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 2,002 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: AGI Codebase Will Be Under 10,000 Lines on 1980s Compute
“I do believe that, you know, when you create a GI retrospectively, it will turn out that it's a code base that's less than 10,000 lines of code. And that if you had known about it back in the 19 eighties, you could have done a GI back then using the computer r…”
Musk: Digital superintelligence will arrive by 2026 for sure
“Like, I think we're quite close to digital superintelligence. It may happen this year, and if it doesn't happen this year, next year for sure. Digital superintelligence is defined as smarter than any human at anything.”
Tom Blomfield says today's software engineering jobs will vanish within 10 years
“But the conclusion of all of that, I think, is that software engineering jobs of today, I think, will not exist in five or 10 years.”
Wang: Meta Agent Swarms Outperform Teams of 100 Engineers
“Like, I think we've seen, internally in meta cases where if you can develop the right agentic loop and you have the right eval or the right metric for the agents to optimize, you can have a swarm of agents accomplish more than, like, a team of a hundred engine…”
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”
Cherny: Anthropic Can No Longer Demonstrate Prompt Injection on Opus 5
“So essentially, if you combine a well-aligned model, so this is, like, essentially three years of research into alignment, With a prompt injection classifier, which we run for all traffic, and what this is doing is it's based on Chrysola's mechanistic interpre…”
Hassabis predicts AGI will arrive around 2030
“Depending on what your AGI timeline is, You know, mine's like, 20, 30 or something like this.”
Heller: AI startups face mass extinction as enterprise pilots fail to convert
“A lot of those pilots are not converting to real revenue, and there's going to be a mass extinction event as a lot of pilot revenue, it's like, instead of ARR, it's like PRR, like Pilot Recurring Revenue, or something like that, or not even recurring, just Pil…”
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.”
Musk predicts Mars will be self-sustaining within roughly 30 years
“I think we'll have enough mass transferred to Mars within like roughly 30 years to make Mars self-sustaining, such that Mars can continue to grow and prosper, even if the resupply shifts from Earth stop coming.”
Musk: There is a 10% to 20% chance AI causes annihilation
“I think it most likely will be a good outcome. I guess I'd sort of agree with Jeff Hinton that maybe it's a 10 to 20% chance of annihilation. But look on the bright side, that's 80 to 90% probability of a great outcome.”
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 …”
Musk in 2016: Human travel to Mars could happen by 2026
“It's a meaningful number of people going to Mars I. I think this is potentially something that can be accomplished in about 10 years maybe sooner , maybe nine years.”
Cherny: Bun codebase was rewritten to Rust in 11 days using Claude
“And he had the model rewrite it from Zig to Rust. It was one prompt. It was a dynamic workflow, and a dynamic workflows are a feature in quad code that essentially let you orchestrate, you know, dozens, 100,000 of agents to do work productively. And it ran for…”
Cherny: Claude routines do the maintenance work of hundreds of engineers
“And so now we have every day, maybe 20 or 30 of these routines. It's running across all of our code bases and It's not totally there yet, but we're on the path to fully automating the maintenance of our apps by doing this. And this is, again, hundreds of agent…”
Huang: Physical AI will be NVIDIA's next $100B business within 10 years
“Likely this will be one of the largest industries in the world, and it'll take longer than a couple, two, three years. It'll take less than 10, and so this will be our next hundred billion dollar business.”
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.”
Hassabis: AI might solve a Millennium Prize math problem within years
“When I say just, we're now talking about just like solving the Riemann hypothesis or something. This would be obviously amazing. Well, one of the Millennium Prize problems, and maybe we're a couple of years out from doing that.”
Chollet: Symbolic Models Will Eventually Replicate and Outperform Deep Learning
“And so everything you're doing with machine learning today, with parametric curves, we should be able to do it. With symbolic models in the future in a way that will be much, much closer to optimality. Much closer to optimality in the sense that you're going t…”
Chollet: AI in 50 Years Will Not Use Today's LLM Stack
“I personally don't think that machine learning or AI in 50 years is still going to be built on this stack.”
Mukund Jha: Emergent invented multi-agent paradigms before academic papers were published
“There was a time when we sort of invented the multi-agent system. We invented memory. We invented like, how do we do agent to agent communication? How do you scale up test time compute? A lot of those things which like were sort of coming out, like we would di…”
Hodak: Humans who will live to 1,000 are likely alive today
“I think it is very possible that the first people to live to a thousand are alive right now. And I think it might be many more people than you think. It's not gonna be like one or two people on earth today.”
Friedman: Majority of Software Code Is Probably Already Written by AI Agents
“It's already probably the case that the majority of code being written is written by agents.”
