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
Aatrey: Most Indian startups will build for Tier 2 and 3 audiences
“Especially, I think for the next 10 years, most products that we built in India will be built for tier two, tier three audiences. Right? And most of these people who will be building startups will come from Metro, will come from IITs. And they will not be them…”
Gill: Future professors will monetize like branded sports stars
“Imagine professors as the sports stars of the future where, oh yeah, what are you wearing? What are you sponsored by? But that sort of means of monetization and where, where it's going for educational content. We think that that personal brand will become more…”
Best: Podcast ad rates per download will drop significantly
“I suspect as I kind of hinted before that there's a lot of podcast advertising that's in a little bit of like an emperor's new clothes state where like too much is it's overpriced. And because there's just not metrics there, it's just like waiting for like som…”
Allred: Lambda School may launch a nursing school by late 2019
“So you know, we're not working on it right, right now, but don't be surprised if you hear by the end of this year, an announcement that Lambda nursing is going live and we're launching a nursing school”
Allred: The best high-growth companies will continue to be built in Silicon Valley
“I think the best high growth companies are still going to be built in Silicon Valley for right now, or at least they'll have an executive team in Silicon Valley.”
Social media platforms will fail to curb manipulation before 2020 elections
“The fact that we saw an increase already in 2018 you know, I don't think the platforms are going to be able to get their act together in time for 2020.”
Deepfakes are overhyped and will not become a major political threat
“I think, you know, there's a lot of hype about deep fake right now. I don't know how, how real it's actually going to be. And, you know, we're already seeing, you know, a lot of the research agencies like DARPA and things like that work on being able to detect…”
Lantz: Indie game development will never be a reliable career
“It's pop culture. It's entertainment. It's hit driven. It's never going to be a, it's never going to be a reliable career for anybody.”
Lantz: Top esports titles will not stay dominant for 20 to 30 years
“Like, it's not, I don't think we're looking at, like, whatever, you know, League of Legends, and Counter-Strike, and Hearthstone, and Overwatch, maybe Starcraft, I don't know. Like, I don't think those, I don't think we're gonna be stuck with those for the nex…”
Cannon: VR combined with chemicals could surpass physical reality
“I mean, VR plus some kind of, like, chemical combination, I could absolutely see being better than real life. For almost everyone. If not everyone.”
Akinlade in 2018: Nigeria's population will exceed the US in five years
“Like in the next five years, I think Nigeria is going to be even more than the US.”
Iorns: Future biotech will rely heavily on direct consumer payments
“I believe that the future will definitely involve a strong component of user pays, so I think the products that are developed will have to be in indications that the patients are actually willing to pay for”
Mathilde Collin predicts personal email will die while workplace email grows
“So like you're emailing friends and families. I don't think that email will last forever. So if you look at the growth year over year, it's actually decreasing every year. Whereas if you look at work emails, it's increasing year over year. So I believe that em…”
Schwartz: Enterprise software will probably never be bought on mobile
“There are many, many products that are probably never going to be bought on mobile. Like probably no one's going to buy enterprise software on, on a mobile device.”
Schwartz: Paid ad budgets will suffer substantial cuts under GDPR
“The other big advantage is that paid budgets are now going to take a huge hit. Because of GDPR, we've gone to this nightmare scenario where you don't know if your paid budgets are working because you can't track users until users Agree to be tracked.”
Reinhardt predicts that third-party data brokering will eventually die out
“There are plenty of other companies out there that, that do stuff like that. It's gonna go away and die eventually.”
Gil: Incumbents will capture most value in Internet of Things
“Internet of Things is a great example where I think most of the interesting things in that market will come from large electronics players who can just integrate it into something and then distribute it versus a new sort of one-off company that's just making a…”
Aaronson: Certified randomness may be quantum computing's first near-term application
“As far as I can see, may be the first application of quantum computing that people could actually be able to realize with, like, near-term devices with 50 or 60 or 70 qubits. And this application is to generate cryptographically secure random bits.”
Benjamin: 50-qubit supremacy devices will launch within a year but lack practical utility
“On the other hand, what we believe is about to happen in the coming year is that people will start to bring out qubits, ah, sorry quantum devices that are at or just a little bit over the quantum supremacy threshold. This number, a lot of people are racing to …”
Benjamin: Quantum hardware will soon reach behaviors impossible to classically simulate
“We are now getting on the verge of getting machines that will behave in ways that cannot be predicted, cannot be simulated. We'll be in the regime where we're genuinely discovering how the machine behaves by having one.”
Preskill: Quantum computers will impact chemistry, carbon capture, and materials
“The Ones which will affect everyday life, I think, are better methods for understanding and inventing new materials, new chemical compounds. Things like that can be really important. You know, if you find a better way of capturing carbon by designing a better …”
Preskill: 50-to-100 qubit quantum computers will arrive in a couple years
“We think in a couple of years we'll have devices with about 50 qubits to a hundred, and we'll be able to control them pretty well, and that's an interesting range, because even though it's only 50 to a hundred qubits, doesn't sound like that big a deal, but th…”
Preskill: Quantum computers breaking public key crypto unlikely in 10 years, likely in 50
“I don't think, though I could be wrong, that we're likely to have quantum computers that can break those public key cryptosystems in 10 years. But in 50 years? Seems not unlikely.”
