| Mostly true |
Peter Thiel | Factual |
11 Jan 2017 |
Thiel said he had watched the first season of HBO's Silicon Valley, that the character based on him died, and that he liked the character.
Peter Thiel · Factual · 11 Jan 2017 |
Their own work or organisation |
| Mostly true |
Scott Alexander | Prediction |
6 Jan 2017 |
No announcement of a genetically engineered human baby or credible plan for one will occur in 2017.
Scott Alexander · Prediction · 6 Jan 2017 |
Biosecurity |
| Mostly true |
Scott Alexander | Prediction |
6 Jan 2017 |
Scott Alexander gave a 95% probability that fewer refugees would be admitted in 2017 than in 2016.
Scott Alexander · Prediction · 6 Jan 2017 |
Other |
| Mostly true |
Sam Altman | Factual |
1 Jan 2017 |
Besides Airbnb, Dropbox and Stripe, more than 50 YC companies are each worth more than $100 million.
Sam Altman · Factual · 1 Jan 2017 |
Their own work or organisation |
| Mostly true |
Sam Altman | Promise |
1 Jan 2017 |
Sam Altman will teach YC's online startup course in 2017.
Sam Altman · Promise · 1 Jan 2017 |
Their own work or organisation |
| Mostly true |
Sam Altman | Factual |
1 Jan 2017 |
YC gives companies in its program $120k for 7% ownership and works intensively with them for 3 months, then less intensively afterwards.
Sam Altman · Factual · 1 Jan 2017 |
Their own work or organisation |
| Mostly true |
Ørsted | Prediction |
2017 |
With 1.2GW capacity, Hornsea 1 will be the world's largest offshore wind farm when commissioned in 2020, and DONG Energy's biggest investment ever.
Ørsted · Prediction · 2017 |
Their own work or organisation |
| Mostly true |
Sam Altman | Factual |
2017 |
President Trump repeatedly invoked unsubstantiated conspiracy theories, such as 3 million illegal votes, in his first week in office.
Sam Altman · Factual · 2017 |
Other |
| Mostly true |
Jeremy Grantham | Factual |
2017 |
Grantham said the US market has been acting as if it is oscillating normally enough, but around a much higher average P/E.
Jeremy Grantham · Factual · 2017 |
Economics and markets |
| Mostly true |
Jeremy Grantham | Prediction |
2017 |
Removing regulations here and there will lower corporate costs in the short term.
Jeremy Grantham · Prediction · 2017 |
Economics and markets |
| Mostly true |
Nate Silver | Factual |
Nov 2016 |
The main reason FiveThirtyEight's 2016 model gave Trump a better chance than other models was its assumption that polling errors are correlated.
Nate Silver · Factual · Nov 2016 |
AI timelines and forecasting |
| Mostly true |
Nate Silver | Factual |
Nov 2016 |
Clinton significantly underperformed her polls across the Midwest and Rust Belt in the 2016 election, costing her the Electoral College.
Nate Silver · Factual · Nov 2016 |
AI timelines and forecasting |
| Mostly true |
Nate Silver | Factual |
11 Oct 2016 |
The two scientific polls after the second 2016 presidential debate showed a Clinton win, but a more marginal one than after the first debate.
Nate Silver · Factual · 11 Oct 2016 |
Science and research methods |
| Mostly true |
Nate Silver | Factual |
11 Oct 2016 |
Silver said that all the scientific polls after the first 2016 presidential debate showed Clinton had won by a pretty emphatic margin.
Nate Silver · Factual · 11 Oct 2016 |
Science and research methods |
| Mostly true |
Yann LeCun | Factual |
28 Jul 2016 |
The check reading system LeCun and a colleague built at Bell Labs in the early 1990s used structured prediction on top of convolutional nets, called Graph Transformer Networks.
Yann LeCun · Factual · 28 Jul 2016 |
AI capabilities |
| Mostly true |
Warren Buffett | Factual |
21 Jul 2016 |
New constituencies in corporate governance, such as activists, have become stronger over the years.
