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Show HN: I built a tool to track what AI leaders say and how their views change

118 points gcsydney 3 days ago 76 comments

gcsydney 3 days ago | parent

Hi HN, I'm Gaurav.

I've been building a tool that turns YouTube videos and podcasts into searchable transcripts. But somewhere along the way, I became more interested in a different problem.

How do you keep track of what influential people actually say, and how their thinking changes over time?

Take Sam Altman, for example.

In October 2025, talking about compute, he said, "there will come a glut for sure."

In June 2026, he said, "there will be a shortage forever."

Two statements, eight months apart. There may be perfectly reasonable context behind both, but I found it interesting that there wasn't an easy way to see them together, with the original recordings.

It currently follows 20 people in AI, including Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, Alex Karp and Marc Andreessen.

Every day, it looks for new interviews, podcasts and talks where these people are actually speaking, rather than videos of other people talking about them.

For each appearance, you get a short summary, key quotes and links to the exact moments in the original recording.

The feature I'm most excited about is *"What changed".*

It compares what someone says today with their earlier statements on the same topic. You can see both quotes, their dates and the original sources.

I'm not trying to catch people contradicting themselves. People should change their minds when new evidence emerges. I just think it would be useful to have a record of how their thinking evolves.

Building it has been more challenging than I expected.

A surprising number of videos with someone's name in the title don't actually feature them speaking. Reuploads are everywhere. And getting AI to reliably attribute statements to the right person is harder than simply generating a transcript.

I've built filters to handle much of this, and every published "What changed" comparison is still manually reviewed.

It's far from perfect. Speaker identification needs work, some podcasts aren't transcribed automatically, and I'm starting with English only.

On the economics side, a transcript and summary currently cost roughly one US cent in model processing. That makes tracking a fairly large history surprisingly affordable.

Everything is free to read. You can also follow up to three people, receive updates when they speak, and ask questions like "What has Dario Amodei said about open-source AI recently?" with answers linked to the original recordings.

I'm still figuring out which part is genuinely valuable: keeping up with people, searching their past statements, or spotting changes in their views.

I'd love some feedback from HN.

Who else should I track? Would you actually use the "What changed" feature? And if you find something incorrectly attributed or summarised, please report it. I'd rather find the failures early.

icepush 3 days ago | parent

There was an interview with Altman where he was talking about various regulatory policies that had been enacted, then at the end he added "but in practice none of it turned out to matter. What we didn't anticipate was that the companies became more powerful than the governments". I wish I could find it today but it seems gone

gcsydney 3 days ago | parent

let me find that and post it

kkotak 3 days ago | parent

Congrats on building this Gaurav. I think you can take this a step further and create how alignment is formed in powerful people's views (in public statements, at least) on important topics over time, and how potential political and world events drive those alignments.

gcsydney 3 days ago | parent

thanks mate.

fouc 3 days ago | parent

Great problem to work on!

gcsydney 3 days ago | parent

thanks

saintfire 3 days ago | parent

Quoting a Kai Lentit video as Dario Amodei changing his mind on regulation is peak slop.

Cool idea, I guess, but its just more slop to track the slop.

gcsydney 3 days ago | parent

I wanted to get a place where I can see get info. correctly and AI leaders changing their mind is a slop in itself.

FabHK 3 days ago | parent

Indeed. This is not Dario Amodei, despite the caption...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DlTNN0gvkLM

Very funny, btw. "Can we please stop anthropomorphising the LLMs? They hate that."

gcsydney 3 days ago | parent

done..

jacquesm 3 days ago | parent

"AI can make mistakes".

toobulkeh 3 days ago | parent

Speaking nothing of the implementation, this is a very valuable concept. I’m curious if statistically there are trends to identify in beliefs or how beliefs spread over societies. You could likely use that data to determine thought leadership and information diets and measure things like distribution, how far the Bay Area is ahead, and other meaningful data for investments, etc.

gcsydney 3 days ago | parent

thank you for your feedback, I will definitely look into it.

dearing 3 days ago | parent

ahead?

forgetfreeman 3 days ago | parent

You noticed that too, eh?

gcsydney 3 days ago | parent

Lol i m not from silicon valley.

nvme0n1p1 3 days ago | parent

Negative numbers are allowed ;)

teaearlgraycold 3 days ago | parent

I have a friend that’s working on a claim provenance database, starting with a focus on Wikipedia and news sources but ideally it could be applied to social media fire hoses as well.

seer 3 days ago | parent

Hmm I feel like the social media aspect would be way more useful for democracies in general.

