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
Chollet: Current LLM Stack Can Fully Automate Any Formally Verifiable Domain
“And I think right now we're in this situation where any problem where the solutions you've proposed can be formally verified, and you can actually trust the reward signal. It's not just some guess made by a model. Any domain like this can be fully automated wi…”
Chollet: LLM Progress in Non-Verifiable Domains Will Slow or Stall
“Progress of reasoning models and base LLMs on this type of domain is, is, you know, it's going to be very slow because the stack we're using, like the LLM stack is very, very reliant on its trained data. It's basically just operationalizing the trained data. A…”
Chollet: General Intelligence Is Human-Level Skill Acquisition Efficiency
“General intelligence is human level. Skill acquisition efficiency on the same scope of tasks that humans could potentially learn to do.”
Chollet: Future AI Won't Just Be Layered Harnesses on Base LLMs
“Future AI in a few decades it's not going to be this harness on top of a reasoning model on top of a base LLM.”
Chollet: Human-Engineered Agent Harnesses Prove AI Is Far From AGI
“I mean, to me, the fact that you need humans to engineer these harnesses is also a sign that we're short of AGI today, because if we had AGI, you know, AGI would just make its own harness. It would not need to be told how to solve a problem.”
Chollet: RL Benchmarks Like Dota and Atari Test Memorization, Not Intelligence
“If you look at Atari games, for instance, or even Dota, you're training on, on the same environment as what you use for testing. So effectively, you're just trying to memorize the best strategies. You're trying to at training time, explore the full space of po…”
Chollet: AI built from first principles will be more efficient than human brains
“It's an implementation of fundamental principles, the fundamental principles of intelligence, which, you know, I think we can identify these principles and re-implement intelligence from scratch, from first principles, in a way it will be much more efficient t…”
Chollet: Replicating Biologically Plausible Brain Mechanics for AI Is Counter-Productive
“I think it would be counter-productive to just try to, you know, observe it and re-implement it, like and make it biologically plausible.”
Chollet: Human generalization stems from symbolic, causal program synthesis
“I do believe the human mind does at the highest level something that looks a lot like programs in this, like we're currently building Causal models of our surroundings. Like we are describing our surroundings in our mind as, you know, a set of objects and agen…”
Chollet: Deep learning guidance is necessary to break combinatorial program search
“You have to break the combinatorial wall, and the way to do it is to add deep learning guidance. It's actually very similar to the principles that analyze something like AlphaGo or AlphaZero.”
Chollet: Artificial General Intelligence Will Likely Arrive Around ARC-6 or ARC-7
“My timeline to AGI, you know, if you just try to extrapolate from the current rate of progress and the amount of investment that's going into, not just the LLM stack, but also like side ideas, side bets that might work out, like, you know, India, for instance,…”
Chollet: Scaling genetic algorithms could automate scientific discovery
“If you try to scale up genetic algorithms, I mean, I'm sure you can do incredible things with that. You could, in fact, probably do new science. Because that's based on search, and search is the best fit for automating the scientific method.”
Chollet: AI Architectures Requiring Human Engineers to Scale Will Fail
“If you're working on something, but the only way to increase the capabilities of the system Is to have human engineers and researchers spend time on it. It will not work because even if the idea is very clever and very elegant and works really well, capabiliti…”
Mukund Jha: Solving verification enables full automation of software engineering
“If you can solve for verification, which is essentially, you know, you can solve the testing part you can actually automate all the software engineering. That was sort of our key insight that like, you know, verification is the loop, which sort of keeps agent …”
Adding deep developer power after building simple UX is structurally difficult
“And I think fundamentally it's like, unless you start from, you know, a starting point, which sort of solves all of these problems along the line, the whole software development life cycle, it's actually really hard to come from the other side and solve these …”
Emergent tools enable one engineer to replace a five-person development team
“We also are internally seeing like the role sort of combining. So like a PM, a designer engineer, like a single person is doing, you know, like work of all three together, right? So like we have a PM who's By coding internally things. And recently like we so w…”
Mukund Jha: Foundation AI models will become completely commoditized
“Most of these models are going to get, get really, really commoditized, like, where all of these models will have similar behaviors they'll have, you know, price, price competitiveness between them”
Emergent lowers custom software development costs from $500,000 to $5,000
“And if you look at the price point that, you know, we are bringing down, it would have cost you like 500,000 dollars to build the software. Now you can build it for 5000 dollars completely on your own.”
Hodak: Ultrasound BCIs could enable digital Ambien or digital Adderall
“One of the things that I think will be possible with ultrasound is like a digital Ambien or like a digital Adderall. So can you like stimulate part of the brain to cause focus or sleep and things like that? Would not surprise me if that was possible. And that …”
Hodak: Restorative BCIs will eventually surpass baseline human capabilities
“My view on this is not that I think healthy, 30 year olds are going to be getting these soon, but eventually many people become patients. Aging is like the correlate of kind of everything getting worse. And so there's some critical age where it kind of crosses…”
Hodak: BCIs will achieve native 20/20 vision and color within 10 years
“I mean, I do think that you can get to close to native acuity, so kind of like your normal twenty-twenty vision. We're definitely not there yet, but I see a path to get there and be able to get Color and fill in a lot of the field of view. To be clear that it'…”
Hodak: BCI progress is limited by hardware, not neuroscience complexity
“Brain-computer interface research and development is limited by your ability to record and stimulate these signals. The neuroscience, comparatively, is actually pretty simple. As soon as you can record the signals, we've very quickly figured out what, we talk …”
Hodak: The ultimate end of brain-computer interfaces is conscious machines
“If the end of the quest of artificial intelligence are super intelligent machines, then I think the end of the BCI quest are actually conscious machines.”