Warren Buffett · Factual · 21 Jul 2016 |
Philosophy, ethics and society |
| Mostly true |
Elon Musk | Factual |
20 Jul 2016 |
Providing solar power has been on Tesla's website for 10 years.
Elon Musk · Factual · 20 Jul 2016 |
Their own work or organisation |
| Mostly true |
Elon Musk | Factual |
20 Jul 2016 |
The first Tesla master plan, written by Elon Musk 10 years before 2016, is in the final stages of completion.
Elon Musk · Factual · 20 Jul 2016 |
Their own work or organisation |
| Mostly true |
Scott Alexander | Prediction |
25 Jan 2016 |
Scott Alexander gave an 80% probability that there would be no major intifada in Israel in 2016 (over 250 Israeli deaths, excluding a Cast Lead style war).
Scott Alexander · Prediction · 25 Jan 2016 |
Other global risks |
| Mostly true |
Scott Alexander | Factual |
25 Jan 2016 |
Scott Alexander makes predictions at the start of every year and scores them at the end of each year.
Scott Alexander · Factual · 25 Jan 2016 |
Their own work or organisation |
| Mostly true |
Sam Altman | Factual |
12 Jan 2016 |
The Affordable Care Act definitely helped a lot of founders start their companies.
Sam Altman · Factual · 12 Jan 2016 |
Economics and markets |
| Mostly true |
Bill Ackman | Factual |
Jan 2016 |
Even the largest index funds have only about 20 people (one per ~1,000 companies) in their governance departments.
Bill Ackman · Factual · Jan 2016 |
Economics and markets |
| Mostly true |
Jeremy Grantham | Factual |
Jan 2016 |
In his previous quarterly letter written in January, Grantham said market commentators were too pessimistic on global stock markets, especially the U.S.
Jeremy Grantham · Factual · Jan 2016 |
Their own work or organisation |
| Mostly true |
Bill Ackman | Factual |
Jan 2016 |
Pershing Square has never attempted to hedge short-term market movements but has sought inexpensive hedges against the risk of dramatic market declines.
Bill Ackman · Factual · Jan 2016 |
Their own work or organisation |
| Mostly true |
Bill Ackman | Factual |
Jan 2016 |
Vanguard, BlackRock and State Street often cumulatively own 12%, and as much as 20%, of nearly every public company.
Bill Ackman · Factual · Jan 2016 |
Economics and markets |
| Mostly true |
Bill Ackman | Factual |
Jan 2016 |
Two days after Pershing Square began building its yuan position, China did a 2% surprise devaluation that substantially increased the cost of the options it had intended to keep buying.
Bill Ackman · Factual · Jan 2016 |
Economics and markets |
| Mostly true |
Bill Ackman | Factual |
Jan 2016 |
China and Saudi Arabia have continued to spend hundreds of billions of dollars to defend their currency pegs.
Bill Ackman · Factual · Jan 2016 |
Economics and markets |
| Mostly true |
Jeremy Grantham | Factual |
Jan 2016 |
Grantham had earlier warned of trouble if China quickly slowed its demand growth for minerals.
Jeremy Grantham · Factual · Jan 2016 |
Their own work or organisation |
| Mostly true |
Bill Ackman | Factual |
Jan 2016 |
Pershing Square largely abandoned its strategy of shorting the credit of highly rated, highly leveraged companies as a hedge in 2009.
Bill Ackman · Factual · Jan 2016 |
Economics and markets |
| Mostly true |
Jeremy Grantham | Factual |
Jan 2016 |
By the time China's demand growth for metals and coal stopped, miners had spent an unprecedented $1.25 trillion on expansion.
Jeremy Grantham · Factual · Jan 2016 |
Economics and markets |
| Mostly true |
Jeremy Grantham | Factual |
2016 |
From late 2002 into 2006 the Fed raised rates by as much as 430 basis points as the economy recovered.
Jeremy Grantham · Factual · 2016 |
Economics and markets |
| Mostly true |
Nate Silver | Factual |
2016 |
The t-distribution in FiveThirtyEight's model mostly makes a difference for very low-probability events.
