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mjr00 51 minutes ago [-]
> It’s much easier to say someone else’s job is going to be fully replaceable by AI when you don’t actually know what they do.
Too true. This isn't limited to AI, either. The most obvious example in my lifetime was during peak blockchain hype, when people who had never worked in finance convinced themselves that blockchain was going to act as the backbone for how money gets moved around. As if the problem that needing solving was Bank of America doesn't trust Capital One to update a number in their database.
The nice thing about AI, at least, is I can always push back and tell people, "Sure, we can do this with AI. I just need you to use Claude or ChatGPT manually to prototype how it would work." This normally results in the requestor realizing that there's human judgment calls involved in the inputs, process, or outputs that require meatbag intelligence.
randusername 8 minutes ago [-]
Some of my coworkers will complain that management is short-sighted for trying to automate programming work they don't understand then immediately suggest we automate management because nobody knows what they do all day.
Maybe they're right, maybe not, but it is ironic.
modeless 13 minutes ago [-]
The AI researchers I know often say they expect the AI to replace their own jobs.
glimshe 8 minutes ago [-]
I've seen people saying that with other technologies. Years later, they are still where they were by a lot richer.
palmotea 2 minutes ago [-]
> The AI researchers I know often say they expect the AI to replace their own jobs.
Are they expecting the equity they get in some AI company will save them personally from economic ruin, so they're fine with that outcome?
Or are they expecting AI technology will magically make our society communist?
bewareofscams 39 minutes ago [-]
This ship has sailed, they'll happily "prototype" the entire thing one-shot in 2-3 messages.
amelius 13 minutes ago [-]
Yeah but only because a meatbag is going to use the product :)
bazoom42 30 minutes ago [-]
Anyone remember when YC declared they would replace Hollywood?
mjr00 28 minutes ago [-]
> Anyone remember when YC declared they would replace Hollywood?
I specifically remember a prolific HN commenter working on an AI video startup claiming that by the end of 2025, children would be able to create Hollywood-quality, feature-length movies using available AI video tools.
I believe this person's startup has (wisely) pivoted to building AI-powered tools for the movie industry.
ben_w 17 minutes ago [-]
In fairness, I agree that end-of-2025 AI probably could make a film so badly that 41% of the crew get cancer within 24 years:
He might be off by a decade, but isn't necessarily wrong.
card_zero 20 minutes ago [-]
Is that a prediction about where "Hollywood quality" is heading?
jnwatson 22 minutes ago [-]
We're at the point now where we're seeing 30 second commercials that are mostly GenAI.
In other words, this is a failure of degree, not of category.
ben_w 8 minutes ago [-]
Degree is the entire problem. I mean, four years back I was thinking:
I don't know how long it will take, but Hollywood is obviously screwed the moment something like Stable Diffusion gets temporal coherency and stops randomly adding limbs, because the energy cost per image on my laptop multiplied by how many frames in a film and $0.1/kWh, is ballpark the same as the cost of a cinema ticket.
Right now temporal coherency is still quite limited, and the models still do enough daft things you can't easily take the first version even when cutting every 5 seconds.
I still have no idea how far we are from something that would be good enough to render a Hollywood film.
Writing it is a separate problem, my experiments there show gradual improvement that has now reached the level of "obviously not publishable but also slightly less bad than going on reddit and sorting posts in short story groups by most recent instead of upvoted".
MattGaiser 14 minutes ago [-]
The thing they didn’t want to say is that the problem is that Bank of America has legal reporting and compliance obligations.
On that one, they were right enough that there are an enormous number of businesses that use crypto to avoid something government related.
n0rand0 15 minutes ago [-]
[dead]
sarreph 45 minutes ago [-]
What the author is getting at here:
> Climbing Mount Everest and getting a PhD are both hard. I wouldn’t say that doing one means you can do the other “no problem.”
and here:
> Surgeons and electrical engineers may be extremely smart and accomplished, but that doesn’t mean they have the ability to weigh in on climate science.
Feels tangentially like a version of Nobel disease[0], discussed here[1] a couple of weeks ago.
I mean, in the meantime, the US president is weighing in on technical design decisions of aircraft carriers, and he has neither a PhD nor a Nobel Prize, so...