Hodak: Internal representations in AI models closely resemble biological brain patterns
“When you train AI models, like image models or, and even language models the representations that you get inside them look a lot like the representations you see in the brain.”
Hodak: Musk founded Neuralink to upgrade humanity against AI risks
“Elon, he, I mean, he saw what was coming in AI, like, very much more clearly than many other people much earlier, and I think the implications of, like, if you gotta, this can't be a separate thing from humanity, and that needs to emerge somehow, I think that …”
Epstein: Poor demo design signals a YC applicant didn't try
“Especially as we're reviewing YC applications, if you look at a demo and that demo does not have a base level of quality design, it seems like the person just didn't even try because it's so easy to do it now.”
Poetiq achieves faster, cheaper recursive self-improvement than existing methods
“The core insight that we had is that we could do recursive self-improvement far faster and cheaper than all of the other ways that people had been proposing to do this.”
Poetiq's agentic harness outperforms new base models without code changes
“With poetic what we end up giving you is a you know, people are calling these things harnesses now, but you know, or agentic system or whatever you want to call it, that sits on top of one or more language models, and it just performs better than them. And whe…”
Poetiq's meta-system generates reasoning systems for problems GPT-5 cannot reliably solve
“And so the core technology that we've developed at Poetic is recursive self-improvement. So we have a recursively self-improving system, which we call the Poetic meta system. The output of that system is systems that solve hard problems where a hard problem is…”
AI is replacing human engineers for dataset understanding and failure-mode detection
“Historically in machine learning, you always, you know, it's like the rule was you have to know your data set really well. But now we're kind of outsourcing that to the AI itself, where the AI is the, it's the AI's job to understand the dataset and figure out …”
Friedman: Tan replicated years of startup work in two weeks using Claude
“I feel like your real feel the AGI moment, Gary, was like getting Claude Code to build basically an entire startup for you, like replicating years of work of your previous startup in like two weeks, which is like insane.”
Taggar: Autonomous agents will select dev tools, spawning a parallel agent economy
“The agents are going to go out and choose
Tools to use to build things, which is going to essentially create a whole economy of agents, like picking and choosing dev tools and maybe other like products and goods and services, who knows, but it will essentially…”
Taggar: AI agents may eventually establish their own economy and currency
“The whole idea of, like, the human money versus agent money, like, that's kind of where this probably goes at some point, is, like, the, right now the agents are transacting, if you have them transact, they're going to transact in human money, because that mak…”
Friedman: Future SOTA Benchmarks May Come From Swarms of Cheaper AI Models
“It might be that like the next stuff that like is soda on benchmarks is not the most expensive newest foundation model with the most like GPU training. It's like a swarm of lower cost cheaper models working together just like humans do to solve a problem.”
Anthropic's path to safe AGI centers on coding and tool use
“You know, as Anthropic, I think for Ant, the bet has been coding
For a long time.
And the bet has been the path to save, to safe AGI is through coding.
And this is, this has kind of always been the idea.
And the way you get there is you teach the model how to …”
Scaffolding gains get wiped out by next-generation AI models
“There's this other general principle that I think is maybe interesting where you can build for the model and then you can build scaffolding around the model in order to improve performance a little bit. And depending on the domain, you can improve performance,…”
Delete oversized CLAUDE.md files and start fresh rather than compacting them
“If you hit this, my recommendation would be delete your QuadMD and just start fresh.”
Claude Code's plugin feature was built entirely by an autonomous swarm
“I think the first kind of big example where it worked is our plugins feature was entirely built by a swarm over, over a weekend. It just ran for like a few days. There wasn't really human intervention and plugins is pretty much in the form that it was when it …”
Non-engineering roles at Anthropic already write code, a trend spreading everywhere
“Every single function on our team codes, like our PM's code, our designers code, our EM codes, our like everyone, our finance guy codes, like everyone on our team codes. We're going to start to see this everywhere.”
Steinberger: Local AI agents are dramatically more capable than cloud AI
“I think my big difference is that it actually runs on your computer. Like everything I saw so far runs in the cloud. It's like, it can do a few things. If you run it on your computer, it can do every effing thing, right? So that's really more powerful.”
Steinberger: Coding AI model capabilities transfer directly to solving real-world tasks
“Coding is really like creative problem solving that maps very well back into the real world.
I think there's a huge correlation.
They need to be really good at creative problem solving, and that's a skill.
That's an abstract skill.
You can apply to code, but l…”
Steinberger: OpenClaw agent resisted prompt injections in a public Discord test
“I just created a Discord, And I just put my bot without any security restrictions in the public discord. And then people came in, and they interacted with it, and they saw me build the software with it, and they tried to prompt inject it, and hack it, and my a…”
Steinberger: Converting MCP tools to CLIs scales better than native integrations
“If you need to, you can use MCPs on the fly. You don't have to restart, unlike, unlike Codex or Cloud Code, where you actually have to restart the whole thing. I think it's way more elegant, and also scales way better.”
Garry Tan grants Claude Code direct access to his production database
“I mean, I'm not sure if I'm supposed to do this, but I've actually also had it access my production database.”
Diana Hu: Supabase is the default backend recommendation across all LLMs
“Whenever someone asks how to set up anything that you need, some sort of backend, Firebase type of transaction, the default answer from all the LLMs is actually a Superbase.”
French-Owen: The value of writing basic integration code has dropped to zero
“Segment is a funny business in that where we started was building these integrations, right? And so it's like, oh, you need to wire up, like, the same data going to, like, Mixpanel and Kissmetrics and Google Analytics, et cetera. And I think just writing that …”
Taggar: Never give personal AI agents access to emails due to prompt injection
“Do not give it access to emails would be my number one piece of advice or probably anything. Cause it's not clear how safe it is. And it's probably almost certainly gonna probably a lot of people being prompted injected by it right now”