Nate Silver · Factual · 2016 |
Science and research methods |
| Mostly true |
Nate Silver | Factual |
2016 |
In 2012, Obama beat his polling by 2 or 3 percentage points in almost every swing state.
Nate Silver · Factual · 2016 |
Science and research methods |
| Mostly true |
Nate Silver | Factual |
2016 |
FiveThirtyEight's model is based on a combination of state and national polls.
Nate Silver · Factual · 2016 |
Science and research methods |
| Mostly true |
Nate Silver | Factual |
2016 |
FiveThirtyEight's polls-only model gives Clinton an 85 percent chance of winning and its polls-plus model gives her 83 percent.
Nate Silver · Factual · 2016 |
Science and research methods |
| Mostly true |
Ray Dalio | Factual |
17 Sep 2015 |
Falling spreads mean asset prices have gone up.
Ray Dalio · Factual · 17 Sep 2015 |
Economics and markets |
| Mostly true |
Dario Amodei | Prediction |
17 Aug 2015 |
AI seems likely to enable much better propaganda and surveillance, which are major tools of autocrats.
Dario Amodei · Prediction · 17 Aug 2015 |
AI policy and governance |
| Mostly true |
Dario Amodei | Prediction |
17 Aug 2015 |
Climate change will be felt much more strongly in the developing world, hampering its development.
Dario Amodei · Prediction · 17 Aug 2015 |
Other global risks |
| Mostly true |
Dario Amodei | Factual |
17 Aug 2015 |
The impact of nuclear power, supersonic flight and elevators has been substantially reduced by regulations or misplaced fears despite working well technically.
Dario Amodei · Factual · 17 Aug 2015 |
AI policy and governance |
| Mostly true |
Dario Amodei | Factual |
17 Aug 2015 |
Diseases have been eradicated and many countries have gone from poor to rich, through decisions that exhibit high returns to intelligence.
Dario Amodei · Factual · 17 Aug 2015 |
Economics and markets |
| Mostly true |
Dario Amodei | Factual |
17 Aug 2015 |
Although drug development is overly cumbersome, once developed drugs are generally successfully deployed and used.
Dario Amodei · Factual · 17 Aug 2015 |
Economics and markets |
| Mostly true |
Yann LeCun | Factual |
27 May 2015 |
Deep learning uses the backpropagation algorithm to indicate how a machine should change the internal parameters that compute each layer's representation from the previous layer's.
Yann LeCun · Factual · 27 May 2015 |
AI capabilities |
| Mostly true |
Yann LeCun | Factual |
27 May 2015 |
The acknowledgements, dated 2015, state that the authors Y.L. and Y.B. are fellows of the Canadian Institute For Advanced Research (CIFAR).
Yann LeCun · Factual · 27 May 2015 |
Field building and careers |
| Mostly true |
Nassim Taleb | Factual |
18 May 2015 |
A study of inter-arrival times between tail conflict events finds that no particular trend can be asserted.
Nassim Taleb · Factual · 18 May 2015 |
Science and research methods |
| Mostly true |
Nassim Taleb | Factual |
18 May 2015 |
Naive observation of conflict data severely underestimates the tail risks of conflicts.
Nassim Taleb · Factual · 18 May 2015 |
Science and research methods |
| Mostly true |
Nassim Taleb | Factual |
18 May 2015 |
The paper examines statistical pictures of violent conflicts over the last 2000 years and develops techniques for handling incomplete and unreliable historical data.
Nassim Taleb · Factual · 18 May 2015 |
Science and research methods |
| Mostly true |
Yann LeCun | Factual |
18 Feb 2015 |
Deep Learning systems augmented with a memory module are starting to show impressive results in natural language processing.
Yann LeCun · Factual · 18 Feb 2015 |
AI capabilities |
| Mostly true |
Yann LeCun | Factual |
18 Feb 2015 |
The brain is much better than current artificial models at unsupervised learning.
Yann LeCun · Factual · 18 Feb 2015 |
AI capabilities |
| Mostly true |
Yann LeCun | Factual |
18 Feb 2015 |
Shallow learning systems have one or two layers, while deep learning systems typically have five to 20 layers.
