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 82 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 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
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…”
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.”
Chas Englander: AI models outperform humans at structuring public filing data
“You know, if you look at some of these data providers, they've got humans reading information from say public filings and put it in that structured format. You know, the bulk of the work that we're doing, what we're seeing is models are already more accurate t…”
Best: Newsletters will replace social feeds for news within five years
“I think the answer is it won't replace the social network aspect of it. The thing that Facebook and the social networks are great at is having the relationship between you and like the people, you know, in real life... The part of it that should absolutely be …”
Allred: Lambda School graduates more than 85% of its starting students
“Now we're graduating, you know, more than 85% of students that start day one, and a lot of the dropout is because of reasons outside of our control.”
Caldwell: Consumer startups make up only about 5% of YC's portfolio
“People think that YC funds consumer companies, and this is what our bread and butter is. And like, Yeah, like, I think it's like five percent consumer.”
Capturing 20% of global freight makes a company bigger than Saudi Aramco
“Our goal is to get to 20 or 40% market share. If you do that, you're the biggest company on planet earth. Like full stop, like bigger than Saudi Aramco.”
Preskill: Validated topological qubit may appear as soon as 2019
“And it's very ambitious, because at this point, it's not even clear they have a single qubit, but if that approach is successful, and we're, it's making progress, so I think we will see a validated Qubit of this type soon, maybe next year.”
Garg: The biggest crypto winners will likely re-centralize in Silicon Valley
“I think you could have the inspiration for ideas come from underserved markets, but I wouldn't be surprised if the really big winners in crypto actually sort of re-centralize around Silicon Valley.”
Scholl: Douglas Aircraft in 1921 was the last startup to build airliners
“The last company entrepreneur founded that went on to build a commercial airliner was Douglas Aircraft in 1921.”
Scholl: The FAA approved Boom's XB-1 flight permit in just 90 minutes
“The approvals process for XB-One, that even for an R&D airplane can stretch on for months, actually happened in 90 minutes. From when we said we think we're ready to fly, and FAA said, here's the paperwork, we agree, go. We got the first ever permit for flying…”
Bryant Chou: Webflow was the first no-code application
“We created this visual interface over HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, and it was sort of, you know, the first no-code application that was out there.”
Tan: Delaware C Corps Require Relentless Pursuit of Profit
“Basically, you know, if you're a Delaware C Corp, you have to relentlessly pursue profit. Otherwise there's grounds to remove you.”
Ries: FTX bankruptcy's Anthropic stake exceeds the entire fraud value
“Apparently the stake that the bankruptcy has of those shares is worth more than the whole, than all of the entire fraud by a lot.”
Chaubard: 7M parameter TRM scored 87% on ARC Prize 1
“And so it's a twenty-eight million parameter model for HRM. Now she brings it down to a seven million parameter model. It actually gets from 70% to 87% on on ArcPrize one. And does actually quite well on ArcPrize two as well.”
Hodak: Science trial achieved the first coherent form vision restoration
“As far as I know, our clinical trial was the first time ever that form vision had been, like, had created, like, a coherent image in the mind's eye of a person.”
Hodak: A major organ perfusion firm makes more from private jet logistics
“Like one of the big companies in the space, it turns out that they're like private jet logistics business is bigger than their medical device business.”
Mercury data shows 70 percent of startups choose Claude
“There was some stuff from Mercury that like, 70% of startups are, you know, choosing quad as their model of choice.”
Musk: Neuralink will do first human vision implants in 6-12 months
“And then I think in the next six to 12 months, we'll be doing our first implants for vision, where even if somebody's completely blind we can write directly to the visual cortex.”
Pachama's ML model predicts New England forest carbon under 1.5% error
“And we demonstrated, this is the work of, ah, Elias, who is the PhD that works with us, ah, for four years he was working on this and he demonstrated in New England, less than 1.5% error at predicting how much carbon is there in a forest, comparing...”
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”
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.”
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.”
Flexport surpassed FedEx to become the 17th largest global freight forwarder
“We are now, we last month we passed FedEx and panel Pina, which are, we're now number 17. Oh, out of about 20,000 freight forwarders in the world in four years.”
