, if you look back 10 years from now, everyone's gonna go, can you believe that we just had this chat box?”
Field: The number of designer founders and design GMs will multiply
“I think that the number of designer founders will multiply. I think the number of designers that are leading Large areas and sort of GMs will grow as well.”
Dylan Field: More people will project consciousness onto AI
“My prediction is that we'll probably see an increase in people projecting consciousness onto AI, whether or not that's the right thing that, you know, you agree with or don't agree with. I think that the number of people that will do that will increase.”
Kaplan: AI training and inference will see 3x-10x yearly efficiency gains
“I think that over time, as AI becomes more and more widespread, I think that we're going to really drive down the cost of inference and training dramatically from where we are right now. Sort of, three X to 10 X gains algorithmically, and in sort of scaling up…”
Srinivas: Users will hate AI answers if ads are embedded into them
“If ads are part of every AI answer, you're going to hate it too.”
Srinivas: Mobile apps will resist adopting MCP servers for AI
“Expecting every mobile app to have MCP servers and then, like, connecting all their data to your thing, It's not going to be that straightforward. Like, nobody wants to be disintermediated by an AI that quickly.”
Ng: AGI is overhyped; humans will outperform AI for a long time
“I feel like AGI has been overhyped.
And so for a long time, there'll be a lot of things that humans can do that AI cannot.”
Fei-Fei Li: Hardware and software convergence will eventually enable the metaverse
“I'm actually really, really excited by metaverse. I know so many people are kind of still like it's still not working. I know it's still not working. That's why I'm excited because I think the convergence of hardware and software will be coming. So that's also…”
Kirsten Green: Enduring AI companies will reinvent categories from scratch
“I imagine that, like, Every category in some way can be reinvented, and I don't think you can look at, like, what it looks like today and just add AI onto it, add memory, or add a bit of a deeper connection. We're seeing that now, right? And I think there's co…”
Nadella: AI product creation will center on data feedback loops for post-training
“But the interesting thing is the feedback loop, the data path inside the product that then is used in order to post train, in order to be able to do the right tool you know, selection that seems to be the place where product creation is all gonna happen.”
Nadella: AI will create measurable value in healthcare, education, and productivity within five years
“I think the real question in the next five years is we've got to produce enough products that are creating great value, which I'm very confident of, right, by the way, in healthcare and education, in, Ah, in productivity. So there's many, many domains, but tha…”
Nadella: AI labs will shift toward integrated reasoning models within a year
“What is the pre-training to RL the end-to-end training loop that's the next, you know, big sample? That I think is also what I think will happen in the next year. So I would say, if that is another scaling law breakthrough, because we will be, like, if you sor…”
Altman: OpenAI's open-source model will run locally and surprise people
“I think it will be, like, much better than you're hoping for, and the ability to, like, use it to run incredibly powerful models locally is gonna, like, really, really surprise people on what's possible.”
Altman predicts AI will shift from turn-based chat to proactive persistent companions
“You will have this, like, entity that gets to know you, that connects to all your stuff, and that is, like, proactively helping you. It'll, it won't just be like you send a message and it sends you one back, but it'll, like, be running all the time. It'll be l…”
Altman predicts small teams will achieve step-function productivity gains from AI
“One of the things that will feel most different about
These next 10 years versus these last 10 years is how much a single person or a small group of people with a lot of agency can get done, and that is a bigger deal than it sounds like because coordination co…”
Musk: Digital superintelligence will happen before Neuralink scales
“The Neuralink is not necessary to solve digital superintelligence. That'll happen before Neuralink is at scale”
Musk: Neuralink will do first human vision implants in 6-12 months
“And then I think in the next six to 12 months, we'll be doing our first implants for vision, where even if somebody's completely blind we can write directly to the visual cortex.”
Truell: AI will eliminate the manual 'human compilation' step of programming
“And so I think that more and more of that, like, human compilation step will go away, and computers will be able to kind of fill in the gaps, fill in the details.”