Yann LeCun · Factual · 18 Feb 2015 |
AI capabilities |
| Mostly true |
Yann LeCun | Factual |
18 Feb 2015 |
The system would probably not be more accurate, but it can potentially recognize people among hundreds of millions.
Yann LeCun · Factual · 18 Feb 2015 |
AI capabilities |
| Mostly true |
Yann LeCun | Factual |
18 Feb 2015 |
A typical Deep Learning system is like a box with 500 million knobs, 1,000 light bulbs and 10 million training images.
Yann LeCun · Factual · 18 Feb 2015 |
AI compute, hardware and data |
| Mostly true |
Yann LeCun | Prediction |
18 Feb 2015 |
Natural language understanding will be the next frontier for Deep Learning.
Yann LeCun · Prediction · 18 Feb 2015 |
AI timelines and forecasting |
| Mostly true |
Yann LeCun | Factual |
18 Feb 2015 |
A trained classifier may also correctly classify cars and dogs it has never seen before.
Yann LeCun · Factual · 18 Feb 2015 |
AI capabilities |
| Mostly true |
Sam Altman | Factual |
Feb 2015 |
Many respected neocortex researchers believe there is effectively one algorithm for all intelligence.
Sam Altman · Factual · Feb 2015 |
Science and research methods |
| Mostly true |
Sam Altman | Factual |
Feb 2015 |
Human brains do not look very different from chimp brains yet produce wildly different capabilities.
Sam Altman · Factual · Feb 2015 |
Science and research methods |
| Mostly true |
Sam Altman | Factual |
Feb 2015 |
Basic search with a lot of compute power has worked better than expected in machine intelligence.
Sam Altman · Factual · Feb 2015 |
AI capabilities |
| Mostly true |
Nate Silver | Factual |
2015 |
Donald Trump's overall favorability ratings in 2015 are about 30 percent favorable and 60 percent unfavorable, and have not improved.
Nate Silver · Factual · 2015 |
Other |
| Mostly true |
GiveWell | Factual |
2015 |
In 2014, GiveWell tracked $27.8 million in money moved to its recommended charities.
GiveWell · Factual · 2015 |
Their own work or organisation |
| Mostly true |
Bill Gates | Factual |
2015 |
NATO has a mobile unit that can deploy very rapidly.
Bill Gates · Factual · 2015 |
Other global risks |
| Mostly true |
Bill Gates | Factual |
2015 |
Small loans have helped millions of people but have reached only a small fraction of the poorest, with relatively high interest rates.
Bill Gates · Factual · 2015 |
Economics and markets |
| Mostly true |
Bill Gates | Factual |
2015 |
At the Ebola outbreak there was no group of epidemiologists ready to deploy to identify the disease and its spread.
Bill Gates · Factual · 2015 |
Biosecurity |
| Mostly true |
Bill Gates | Factual |
2015 |
There was no medical team ready to deploy to the Ebola outbreak.
Bill Gates · Factual · 2015 |
Biosecurity |
| Mostly true |
Bill Gates | Factual |
2015 |
Ebola does not spread through the air, and by the time people are contagious most are too sick to move about.
Bill Gates · Factual · 2015 |
Biosecurity |
| Mostly true |
Nate Silver | Factual |
2015 |
In presidential primaries, endorsements and party elite support tend to be more reliable indicators of eventual success than early polls.
Nate Silver · Factual · 2015 |
Other |
| Mostly true |
Bill Gates | Factual |
2015 |
The WHO is funded to monitor epidemics, but not to do the other outbreak-related tasks the speaker had described.
Bill Gates · Factual · 2015 |
Biosecurity |
| Mostly true |
Nate Silver | Factual |
2015 |
Of Lieberman, Clinton, Giuliani and Perry, only Clinton came close to winning the nomination.
Nate Silver · Factual · 2015 |
Other |
| Mostly true |
Nate Silver | Factual |
2015 |
Even this far out, national primary polls have some correlation with outcomes: a candidate near the top is a somewhat better bet to win the nomination than one near the bottom.
Nate Silver · Factual · 2015 |
Science and research methods |
| Mostly true |
Bill Gates | Prediction |
2015 |
If anything kills over 10 million people in the next few decades, it will most likely be a highly infectious virus rather than a war.