I remember reading about Switzerland’s government service that tracks each politician, their political actions - which positions they take, which laws they promote, etc. and comparing that with which companies and investments they, their famalies and their close connections have.

All quantifiable data. I always thought something like this was _essential_ for any democracy in general - follow the money and “qui bono” and all that, thought it would be cool to build one. But of course prohibitively expensive for individuals small teams. But with all the ai - this could definitely be a thing.

If it all boils down to “verifiable corruption rating” as a single sound bite, it could seriously affect public opinion I feel. Hope someone gets on that idea someday.

throwaway81523 3 days ago | parent

Ages ago there was a site called whizbang.com that did something like that on web sites. It tracked various corporate "about" pages and noted how stuff on them changed over time. It may have done other stuff too. It was almost unusably slow and shut down after a while. I assume someone else has the domain now and is doing something unrelated with it.

deadbabe 3 days ago | parent

AI leaders aren’t important, why not track actual politicians?

gcsydney 3 days ago | parent

That is the plan pls upvote in the website or suggest names there, I will try to add them

tcfhgj 3 days ago | parent

They are politicians, just not elected ones

jacquesm 3 days ago | parent

Technically, they own the politicians, or at least a substantial fraction of them.

ttrtr 3 days ago | parent

No they don’t - they can ‘influence’ and hope to get their agenda pushed through but no guarantee unless the politician is desperate and you’re putting forth a lot of money (aka musk when trump got re elected).

jacquesm 3 days ago | parent

Show me how often there were lasting decisions made against one of the 'fat cats' and their companies other than to bring them to heel.

Money and politics should never mix. One man, one vote. Not one dollar, one vote. One E.M. just tossed a few hundred million on the table in order to influence the outcome of an election and nobody did anything about it. That should tell you enough.

falkenstein 3 days ago | parent

didnt he just shell out another extra 276 mil (accountable donations) and several other in non-accountable donations (allegedly)? he probably still pissed that peter thiel managed to place his man as vp for peanuts while he got the sack after only six months and 100mil spent. fun to watch caligula and his oligarch bidders taking apart the empire bit by bit.

autoexec 3 days ago | parent

> fun to watch caligula and his oligarch bidders taking apart the empire bit by bit.

It'd be fun if so many people weren't being hurt in the process. A part of me can empathize with the folks who are so disillusioned that they're willing to let the country burn, but we're all still in here...

jacquesm 3 days ago | parent

Other than all the people dead, hungry and bankrupt yes, it sure is fun...

Oh, apropos Elon Musk:

https://www.reddit.com/r/UkraineWarVideoReport/comments/1x5k...

deadbabe 3 days ago | parent

Can an AI leader sieze your assets, kill you, and leave you unable to do anything about it, legally or physically? The government can.

Without a monopoly on violence they are not as powerful as you think they are.

rnd0 3 days ago | parent

AI leaders are the employers, politicians are just the employees. I don't track my starbucks barista either.

thingsilearned 3 days ago | parent

We should point blumify also at all HN commenters, and I'd expect this to be an opinion that'd change in the next few years :)

gcsydney 3 days ago | parent

I dont know about . :P

iafine 3 days ago | parent

YouTube's auto-generated captions are a great product, but one problem is that they can't tell speakers apart in podcasts with multiple people. I'm building something that also works with YouTube transcripts, and it has the same problem.

gcsydney 3 days ago | parent

Thanks for the feedback.

aavisangle 3 days ago | parent

You could use some smaller models, like parakeet, to figure out the users.

shermantanktop 3 days ago | parent

It’s called “diarization“ and the leading models are not nearly as accurate as the leading speech to text - whisperx etc.

jakderrida 3 days ago | parent

If a video is less than 45 minutes, you can plug it into any gemini and have it transcribe and diarize the video. (although, I've been told it only works on aistudio anymore) Sometimes it trips up. However, plugging in videos longer than 45 minutes quickly leads to ludicrous behavior the longer it is over 45 minutes.