That probably should be "meaningfully weigh in" or something. I don't even remember most of the things I "weighed in on" on the web, but everybody'll tell ya, they'll say, he had the least amount of clue possible in any of these things, they actually didn't think it's possible but it's true. But then they realised that even a coin toss gets it right more often than that so they said, wait a minute, this is real, this is happening, this is actually what's going on and they were all amazed because it had never been seen before. So now I'm wired to this flock of ducks that goes into the opposite direction of where I want to go to find out the scientifically best spot to be in at any given moment.
_doctor_love 7 minutes ago [-]
Sounds like the Vasa to me!
13 minutes ago [-]
chermi 2 minutes ago [-]
Ahh well. Let them fail if it's so obvious they will. Sounds like a sure bet.
cmiles8 9 minutes ago [-]
There’s a tremendous amount of naivety on display by the big labs.
A bit of that is to be expected from any disrupter, but there’s now serious questions about if these startups have the basic competencies required to survive long term.
skrebbel 1 hours ago [-]
Wait is this real? Did a random 25yo get 45B under management because he got some interviews after getting fired from OpenAI? I missed all of this and it almost seems like performance art to me.
cmiles8 4 minutes ago [-]
Yes… and some folks gave him money. Per reporting from the NY Times he was broadly laughed out of the room with “East Coast” money which has a massive amount to invest but tends to hold a higher standard on where it goes. Per that reporting, the combination of a lack of experience and inability to give coherent answers to basic questions meant those folks stayed far away.
Regardless he was still able to build a giant pile of cash before alighting it on fire.
askafriend 55 minutes ago [-]
Well it's not a random 25 year old. He became valedictorian at Columbia and graduated at 19. He was then briefly a part of OpenAI's superalignment team.
After he got fired, he wrote a 165 page thesis on AI in early 2024 that all ended up becoming true in 2026; you can read it for yourself and be the judge: https://situational-awareness.ai
That's what he based the fund on.
It's generational foresight not available to 99.999999999999999999% of 25 year olds. I want to get ahead of the default cynicism and "oh it's just dumb luck woe is me" aspect of HN.
mbesto 35 minutes ago [-]
> generational foresight not available to 99.999999999999999999% of 25 year olds. I want to get ahead of the default cynicism and "oh it's just dumb luck woe is me" aspect of HN.
And I want to get ahead of this absurd romanticism. I have plenty of counterpoints in all types of technical domains (3D printing, blockchain, you name it). Oracles don't exist, just stories of right place right time survivors.
> That's what he based the fund on.
His thesis was so true that his fund folded. Fancy that.
gorgolo 24 minutes ago [-]
His fund didn’t fold btw. They sold / were forced to sell a position that was several hundred percent up at a very very bad price relative to peak. AFAIK the fund is still up on the year though.
modeless 7 minutes ago [-]
AIUI they were forced to sell all their positions in public companies at a net loss. The fund is still up for the year only because they invested in Anthropic.
askafriend 21 minutes ago [-]
His fund did not fold.
In fact, the returns were so astronomical that they took a $35B loss (around 67%) which means they were still UP 80% for the year in 2026.
Today they have around $10B under management.
As an investor, how would you feel about being up 80% for the year? Exactly. They're having a phenomenal year.
cmiles8 3 minutes ago [-]
Well that “foresight” left him to walk right into a total amateur hour cash crunch that would have gotten a junior Wall Street analyst fired… so the evidence of amazing foresight here isn’t great.
Calling the fund “situational awareness” and then demonstrating a complete lack of situational awareness was rather amusing.
gwerbin 27 minutes ago [-]
Wait, is this the group who predicted that we'd have expontential AI progress and AGI in 2027 because we'd have AIs training AIs? Predicated on the preposterous assumption that R&DEffort == RateOfProgress. The more sober and realistic assessment is that R&DEffort >= RateOfProgress, with only short bursts of achieving the upper bound. Leave it to a brilliant 25 year old to overfit to one of those short bursts of progress and then assume it will continue forever just as it always has.
What actually happened is that AI-assisted training of LLMs (mind you -- stuck on that same old transformer architecture, with nothing resembling a medium-term memory, and fine-tuning still doesn't really work as a form of "learning") is right now giving us ~linear-ish progress... beecause we already hit the slowdown in the S curve of what human researchers can achieve.
