“I would not have believed anyone if they had told me that within eighteen months I would have lost 99 per cent of my $4 billion fortune and would be pursued almost to the brink of bankruptcy by seven major banks… I would have found it impossible to contemplate that I would be treated like a pariah in my home country, saddled with $1 billion in debts and hated as a man who had supposedly almost single-handedly brought down an economy. But that is exactly what happened…”
— Thor Björgólfsson
Icelandic billionaire businessman and former chess player

The quote archive

Wisdom in fragments

A growing archive of 3,000+ moments, drawn from every interview.

I'm not trying to craft a grand story so much as get stuff done.

— Dave Plummer

I think, and I have thought for many months, or a year now, that this is as big as or bigger than the internet itself as a revolution in computing.

— Dave Plummer

You don't need a cult of personality. You need a whole lot of talented engineers working together, with good communication and collaboration, to produce a great product.

— Dave Plummer

If you're trying to fake that and compete with somebody who does it naturally, good luck.

— Dave Plummer

I wasn't writing it to a spec, or for an imaginary customer. I was writing it for me.

— Dave Plummer

If you were going to give Leonardo da Vinci a CNC machine, would you do it when he was 17, or would you wait until he had already learned the craft? I think I would wait.

— Dave Plummer

You still need to be an engineer to do AI coding effectively, but now you need taste, which you didn't have to have before.

— Dave Plummer

I was not looking for an excuse, but it served as a great explanation for a lot of things.

— Dave Plummer

I always knew I was different, but I didn't think I was wrong.

— Dave Plummer

Right now, I would say that AI on a constrained task is a better engineer than I am.

— Dave Plummer

I also don't want our work to be part of a hype cycle that distracts from other issues.

— Susan Schneider

It's imperative that we grapple with the questions: what is it to be sentient? What is it to be human? What is it to be intelligent?

— Susan Schneider

We could potentially realise that consciousness extends beyond brains.

— Susan Schneider

I think major assumptions have to be backed by extraordinary science.

— Susan Schneider

If you want to say consciousness emerges, it has to emerge from something. You can't get apples from oranges.

— Susan Schneider

There's no science I've seen that's publicly accessible indicating these systems are conscious, but there's good science to indicate that they emulate us, because they're trained on our data.

— Susan Schneider