Zeevi: Modern daily sugar consumption equals annual sugar intake in 1700
“The annual consumption in 1700 is the daily consumption today.”
Watts: Antidepressants blunt and essentially stop psilocybin from working
“Psilocybin is not nearly as effective if you're on antidepressants. It really takes the I mean, it takes the highs and the lows. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah. It stops it from working, essentially.”
Altman: LA produced more billion-dollar startups than New York recently
“In fact, I bet there's more billion plus dollar companies in LA in the last few years than New York, or at least more total market cap.”
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.”
Altman: Every billion-dollar accelerator alumni so far came from Y Combinator
“However, all, every billion plus dollar company so far ever to come out and accelerate, I think there's 11, have been part of YC.”
Livingston: Press credited Paul Graham for a conference announcement she wrote
“I spent all morning working on announcing this conference, and here's my blog post right here, announcing the female founders conference, and so what turned up later that day in the press? Paul Graham announced his conference for women founders.”
Scholl: Boom's XB-1 is the first plane landed solely using augmented reality
“The first human piloted airplane landed solely on augmented reality with no natural view of the runway.”
Scholl: Amazon's board and internal staff laughed at Jeff Bezos over AWS
“He was laughed at internally and laughed at by his board when he launched Amazon Web Services. He was laughed at by the world for e-commerce.”
Hu: RT-X proved AI scaling laws apply to physical robotics
“That was a big paper, because it was the first that showed potential scaling laws that applied to robotics, because now you could start training all these models across multiple kinds of hardware, not just one, which has never been done in robotics ever before…”
Tan: Groq runs transcription 200 times faster than Whisper v1
“You should be using a Grok with a Q. It's literally 200 times faster.”
Joseph: Original scaling laws paper spanned 11 orders of magnitude
“Like, you know, the scaling, I think the original scaling laws paper had, like, 11 orders of magnitude, and there was, like, this intense debate on whether it would continue for, like, another point.”
Thompson: Operation Warp Speed reduced the 10-year vaccine development record to 10 months
“I think the record amount of time to go from part one to part Z, Was something like, or A to Z was something like nine, 10 years. We did this in, in 10 months.”
Taggar: The most successful startups in history all had co-founders
“If you look at the most successful startups in history, they all had co-founding teams, and we don't always realize this because once a startup becomes successful, it's common for some founders to leave and one founder, especially the CEO, to become well-known…”
The average YC company dies; getting admitted means you accomplished nothing
“The average YC company dies. Like you literally have accomplished in the scale of making any impact on the world, getting into YC means you've accomplished nothing.”
Caldwell: YC Repeatedly Funded Failed Ride-Sharing Startups Before Uber
“How many times has YC funded that idea before Uber and it didn't work? This was actually a really common bad startup idea was ride sharing.”
YC is the world's largest bio and hard-tech seed investor
“YC is actually the largest bio seed investor in the world and the largest hard tech seed investor in the world. This includes accelerators, seed funds, every kind of investor.”
Aatrey: Most Indian unicorn founders graduated from IIT Delhi
“If you see most of Unicorn founders in India are from IT Delhi, you look at Flipkart, Zomato, and a lot more, right?”
Gill: Audio recall lasts 36% longer than visual media
“People actually do remember what they hear. Yeah. 36 to 39% longer than what they see and what they read, which is actually a video advertiser, like, hidden piece of research”
Migicovsky: Relativity Space's thesis was that 3D-printing eliminates integration testing costs
“Their thesis was it's not actually rocket assembly that costs a lot of money, it's the testing phase of integration, where if you have hundreds of different systems that have to work perfectly with each other, when you assemble and build the final rocket, you …”
Ning: Well-capitalized Canadian public companies will drive US cannabis consolidation
“I think part of the whole like consolidation pattern that will Come just because the market's so fragmented right now will be heavily pressurized by Canadian like publicly traded, heavily capitalized companies. Just because they're coming in and they're buying…”
Hua: San Francisco requires a 30% social equity workforce for cannabis
“Within San Francisco. You're gonna need to hire 30% of your workforce from social equity people. You also, as a dispensary, may need to have a certain amount or certain percentage of your shelf space of products created and manufactured by people from social e…”