We are also energy-constrained in ways that the exponential forecasts have no answer for other. Compute is not getting more efficient fast enough to achieve anything close to exponential growth driven by growth in computing power. There are social, moral, and political limits on the amount of energy we can dedicate to AI training in any given time period. And it's not just energy, we're short on RAM wafers and water for cooling and eventually we're going to hit other limits on various minerals and elements of the supply chain etc. etc. So even if it were true that R&DEffort == RateOfProgress without resource constraints, we're likely not going to see that exponential progress because we also need corresponding exponential scifi-scale progress in computing efficiency, cooling, and, energy delivery.
Basically this kid made a bunch of very clever and grand predictions which were always kind of ridiculous and no, they have not come to pass in 2026 and we are not at all on track to achieve AGI in the next 12 months, despite what Altman keeps trying to make the public think.
GPerson 46 minutes ago [-]
It’s pretty standard insight among the machine learning crowd. This kid founded the effective altruist club at his school. He’s clearly very smart and ambitious, and has leadership qualities, but you don’t have to exaggerate.
dghlsakjg 36 minutes ago [-]
The paper was about half that length and contradicts itself in several places. Hard for something that contradicts itself to be more than half true.
He didn’t have the foresight to avoid collapsing his hedge fund in a minor selloff by hedging.
You might be overselling his ability to predict the future.
jakebol 25 minutes ago [-]
You forgot to add that he was in a relationship and later engaged to the chief of staff at Anthropic while raising his fund, but I’m sure he had no access to material non-public information.
dgellow 8 minutes ago [-]
And the margin call literally happened during the wedding
glimshe 4 minutes ago [-]
My 16 year old said the same things in a few paragraphs. But then, he doesn't have the friends from having worked with Sam Bankman-Fried.
bonoboTP 27 minutes ago [-]
Is "valedictorian" a good signal? I'm from Europe so we don't have the concept, but it seems to me that being the exact single topmost student in a cohort would set a perverse incentive to game the rules and hyperfocus on getting this label. To me being somewhere in the top 5%-10% while ignoring some bullshit and not caring about maximizing all grades would indicate a more robust mind that is focused on better priorities. (I'm not claiming it is easy to become valedictorian, I'm just wondering what precisely it indicates about a person, besides obvious talent and conscientiousness etc)
askafriend 18 minutes ago [-]
It's a no-signal or slightly-positive signal until paired with other signals.
For example, doing it at Columbia is meaningful. Doing it at a random school, not so much.
bix6 14 minutes ago [-]
Ahhh elitism.
129az 44 minutes ago [-]
Early 2024 is a bit late, isn't it? He jumped on a bandwagon and his AGI fever ramblings quoted in the submission show that he is just a marketing drone.
LPisGood 19 minutes ago [-]
I agree. If he predicted it using GPT-2 or GPT-3 I’d be quick to yell genius.
recursive 45 minutes ago [-]
You sure that's the right number of nines? We'd probably need to look at over a billion earths to find another such 25 year old in that case. Further, if we look at the rest of his body of work, it may temper our estimation of his foresight.
steveBK123 16 minutes ago [-]
> generational foresight
His strategy was to trade on MNPI available to him via relationships that no larger fund/bank compliance department would sign off on, in a portfolio no fund/bank risk department would allow.
bix6 15 minutes ago [-]
Do you really need a 300 page thesis to say in 2024 that AI is going to become a big deal?
afavour 46 minutes ago [-]
> he wrote a 300 page thesis on AI in 2024 that all ended up becoming true in 2026
...no? The essay is literally titled "The Decade Ahead", its predictions have not come true in 2026.
> The AGI race has begun. We are building machines that can think and reason. By 2025/26, these machines will outpace many college graduates. By the end of the decade, they will be smarter than you or I; we will have superintelligence, in the true sense of the word
I'd argue even the 2025/26 part of that isn't true, though the "many" in "many college graduates" makes the claim very difficult to verify.
