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 161 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 3 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
Tan: Returning to Coding with AI Yields 400x Output
“It was 13 years of not coding and then suddenly, boom, I'm doing about 400 X the amount of work that I was that year. The last time I was even sort of like two thirds of the time writing code.”
Tan predicts everyone on Earth will have a personal AI by 2027
“And then I guarantee you like this time next year, like everyone's going to be saying what you heard here first, which is like every single person on the planet will have their own personal AI.”
Garry Tan: Claude in Chrome MCP is among worst software ever used
“Claude in Chrome MCP is one of the worst pieces of software I've ever used. You know, every time it would try to do an action, it would think and think and think. There was crazy context bloat. Often it wouldn't even do anything, but it would take two to three…”
Tan: Artificial general intelligence is literally actually here
“So, you know, there's sort of this explosion in model capability. You know, we've been talking about this for several years, but then it feels like it's here. Like AGI is literally actually here.”
Tan: Harvey and Open Evidence are overcapitalized 'foie gras' startups
“I think they're like, there might be a case of two foie gras startups, like one being Harvey and the other one being open evidence, right?”
Garry Tan: Scammy founder programs produce future SBFs and Theranos fraudsters
“I worry that some of these programs are just literally trying to teach people to become more you know, SBFs and Theranos. And that's like, you know, that's a waste of time. Like, and you're going to go to jail.”
Tan: OpenAI o3 operates around 130 IQ, smarter than many past hires
“I think of O-three as basically about a 130 IQ, maybe O-three pro can be even smarter than that. When I really think about that, it's like, oh yeah, like a lot of the people who I've ever hired in my lifetime are like, yeah, O-three is smarter than that person…”
Tan: Sam Altman aims to scale AI compute to $1 trillion spend
“Since then, Sam has told me that he actually wants to go to four orders of magnitude to get to a trillion dollars in you know, sort of spend.”
Tan: AGI is effectively already here for most knowledge worker tasks
“Like you could make a strong case that AGI is basically already here. The majority of the tasks that, you know, 98% of knowledge workers do day-to-day it is now possible for a software engineer probably sitting in front of cursor, to write something that gets …”
Garry Tan: Context-aware consumer AI will become a $10B-$100B company
“I mean, this is a great example of like consumer AI that is almost certainly going to be a 10 or a hundred billion dollar company. That no one's built yet.”
Tan: Write markdown teaching LLMs to code rather than calling LLMs
“And a new way to do it is actually have the LLMs just write the code you need right now. And then you write 10 or 20 times less code, but it's way more customizable. It does, you know, more and is more awesome. Between token maxing and even like, you know, don…”
Tan: AI token compute costs will drop drastically within two years
“I mean, basically because the frontier models are that good, like, you know, I think that in two years, like, That'll be a 100,000 and, you know, down to 10,000 and a thousand. I mean, basically these orders of magnitude are about to happen.”
Tan: The AI consumer revolution will arrive in 2029
“It means that the ideal consumer moment is still like
Three orders of magnitude away, but that means that the consumer revolution is actually in 2029.”
Tan: The next Meta and Snap will emerge within two years
“That's when we're going to see the new meta. That's when we'll see the new snap. That's when we're going to see all of the future and it's not even a couple of years away.”
Tan: AI allows solo founders to build year-long projects in days
“And then now it's like, actually what would take a week or a month or a year, like you literally do in, you know, minutes, hours, or, you know, at the worst, like you could build a whole cathedral of like 20 to 40,000 lines of code. Like what would take a typi…”
Tan: Organizational superintelligence is built by compounding micro AI skills across all work
“How do you build super intelligence inside a company? You do that on everything you do. And it's not more complicated than that. Like, you literally just compose everything that you do, and any given thing that any given person can do, you combine that in aggr…”
Tan: $100K AI token workloads will drop to $200 in two years
“What you spend a 100,000 or a million dollars a year on now, it will be commonplace like in, in two years, right? It'll, it won't cost a 100,000 in a year. It'll cost 10,000. And the year after that, it'll be like a couple hundred bucks, right? And everyone wi…”
Tan: Centralized vs. decentralized AI trajectory will be decided within 24 months
“We basically have a choice to be made over the next, I don't think it's even that long. I think it's like 18 to 24 months. It might take five years, but there are sort of two scenarios”
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…”
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…”
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.”
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.”
Tan: Boom Supersonic is using jet engines to power AI data centers
“Boom supersonic, instead of making supersonic jets right now, is on this good quest to create enough power for a bunch of these
AI data centers that are being built right now.