Claude Code increased Anthropic engineer productivity by 150 percent
“And since Quad Code came out, productivity per engineer at Anthropic has grown a 150%.”
Claude generates between 70 and 90 percent of Anthropic's codebase
“If you look at Anthropic overall, it ranges between, like, 70 to 90% you know, depending on the team. For a lot of teams, it's also, like, a hundred percent. For a lot of people, it's a hundred percent.”
Cherny predicts AI will generally solve coding for everyone
“So continuing to trace the exponential, I think what will happen is coding will be generally solved for everyone. And I think today coding is practically solved, you know, for me, and I think it'll be the case for everyone you know, regardless of domain.”
Cherny: The software engineer title will disappear as roles become builders
“I think we're gonna start to see the title software engineer go away, and I think it's just gonna be maybe builder, maybe product manager, maybe we'll keep the title as kind of a vestigial thing, but the work that people do, it's not just gonna be coding, it's…”
Steinberger: 80% of consumer apps will disappear due to AI agents
“I think 80% of them are going away.”
Skates: Basic AI visibility will rapidly commoditize into free lead generation
“I think the real business has to be downstream of AI visibility. It's a valuable, there's value in it, like, you know, just like there's value in, in the SEO world, but it's so easy to do. You know, we did it, you know, as I mentioned in, in, in probably more …”
Fisher: AGI is extremely likely to arrive within two to three years
“Cause it's extremely likely that we will have AGI in the next few years. Maybe it's not two, maybe it's three.”
Masad: Traditional SaaS application software value will drop to near zero
“My prediction is that all application software will go to zero. In other words, software will be dirt cheap, that no one will be making money on the traditional type of SaaS software.”
Kaplan: AI swarms will eventually replicate entire scientific communities
“Eventually we imagine AI models or millions of AI models perhaps working together will be able to do the work That whole human organizations can do. They'll be able to do the kind of work that the entire scientific community currently does.”
Srinivas: Google possessed only fourth or fifth best AI models in 2023-2024
“And 2024, 20 23 especially, and large part of 2024 too, Google had like, maybe a fourth or fifth best models at any moment. So as a startup outside Google, you had access to AI that was better than what Google internally had.”
Ng: AI companies have made untrue statements to regulators behind closed doors
“I've been in the room where some of these businesses said stuff to regulators that was just not true.”
Chollet: All inventive AI systems rely on discrete search
“All known AI systems today that are capable of some kind of invention, some kind of creativity, they rely on discrete search.”
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…”
Musk: Humanoid robots will outnumber all other robots combined tenfold
“There's gonna be so many humanoid robots, and robots of all sizes and shapes, but my prediction is that there will be more humanoid robots by far than all other robots combined, by maybe an order of magnitude, like a big difference.”
Musk: Augmented Human Intelligence Will Probably Be One Billionth of Digital Intelligence
“Human intelligence, even assuming a significant increase in human population and intelligence augmentation, like massive intelligence augmentation, where like everyone has an IQ of a thousand type of thing. Even in that circumstance collective human intelligen…”
Tom Blomfield says AI will fulfill surging global demand for software
“Like I could easily see the demand goes up 10 X or a hundred X, who knows, but I just think the AI is getting so good that you just won't have humans fulfilling that demand in anything but the most niche of niche cases.”
McGrew: LLMs have entered a pure scaling regime toward AGI
“And now that that has been cracked at this point, I think we actually have a very clear path to just focus on scaling. You know, we were, you know, talking about that you know, the zero to one part, that's not about scaling. I think there's a really strong cas…”
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.”
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.”
Seibel: VCs tell YC partners not to advise founders against high burn
“They also always tell us like, hey, like we're funding your companies. Like you shouldn't be like, you know, like telling the founders not to have high burn.”
Doctorow: There will never be another Facebook
“The big, big upsides are not creating another Facebook because there won't be another Facebook. The big, big upside is creating the thing that happens once Facebook has been torn down.”
Rossmann predicts Harvard will soon be recognized primarily as a luxury good
“Harvard is going to be more obviously recognized as a luxury good, as an expensive purchase that works for the elites. And it's something that if you can afford to get your kids there and you can afford to not focus on hard skills, then great. You've purchased…”
Allred: Lambda School grads are financially $250K ahead of university peers
“By the time the student's graduating from university, the Lambda School student has three years of experience and has paid Lambda School off and is a quarter million dollars ahead, at least, of the university grad.”
Gil: A prominent Midas List investor tried clawing exit value at Mixer Labs
“The biggest issue we had there is we had a bad investor who, as we were exiting the company, basically tried to claw more value for themselves as part of our exit. And this is sort of a Midas list investor who's very well known now.”