Koomen: Every profession will have its Cursor or Windsurf moment
“It's basically every profession I think will have its cursor moment or its windsurf moment.”
Koomen: Mainstream users will adopt AI prompting faster than personal computing
“And I think the same thing is going to happen with prompting. So I think this is actually going to happen a lot faster with prompting, because writing a prompt is a lot more accessible than, you know, operating your file system manager on, on your computer. Yo…”
Blomfield: In 5 years, 99% of people won't touch their system prompts
“But I, I'd suggest, I think in In five years, for 99% of people, they're not touching their system prompt, but the system prompt is custom to them.”
Koomen: Writing prompts will become part of daily workflow for many
“Some of the work that we've done at YC, building agents to automate some of the repetitive work that we and our teammates do on a regular basis, actually suggests to me that writing prompts is going to be part of the day-to-day flow for a lot of people.”
Tom Blomfield predicts trade bodies will act as protectionists against AI
“And so I can see that happening in, in law, in medicine, as these kind of trade bodies act as gatekeepers to try and, almost like protectionist unions, trying to protect the jobs of their members.”
Tom Blomfield says AI will transform law and medicine within five years
“So many industries like law or education or medicine that really were not big buyers of software in the past that are going to be transformed in the next five years.”
Blomfield: AI Coding Might Shift Software Architecture Toward Modular Services
“I think we might see a shift towards more modular or service-based architecture where the LLM has clear API boundaries that it can work within while maintaining a consistent external interface Rather than these huge monorepos with massive interdependencies.”
Palicha: Zepto can easily reach $20B to $30B in top-line revenue
“We've got an opportunity to build, you know, the largest, you know, grocery player in India, which it's, is a seven hundred billion dollar market, right? And so if I'm in that position, we can easily build 20, 25, thirty billion of top line,”
Friedman: AI models will solve debugging limitations within six months
“So like, it definitely feels like we're headed in the direction where this may not be true in, you know, six months.”
McGrew: Extended reasoning compute will unlock reliable autonomous AI agents
“What we're going to see out of reasoning, out of long thinking is that it's really going to unlock the possibility of agents to do actions on your behalf, which, you know, has sort of always been possible, but it's just never been quite good enough.”
Taggar: 100% AI accuracy will create winner-take-all software markets
“If they just on day one, you could be guaranteed a hundred percent accuracy, like as though you're just building a web app on top of a database, the barrier to entry to build these things goes way down. It's gonna be more competition than ever. And then it wil…”
Friedman: People will look back on 'GPT wrapper' as a silly term
“And I think people are going to look back on this term GPT, GPT wrapper, like similarly how we think of like, how we would look at the term database wrapper, which just seems like silly.”
Caldwell: Future generations will view human-driven cars as barbaric
“And the number of people that every day get seriously injured or die in car accidents, I think we're going to look back and be like, that was crazy barbaric. That was like having surgeons that didn't wash their hands. In that era. Is I think how we'll look at …”
Seibel: Reliable rockets will enable 45-minute commutes to Tokyo
“When rockets are reliable, you can go anywhere in the world in 45 minutes. Like, we could commute to Tokyo.”
Seibel: 95% of extrinsically motivated startups die within three years
“95% of your friends doing startups are extrinsically motivated, and their startup's gonna die in the next two or three years.”
Saez-Gil: New airline regulations demand 160M tons of carbon offsets annually
“All the airlines starting in twenty-twenty-one will have to offset their emissions. This is by regulations, right? Mm-hmm. It's called the Corsia Framework. Yeah. We are talking about a 160 million tons per year that are gonna be demanded by the market.”
Betts-Lacroix: Amazon's surveillance monopoly will be entrenched by police partnerships
“Or Amazon is now involved in video surveillance on the, at the behest, as you were saying, of police forces all over the country. And that's a situation where they have this creeping, growing monopoly power but it's going to be likely enshrined or ennobled, as…”