You can even just plug in the Youtube link with a short prompt.

Bear in mind that thinking that plugging in the transcripts will help the Gemini model in any way frequently results in mistranscriptions being included and actually compromises the diarizations.

The prompt I use is...

"Please transcribe, diarize, and speaker identify the speakers from the Youtube video."

Another thing I've learned is that long-worded prompts also interfere with the results in weird ways.

qwerty_clicks 3 days ago | parent

Interesting concept but useless without signing up for who knows what just to start trying to see what things all about.

patrick_rtk 3 days ago | parent

super nice idea , should do that on politics

gcsydney 3 days ago | parent

thanks for the suggestion mate.

fedpost 3 days ago | parent

This is...kind of my fear though. We need some pragmatism in politics but the American public fucking hates anything other than "my team best team forever". I say this as someone who is staunchly more left than probably 95% of everyone here... Building an algorithm that ensures absolutely any deviation from the trend is swiftly punished brutally is not necessarily a feature of a functional society.

You may think you want this because of Sinema and Fetterman but...we already know they're shitheads because...they blatantly do shithead stuff. Replacing the time spent gleaning all the nuance behind a vote with a party whip algorithm is not going to somehow make voters better at voting.

probably_wrong 3 days ago | parent

There used to be a show in Argentinean TV which weaponized this idea. The strategy was to take something a politician said that week and contrast it with a videoclip (months, years, even decades old) of that politician saying (apparently) the opposite.

It's not obvious at first, but this idea is actually pretty terrible: changing your mind in presence of evidence is something we want politicians to do, but if you then use that to paint them as hypocrites then they'll never ever change any stated position. And "the opposite" casts a wide net: if someone is recorded as saying "I think we should stop building datacenters for AI" and you then contrast them with an old clip saying they use Google Translate, what does that tell us about the character of this person? (IMO nothing, but that's not what the clip wants to tells you)

Lerc 3 days ago | parent

I think this would be a good thing to have, but it has to be comprehensive.

Selective ommission and reduction of context would allow any narrative you chose to write.

In other words for this to work you really need to cover enought scope that it would be surprising to find a public statement that was not covered here.

That's quite a lot of work, but anything else would be susceptible to cherry picking.

gcsydney 3 days ago | parent

Thanks for your feedback Lerc, yes it is a lot of work, but I wanted to ask the community if it is valuable enough to start with.

Frieren 3 days ago | parent

> Selective ommission and reduction of context would allow any narrative you chose to write.

Misquoting people always has been a strategy. I see how this page could be used to further follow that path. But the root of the problem is the billionaire owned media. Their interests and the interest of citizens run one against the other. Lying to the public brings more power to billionaires, so their media empires always lie.

We need independent non-billionaire owned media: - https://www.404media.co - https://defector.com - https://aftermath.site

gcsydney 3 days ago | parent

Hi I am an independent developer who is trying to build what I needed based. However, I need support from people to subscribe and contribute so that I can keep this going.. thanks for your encouragement.

Lerc 3 days ago | parent

I am unfamiliar with defector and aftermath, but my experience of 404media is they take the same approach as any partisan media, They just pick the cherries from a different place, and where a cherry is missing, assume the one that should be there would have been the colour that matches their ideology.

Not lying per se, but not really making claims supported by the preponderance of the evidence either.

Frieren 3 days ago | parent

> They just pick the cherries from a different place

What you said is a tautology. No news outlet contains all the news in the world. I just prefer that my news come from journalists and not billionaire propagandists.

Lerc 3 days ago | parent

It is not a tautology, I am ok with a sample. I just want it to be a representative sample.

I don't really care where the information comes from if it is accurate, and is not selected to support a particular conclusion.

If the outlet interprets the facts to tell you what conclusion to draw, they have left journalism and entered the world of commentary. Fox is the classic example of this.

It is quite egregious to put your interpretation of what the facts mean into the headline like

"Character.ai's Bankruptcy Documents Show the Economics of AI Don't Work" In fact the headline doesn't even hint at what the documents say, they jump straight to the claim of what they mean.

If the documents showed that their expenses per user were high enough that no amount of customers would have helped, that would be a claim of fact. They could report that. If the structure of their expenses and revenue was replicated across the industry, showing that as well might be sufficient for readers to draw the conclusion from the headline.