Preskill: Quantum computers will enable tabletop toy spacetime in decades
“And in particular, what we're going to be doing with quantum computers and, you know, the other quantum technologies that are Becoming increasingly sophisticated in the next couple of decades is we'll be able to control very well, highly entangled, complex qua…”
Garg: Mainstream dApp adoption is probably 7 to 10 years away
“I think it's probably like seven to 10 years out for most of these. I think we're really, really early in most of these cases.”
Xie: Decentralized apps are 3 to 5 years from mainstream adoption
“I think my time span is just a little bit short and maybe like three to five, but I think that there's a lot of scaling issues that need to be solved before anything can go mainstream.”
Garg: Crypto will go mainstream via invisible blockchain infrastructure
“At some point in like the next five years, it's not going to be that you're a crypto company, it's that you offer some value to the people who use your product, and it just so happens that you sit on top of blockchain, or you use crypto economics, or whatever …”
Patrick Moberg predicts Fortnite on mobile will spike and then fade
“Yeah, but it'll spike and then sort of maybe die off. It's really novel right now to play this on, like against other players on your mobile device.”
Brundage: AI will achieve superhuman performance in StarCraft within three years
“Yeah, I think there will be Superhuman, Starcraft and Dota too, probably in that time horizon. I said in, I think early 2017 that it would be the end of, that I gave like 50% chance by the end of 2018. So this gives me more runway. I'll say, yeah, like, 70% co…”
Wojcicki: Universal Healthcare Payment System Will Never Happen in US
“I think the reality is what needs to happen is never going to happen. Which is like you have a universal payment system.”
3D home printing can reduce construction costs from $6,500 to $3,000
“So right now our homes on average are about 6500 dollars per home. We believe with three D home printing, we can get that down to about 3000 dollars over time, not in the beginning, but over time,”
Buchheit: Commercial supersonic flights will reach Tokyo in six hours by 2028
“In 10 years, when you wanna go to Tokyo, you're gonna get there in, like, six hours.”
Ralston: The Startup ICO Fundraising Boom Is Not Sustainable
“Don't really believe it's sustainable.”
Slavin: The Creator Who Solves VR Won't Come from AAA Studios
“Instinctively, and from my experience, I don't think that that person is going to come from one of the big AAA studios because they're going to have to be thinking in a different way.”
Slavin Predicts 98% of Americans Will Own Smartphones by 2019
“And by 2019, that's 98%. 98% of the United States will have smartphones, you know, even Obama phones or smartphones. You won't be able to buy a non-smartphone in 2019.”
Sloan predicts Facebook updates and Instagram photos will be gone by 2050
“I would not bet against everything that we're pouring into kind of the vast digital box, you know, like everything, the Facebook updates, the Instagram photos, all of it basically being gone in 2060, 20, 50. Like, I hope that's not the case, and I mean, it see…”
Brockman: AI hardware will advance faster than people expect
“Now, if you look forward to what's going to happen over upcoming years is the hardware for these applications for running neural nets really, really quickly are going to get fast, faster than people expect.”
Kor Adana in 2017: Blockchain and cryptocurrencies are the future
“Personally, I think blockchain is unbelievably exciting, and I think it's the future. So I am all for people investing in cryptocurrencies, investing in Bitcoin, Ethereum, and it is a volatile market right now, and you have ICOs coming out every day, and That …”
Iorns: RNA Editing Will Face Lower Regulatory Barriers than CRISPR DNA Editing
“So I think there you'll see less of a regulation barrier because you're not editing the actual genetic code. You're just editing the end product.”
Speech recognition could be a solved problem within a few years
“I sincerely think there's a chance that over the next few years we're going to regard speech recognition as a solved problem.”
Benet: Shipping physical storage to consumers may become cheaper than internet bandwidth
“Eventually we're going to get to a point where it might actually be cheaper to ship around stuff to consumers.”
Benet: Distributed labs with long-term funding will replace Bell Labs model
“I think this is, you probably won't see the creation of a Bell Labs like the one before. It's possible that someone like Google and so on creates it, but I think what we'll have instead is, is a much more distributed version of it, where you will have smaller …”
Musk: AI is probably the biggest near-term factor affecting humanity's future
“In terms of things that I think are most likely to affect the future of humanity, I think AI is probably the single biggest item in the near term that's likely to affect humanity.”
Chaubard: Massive chip specialization will split training and inference data center specs
“We just see that at the chip level, there's going to be massive specialization. The specs that you would need for a training data center are going to be very different than the specs for a inference data center.”
Chaubard: Chip specialization and ASICs will proliferate across AI workloads
“From my vantage point, we're gonna see this proliferation, and where we have sufficient demand now, because there's so much demand for tokens, Where it makes sense to specialize at the chip level that will pay out and allow you to go through the full new produ…”
Stuart: Single NVLink domains will soon scale to hundreds of GPUs
“And you also have a scale of architectures like NBL-L-Seventy-Two, which packs 72 GPUs inside a single NVLink domain, and soon this is going to extend to hundreds of GPUs.”
Pomel: Companies must build ahead of AI demand and will fail more often
“With AI in particular, things are changing so fast that you just can't wait to see the demand materialize from the customer base. So you need to get ahead of it, which I think us and many others I think are going to get wrong more often, and we need to be at e…”