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 295 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 1 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
Altman: Startups founded today will produce future trillionaires
“I bet there's some future trillionaires sitting in this room, and I would bet that the startups created today will be much more valuable, much more impactful than startups of the past”
Altman: OpenAI made big mistakes in Hugging Face incident, an alignment failure
“Here are the mistakes that OpenAI made, and we did make some big ones, of course, but these systems have gotten incredibly capable. So I think it's an alignment failure. I think it's a security failure. I think it's like a very serious thing, even though it's,…”
Altman predicts humanity will achieve unimaginable superintelligence within 20 years
“Look, there, there's a lot you know, in 10 or 20 years, unless something goes hugely wrong, we'll have, like, unimaginable super intelligence, and I'm very excited to see how that goes.”
Altman: AI progress could compound over next nine years toward superintelligence
“I can see a path where the work we are doing just keeps compounding, and the rate of progress we've made Over the last three years, continuous for the next three, or six, or nine, or whatever. You know, nine years would be, like, 3500 days, or whatever. If we …”
Altman: Building AGI at OpenAI outweighs all past human innovation combined
“If this one thing works, like, if we do actually build AGI at OpenAI, that is more important than all of the innovation sum total in humanity so far. So, clearly not has all the innovation happened.”
Altman: Overreacting to AI safety risks creating a zero-agency surveillance dystopia
“One dystopia that I'm particularly nervous about 10 years from now is we overreact to AI safety, and so we say, look, everyone, you're gonna get a cure for cancer, you're gonna have material abundance, but you will have no freedom, you will have no agency, it …”
Elon Musk emailed OpenAI saying it had zero percent success chance
“I can say this one because it got publicized in early, not early, a few years into OpenAI, where Elon sent us this really mean email. We'd been working through that for a while and said we had a zero percent chance of success. Like, not 0.10, that we were tota…”
Altman claims core scientific discovery in AI is mostly finished
“Figure out the remaining scientific stuff, which I don't think there's much left.”
Altman: Climate fixes, space colonies, and physics discoveries are not far off
“But I do think all of those things, and probably a lot more we can't even imagine, are maybe not that far away.”
Altman: AI will enable someone to solve all of physics
“The fact that somebody else, I really believe, is now gonna go solve all the physics with this stuff, like, I'm so excited to be alive for that.”
Altman: Value Investing Fails for Angel Investors Most of the Time
“I think value investing is not a winning strategy when it comes to being an angel investor most of the time.”
Altman: Most investment firms struggle to reject profitable, harmful companies
“If there's a company we look at where we think we'd make a lot of money, but it'd be, we think it might be bad for the world, we won't touch it. Which most other investment firms unfortunately have a hard time with.”
Altman: Most VCs give founders bad advice on employee equity
“And this is one place that your investors will always give you bad advice. I think, not YC, but all other investors give bad advice here, most do.”
Altman: In-House Fundraiser Post-Series B Beats Bankers and Halves Dilution
“Another thing that I think is worth hiring earlier that almost no one does, is a full-time fundraiser. Let's say you hire someone like really, really great, and their full-time job is to raise money for the company. You hire them after your B round, and you sa…”
Altman: Best PR hack is skipping agencies to directly contact 3-4 journalists
“I think the biggest PR hack you can do is to not hire a PR firm. Just pick three or four journalists that you develop really close relationships with, that like you, that understand you, that you get. And then you contact them yourself. They will cover every s…”
Altman: Founders should never hire a professional CEO
“When should the founders think about hiring a professional CEO? Never. You, if you look at the most successful companies in tech they are run by their founders for a very long time sometimes forever.”
Altman: Almost no top 30 software startup had remote early co-founders
“The data on this is look at the, say, like, 30 most successful software startups of all time, and try to point to a single example where the co-founders were in different locations. It's really, really tough.”
Altman: AI agents build in seven minutes what took startups three months
“What took three months to build at the time that we, each company built over the whole YC startup, could now be done with, like, in, like, seven minutes by a coding agent”
Altman: Startups will prevent AI power from concentrating in few companies
“In fact, if we are right that AI is going to be such a big change, startups will be much more important to making sure that The power of this technology gets widely distributed throughout the economy and society, and it's not just concentrated in a few compani…”
Altman: AI tool fluency will beat traditional experience for founders
“I would bet that this generally will cut against many years of experience in favor of people who have a lot of fluency with the tools.”
Altman: AI loss-of-control accidents are not entirely theoretical
“Loss of control, accidents are not entirely theoretical things.”