Really, the language used in that article is nailing their colours to the mast to declare themselves as taking a position and deliberately presenting everything to support it.

It is a little ironic that there are outlets concerned about AI removing our ability to think for ourselves. At the same time they like to publish works doing all the thinking for you.

ks2048 3 days ago | parent

Alexandr Wang "says his favorite Muse use case is having it coach him in MMA by watching gym cameras and giving feedback between rounds"

Okay, you've convinced me I don't want to track what these guys are saying.

On a serious note, it looks good. Although to really track what they say, you'd probably want text too, e.g tweets and blog posts.

handwoven 3 days ago | parent

Wasn't that Zuckerberg? And Alexandr Wang saying he uses Muse to buy obscures teas from Japan and Taiwan?

ks2048 3 days ago | parent

That makes sense. Probably bad AI summaries. I copied that quote from Wang's page. Looking now at the podcast page [1]:

What are people actually doing with Muse?

Zuckerberg's Muse sources obscure teas weekly from farms in Taiwan and Japan. Wang's favorite use is MMA coaching: cameras in his gym let Muse watch his sparring"

[1] https://blumify.io/t/youtube/XfdIhd1g6EI/muse-wonder-zuckerb...

gcsydney 3 days ago | parent

thanks for the feedback.

soco 3 days ago | parent

Who was it saying recently they started smoking because AI will solve lung cancer?

gumby 3 days ago | parent

Joke’s on them since the carbon monoxide and nicotine (an insecticide) destroy your vascular system (definitely an even harder problem than than cancers these days).

danaris 3 days ago | parent

Is that real? God, these people are like the guy who is certain he's picked the winning lottery numbers, and starts buying millions of dollars worth of stuff before he even buys the ticket...

hurfdurf 3 days ago | parent

  Palantir CTO:Some AI researchers taking up smoking;they expect AI to cure cancer
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50061795 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50072094 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50073279

knowaveragejoe 3 days ago | parent

Karp's takes and changes in tune are... depressing.

haisin5555 3 days ago | parent

This is, hands down, such an amazing tool!! Your tool could be a huge help for article and news writers, I can totally see them using it to find quotes fast without rewatching hours of video.

gcsydney 3 days ago | parent

Thank you please share and recommend and if possible subscribe

dvorka 3 days ago | parent

This is really great!

For pretty long time I was thinking about making the application which shows AI leaders predictions vs. reality.

Like "We will have AGI in ..." or "There will be no SWE jobs in..." as I feel really bad when some of these "visionaries" influence decisions of young people planning their future, normal people decisions (and markets obviously).

Another chapter would be fact/reality check for statements like "We don't hire SWEs anymore..." while having 100s of opened positions on their job portal.

Anyway, great app!

gcsydney 3 days ago | parent

Thanks for your feedback

mikk14 3 days ago | parent

Maybe this is what you're looking for? https://boyswhocriedai.lovable.app/archive

wartywhoa23 3 days ago | parent

The AI Wall of Shame.

egorfine 3 days ago | parent

It's a nice one.

I also wanted to create a small web tool to watch those people put the term "superintelligence" in their twitters. But then I have realized that almost all of them did bend over, so there is little sense now.

KellyCriterion 3 days ago | parent

you could somehow add the current stock chart somehow and pin it to their statements/dates? :-D

gcsydney 3 days ago | parent

Thanks! The topic timelines here can show exactly that: when each person started saying "superintelligence" on video, with the quote and the date. That might make an interesting page on its own.

gcsydney 3 days ago | parent

good idea, will add in backlog.

xtiansimon 3 days ago | parent

This is interesting and obviously applies to a host of public people (and prolly some annoying clients)

gcsydney 3 days ago | parent

Ha, clients would need their own private version. Public people first: you can suggest who comes next on /people.

Otterly99 3 days ago | parent

I noticed that there are a few duplicates, which seem to point to different transcripts of the same source.

For instance if you go to Marc Andreessen's page, at the top there are 2 quotes which are basically the same THEN/NOW with one quote from JRECentral and one from PowerfulJRE.

gcsydney 2 days ago | parent

Hi thanks for feedback. It is rectified, I really like this community in providing constructive feedback.