Bill Gates · Prediction · 2015 |
Biosecurity |
| Mostly true |
Nassim Taleb | Factual |
24 Dec 2014 |
Traditional portfolio construction in modern financial theory has operated under at least one of two assumptions: constraints derived from a utility function and/or a fully known multivariate distribution of asset returns.
Nassim Taleb · Factual · 24 Dec 2014 |
Economics and markets |
| Mostly true |
Nassim Taleb | Factual |
24 Dec 2014 |
Under the paper's construction, the barbell payoff (maximal certainty/low risk on one side, maximum uncertainty on the other) emerges naturally.
Nassim Taleb · Factual · 24 Dec 2014 |
Economics and markets |
| Mostly true |
Rodney Brooks | Factual |
16 Dec 2014 |
Labour costs were rising and the era of infinitely cheap labour was coming to an end.
Rodney Brooks · Factual · 16 Dec 2014 |
AI, the economy and work |
| Mostly true |
Rodney Brooks | Factual |
16 Dec 2014 |
Brooks first presented his 1986 layered-architecture work in France.
Rodney Brooks · Factual · 16 Dec 2014 |
Their own work or organisation |
| Mostly true |
Rodney Brooks | Factual |
16 Dec 2014 |
The first industrial robots were installed in 1961, when a computer filled an entire room.
Rodney Brooks · Factual · 16 Dec 2014 |
Technology |
| Mostly true |
Scott Alexander | Factual |
30 Sep 2014 |
The Nazis' outgroup was the almost-identical German Jews rather than the culturally distant Japanese.
Scott Alexander · Factual · 30 Sep 2014 |
Philosophy, ethics and society |
| Mostly true |
Scott Alexander | Factual |
30 Sep 2014 |
Estimates of the genetic contribution to political association range from 0.4 to 0.6.
Scott Alexander · Factual · 30 Sep 2014 |
Science and research methods |
| Mostly true |
Scott Alexander | Factual |
30 Sep 2014 |
Heritability of attitudes toward gay rights is estimated at 0.3 to 0.5, slightly higher than the heritability of homosexuality.
Scott Alexander · Factual · 30 Sep 2014 |
Science and research methods |
| Mostly true |
Scott Alexander | Factual |
30 Sep 2014 |
Researchers have studied belief congruence theory, that belief differences matter more than demographics in forming in-groups and outgroups, for decades.
Scott Alexander · Factual · 30 Sep 2014 |
Philosophy, ethics and society |
| Mostly true |
Satya Nadella | Factual |
10 Jul 2014 |
Gaming is the single biggest digital life category in a mobile-first world, measured in both time and money spent.
Satya Nadella · Factual · 10 Jul 2014 |
Economics and markets |
| Mostly true |
Satya Nadella | Factual |
10 Jul 2014 |
Microsoft was founded on the belief that technology creates opportunities for people and organizations, by putting a PC on every desk and in every home.
Satya Nadella · Factual · 10 Jul 2014 |
Their own work or organisation |
| Mostly true |
Yann LeCun | Factual |
15 May 2014 |
The notions of partition functions, entropy, free energy and variational methods prevalent in the graphical models literature come from statistical physics.
Yann LeCun · Factual · 15 May 2014 |
Science and research methods |
| Mostly true |
Yann LeCun | Factual |
15 May 2014 |
The first commercially viable check reading system, deployed by AT&T/NCR in 1996, used a ConvNet rather than an SVM.
Yann LeCun · Factual · 15 May 2014 |
AI capabilities |
| Mostly true |
Yann LeCun | Factual |
15 May 2014 |
No one uses generalization bounds to do model selection; practitioners use cross-validation.
Yann LeCun · Factual · 15 May 2014 |
Science and research methods |
| Mostly true |
Yann LeCun | Factual |
15 May 2014 |
Speech is a domain with access to ridiculously large amounts of data and a very large number of categories.