Altman: OpenAI must avoid imposing its worldview on AI users
“And that means that we have to, you know, be fairly quite reserved about not imposing our worldview about what we think people should or shouldn't do with AI, or even what we think the good ideas are, while still making sure that we can ensure enough of a safe…”
Altman: Next six months will match prior two years of AI progress
“I think there will, I think it will feel like the next six months is like maybe equivalent to the last two years of model progress, something like that.”
Altman: Demand for low-cost high-quality intelligence is effectively uncapped
“It seems to me like the demand for sufficiently high quality intelligence at a sufficiently low price is effectively uncapped.”
Altman: In 6.5 years, average person will use 500B tokens monthly
“If that happens again, which I think it probably will, then in another six and a half years, the average person uses, let's say, five hundred billion tokens a month, and the token leader uses a quadrillion, or quadrillions of tokens a month.”
Altman: OpenAI has an open-source model releasing soon
“We have an open source model coming out soon.”
Altman: AI companion value lies in background persistence, not hardware
“I think the key of her is not the little piece of hardware. It's that this thing got to a point where it could run in the background and feel like a sort of AI companion.”
Altman: OpenAI will soon run world's largest, most expensive infrastructure
“I think we will run the, like, largest and most expensive piece of infrastructure in the world pretty soon.”
Altman: ChatGPT will become third biggest website, possibly first
“It'll be the third at some point, hopefully someday the first if our current growth rates continue”
Altman: AI models like o3 can act as junior employees executing multi-hour tasks
“But now you start to see things where you can like really give a task to Codex, for example or to deep research, and you have this thing go off and do a bunch of stuff and come back to you with like a proposal. It's like a very junior employee that can work on…”
Altman: Startups almost always win when industry clock cycles shift dramatically
“When the clock cycle of the industry changes this much, startups almost always win, and we've probably never seen it change this much.”
Altman: Energy will eventually be the fundamental limiter on intelligence scaling
“I cannot recall ever thinking until like after starting OpenAI that they were going to be so obviously related. That, you know, the, that energy would be the eventually the fundamental limiter on how much intelligence we could have.”
Altman: AI progressed to PhD-level intelligence across most areas in five years
“In five years we have gone from this, like, thing that could barely write a sentence to a thing that is like, you know, PhD level intelligence in most areas.”
Altman predicts AI will maintain its rapid rate of progress for five more years
“Five more years I think we'll be able to maintain the same rate of progress”
Altman: AI's economic impact will be faster and steeper than the transistor's
“The analogy I like most for AI is the transistor, like the historical tech, technical analogy. You know, some people figured out like a new, really important scientific discovery. And society, the economy, whatever you want to call it, just got to work. Just d…”
Altman: Expecting significant compounding AI progress ahead despite potential walls
“We could hit some, like, unexpected wall, or we could be missing something, but it looks to us like there's a lot of compounding in front of us still to happen.”
Altman: Most of the world undervalues extreme conviction on one bet
“Most of the world still does not understand the value of, like, a fairly extreme level of conviction on one bet.”
Altman: No Great Businesses Were Built on GPT-3 Except Copywriting
“But, with the possible exception of copywriting, no great businesses were built on GPT-III.”
Altman: The world is astonishingly asleep on the AI platform shift
“I think that's why I'm so excited for startups right now. It is because the world is still sleeping on all of this to such an astonishing degree. And then you have, like, the YC founders being like, no, no, I'm gonna, like, do this amazing thing and do it very…”
Altman: OpenAI now knows the path to building AGI
“This is the first time ever where I felt like we actually know what to do. Like, I think from here to Building an AGI will still take a huge amount of work. There are some known unknowns, but I think we basically know what to go do, and it'll take a while.”
Altman: Level 4 AI innovation can happen using current models creatively
“I had been telling people for a while, I thought that The level two to level three jump was going to happen, but then the level three to level four jump was, level two to level three was going to happen quickly, and then the level three to level four jump was …”
Altman: AI will reach Level 3 autonomous agents faster than expected
“Three is agents ability to go off and do these longer-term tasks You know, maybe like multiple interactions with an environment, asking people for help when they need it, working together, all of that. And I think we're gonna get there faster than people expec…”
Altman: Arrival of advanced AI will make human intelligence less beneficial
“I think one thing that will happen with the sort of arrival of, HEI is intelligence. Like, I got lucky, I got born reasonably smart will be less and less of a benefit.”
Altman: Virtual reality is a fake trend because buyers rarely use headsets
“A fake trend, or at least a fake trend as of, ah, August, 2018, I would say is VR. I do believe VR will be big someday, but today most people that I know, ah, that own a VR headset use it never or very rarely.”
Altman: In Silicon Valley, starting a hard startup is easier than an easy one
“In fact, I think in 2018, at least in Silicon Valley, it's easier to start a hard startup than it is to start an easy startup.”