They use jet engines and even those like are so bad, you know, the supply chain for …”
Tan: Environmental lobby abuses CEQA to halt innovation and housing
“In California we have CEQA, which is totally abused by the environmental lobby to stop all innovation and building housing, by the way.”
Tan: GPT-4 wiped out YC startups' RL fine-tuning lead over GPT-3.5
“You know, we've also had YC companies where, ah, they had something that beat OpenAI, ah, you know, GPT-III.V and they were doing fine-tuning with RL, but then, ah, yeah, GPT-IV and then, ah, GPT-IV came out and, ah, you know, basically blew their fine-tuning …”
Tan: Micro-creators with 1,000 to 10,000 followers are mispriced distribution assets
“When you're paying someone else, like the reason why that's interesting for consumer products is it's a mispriced asset generally still. I mean, Mr. Beast is not a mispriced asset. He's like getting his value from it. Like he's, you know, but It does seem like…”
Garry Tan: CS majors face higher unemployment than art history majors
“The craziest stat, I think this came out of the New York fed in February of this year computer science majors You know, obviously this is not the people in this room. This is just, like, out of, like, you know, a normal distribution of all computer science maj…”
Tan: Y Combinator uses LLMs internally to evaluate prospective venture investors
“Well, one of the things we've been using LLMs for internally is actually helping founders figure out who they should take money from.”
Gary Tan: Sam Altman directly estimated AGI is 4 to 15 years away
“Seeing him on Monday, he actually directly estimated, you know, between four and 15 years.”
Tan: AI startup moats come from proprietary data for domain evals
“You can almost Argue that anything that is consumer and publicly available on the internet, that's going to be in the base model. So then your moat ultimately is for all of the other things that are not already online, whether it's, you know, for case techs be…”
Tan: OpenAI Uses Fake Model to Hide Raw o1 Chain of Thought
“If you use O-one in ChatGPT, it looks like it will tell you what's really going on, but apparently they have a fake model that just spits out things to give you the impression that it's breaking it up into steps. And they've actually You know, hidden it, becau…”
Tan: Foundation model giants won't build vertical applications due to inefficiency
“If you treat OpenAI as the Google of the next 20 years, you want to invest in Google and all the things that Google enabled, like Airbnb. Google could do Airbnb, it probably won't. Just from, like, I don't know, Coase's theorem of the firm, probably. It's just…”
Tan: OpenAI's $9/hour real-time voice API threatens call center-reliant national economies
“The Ongoing usage-based pricing is nine dollars per hour, and it sort of points to a sort of powerful thing. Like, if I were a macro trader, I would be very, very bearish on countries that have, that rely very heavily on call centers right now because, you kno…”
Tan: Embed LLMs in Familiar UIs Rather Than Chat Interfaces
“While in the next five or 10 years I think we will get far more used to using it that way I think the low-hanging fruit right now is just using the large language model
To actually do the sort of knowledge work that a human being could do, and then package it …”
Tan: AI Dev Tools Suffer Churn as Incumbents Add LLM Features
“A bunch of us are funding dev tools companies that sell to AI companies and they're selling tooling, but then they might, you know, they might sell enterprise contract to someone who also upstream has a fortune 100 that said that they'd pay a 100,000 dollars a…”
Tan: Any GPT-4 prompt workflow can be duplicated with custom fine-tuning
“Anything you do with those prompts, you can get your own model to do with a little bit more training.”
Tan: Chat interfaces are the wrong UX model for AI software
“I mean, this is why I think the chat interface is wrong. Like I actually think there is value accrued to really great UX, like good copy, good you know, interaction design, information hierarchy you know, being able to approach a product and say like, this is …”
Tan: Open-source AI access for consumers is the best insurance against tyranny
“We want all consumers to be able to have from the bottom up, ah, the same access to that same technology. And that's, ah, yeah, the best insurance against tyranny.”
Tan: Meta's Muse Spark matches Claude Opus at one-eighth the cost
“When I was using you spark with my open claw, like it became clear that it was as good as Opus, especially for that sort of agentic flow with skill files, but it was like eight X cheaper actually.”
Tan: All competitive alpha lies in building custom, self-improving AI models
“I feel like all the alpha is in building your own AI. I mean, if someone else is using whatever is off the shelf, but you're, you have a thing that can recursively self-improve, and it is, you know, I mean, the mechanic, people are very flippant about markdown…”
Tan: AI models before Opus 4.5 were toys; newer models are peers
“In the Opus 4.5 and later moment, like I would, you know, I would trace it to like that model was the thing that changed everything for me. The things before that were usable, but like toys that release, there was something magical that happened. And now I can…”