Yann LeCun · Factual · 15 May 2014 |
AI capabilities |
| Mostly true |
Yann LeCun | Factual |
15 May 2014 |
Facebook AI Research uses Torch7 for many projects, as do Deep Mind and several groups at Google.
Yann LeCun · Factual · 15 May 2014 |
Technology |
| Mostly true |
Bill Ackman | Prediction |
5 May 2014 |
Banks are not likely to step back in and provide meaningful mortgage investment.
Bill Ackman · Prediction · 5 May 2014 |
Economics and markets |
| Mostly true |
Elon Musk | Factual |
3 Apr 2014 |
NASA called SpaceX to tell it that it had won a $1.5 billion contract.
Elon Musk · Factual · 3 Apr 2014 |
Economics and markets |
| Mostly true |
Satya Nadella | Promise |
3 Mar 2014 |
Mark Penn will be a member of and advisor to the SLT and continue to report to Satya Nadella.
Satya Nadella · Promise · 3 Mar 2014 |
Their own work or organisation |
| Mostly true |
Satya Nadella | Factual |
3 Mar 2014 |
Mark Penn's work produced Microsoft's 'Honestly' campaign and Super Bowl ad, both widely cited across the industry as examples of high impact advertising.
Satya Nadella · Factual · 3 Mar 2014 |
Their own work or organisation |
| Mostly true |
Satya Nadella | Promise |
3 Mar 2014 |
Mark Penn will take a new role at Microsoft as EVP, Chief Strategy Officer.
Satya Nadella · Promise · 3 Mar 2014 |
Their own work or organisation |
| Mostly true |
Satya Nadella | Factual |
3 Mar 2014 |
Chris Capossela has served in senior leadership roles across Microsoft's marketing function for many years.
Satya Nadella · Factual · 3 Mar 2014 |
Their own work or organisation |
| Mostly true |
Satya Nadella | Factual |
3 Mar 2014 |
Over the eight months before March 2014, Tami Reller led Microsoft's Marketing Group, combining many distinct teams.
Satya Nadella · Factual · 3 Mar 2014 |
Their own work or organisation |
| Mostly true |
Satya Nadella | Promise |
3 Mar 2014 |
Eric Rudder will serve as interim leader of Microsoft's Business Development and Evangelism while continuing in his current role.
Satya Nadella · Promise · 3 Mar 2014 |
Their own work or organisation |
| Mostly true |
Ørsted | Factual |
Feb 2014 |
With divestments exceeding DKK 15 billion and a DKK 13 billion capital injection in early 2014, DONG Energy's financial platform has been significantly strengthened.
Ørsted · Factual · Feb 2014 |
Their own work or organisation |
| Mostly true |
Vinod Khosla | Factual |
14 Jan 2014 |
There is $51 billion remaining in DOE loan money.
Vinod Khosla · Factual · 14 Jan 2014 |
Economics and markets |
| Mostly true |
Vinod Khosla | Factual |
14 Jan 2014 |
The U.S. Department of Energy Loan Guarantee Program has created 55,000 new cleantech jobs.
Vinod Khosla · Factual · 14 Jan 2014 |
Economics and markets |
| Mostly true |
Vinod Khosla | Factual |
14 Jan 2014 |
A substantial portion of DOE loans is allocated to nuclear energy.
Vinod Khosla · Factual · 14 Jan 2014 |
Economics and markets |
| Mostly true |
Vinod Khosla | Factual |
14 Jan 2014 |
Oil prospecting has a failure rate greater than 55 percent.
Vinod Khosla · Factual · 14 Jan 2014 |
Technology |
| Mostly true |
Vinod Khosla | Factual |
14 Jan 2014 |
The U.S. DOE loan program has a 97% success rate.
Vinod Khosla · Factual · 14 Jan 2014 |
Economics and markets |
| Mostly true |
Sam Altman | Factual |
2014 |
Sam Altman experienced plenty of rejection from investors while running his own startup.
Sam Altman · Factual · 2014 |
Their own work or organisation |
| Mostly true |
Steven Pinker | Factual |
12 Mar 2013 |
Human intelligence is not particularly dependent on geography.
Steven Pinker · Factual · 12 Mar 2013 |
Science and research methods |