But even putting all that aside I think it's still a valuable evidence point when discussing "intellectual arrogance". No doubt this 25 year old is very smart when it comes to AI. But there's this belief that if someone is smart at one thing then they're surely smart at everything. Turns out "smart at AI" doesn't automatically translate to "can sensibly manage a $45bn fund".
jayd16 31 minutes ago [-]
A lot of sci-fi authors have published in their 20s.
jdw64 52 minutes ago [-]
However, I think this is a classic example of the category error the OP is talking about. Making accurate predictions isn't necessarily the same thing as asset management. Once you reach that level of fame, people will 100% target and trade against you, and when someone is that well-known, their market positions inevitably get exposed—how could they possibly handle that?
askafriend 49 minutes ago [-]
That's fair and I guess we're about to find out! The thing to appreciate is there's a lot that's unprecedented about all of this. Some of it has to do with Leopold but then there's a whole lot that doesn't. I'll definitely be following along as the story develops over the years...
adastra22 32 minutes ago [-]
Did you read TFA? It has lots of examples offered as precedent.
gloryjulio 25 minutes ago [-]
Not sure if that's true. Tons of r/wallstreetbets redditors did the same.
Aperocky 48 minutes ago [-]
> not available to 99.999999999999999999%
There are not enough human 25 years old in history for this many 9s. You had 21 nines, which would only make sense if there were 10 billion billion humans ever and that he is the only one. However, the current estimate is there were 107 billion humans ever alive in history, so your statement is impossible even if the estimate is off by 10000 fold.
autophagian 23 minutes ago [-]
Your failure here is that you are using normal math, not Effective Altriusm math. That number should not only include past/current 25 year olds, but also all possible future 25 year olds, including all 25 year olds simulatable by a future powerful AI. In that context, the estimation is quite modest.
27183 47 minutes ago [-]
ha you beat me to it by mere seconds
Aperocky 44 minutes ago [-]
You would expect someone following quant trading to have sensitivities to quantity, but alas.
askafriend 41 minutes ago [-]
I'm not writing a technical paper and I refuse to write like what you're suggesting. It's just a rhetorical device!
jcranmer 17 minutes ago [-]
> It's just a rhetorical device!
It's a rhetorical device that I have yet to see used to good effect. The kind of rhetorical device that undercuts the argument rather than strengthens it.
27183 36 minutes ago [-]
your claim would be suspect with only 1 nine, given the evidence. Like, the guy failed spectacularly.
askafriend 14 minutes ago [-]
You're so caught up in irrelevant details like a rhetorical device that you've missed that this guy's fund is up 80% for the year and his investors are having a GREAT year. Worth reflecting on.
skrebbel 27 minutes ago [-]
Appreciate the context
guardiangod 51 minutes ago [-]
You missed the years long work at FTX under Sam Bank Friedman all the way to FTX's bankruptcy.
27183 48 minutes ago [-]
> 99.999999999999999999% of 25 year olds
18 decimal places... goddamn that's more than you get on a computer usually. We must be counting 25 year olds that won't even be born for millenia.
malfist 36 minutes ago [-]
It includes the multiverse
3737488484 53 minutes ago [-]
[flagged]
lordnacho 44 minutes ago [-]
It's real. Obviously he's a pretty accomplished young guy, but that doesn't mean he knows anything about investments.
It's an interesting look into who gets opportunities in our society.
NiloCK 36 minutes ago [-]
Before OpenAI / situational-awareness he made a lot of money on societal-shift type investments and shorts during the lead up to Covid economic impacts.
His "main thing" is success in calling economic impacts of undervalued large shifts, and the premise of the fund is basically that the same thing is occurring around AI, where he also has specific subject matter expertise.
lordnacho 29 minutes ago [-]
Well, I don't buy it. There's probably a lot of people who picked out those trends, after all they are just what's in the news. Most of them didn't get 45B to invest.
I'm going to need better evidence to believe he has any skill.
From what I can see, his investors could have just bought AI related stocks themselves.
john_strinlai 23 minutes ago [-]
>There's probably a lot of people who picked out those trends, after all they are just what's in the news
i know nothing about this specific person, but the typical rule is that if it has already reached the general news cycle, you are too late.
Quarrel 49 minutes ago [-]
FWIW, I quite enjoyed this write up of it, and the state of AI investment at the moment. It doesn't entirely dwell on the blowup, but I found it worth the read:
It's better than performance art, it's something you couldn't write.
luke5441 50 minutes ago [-]
And before OpenAI, he was at FTX.
adastra22 31 minutes ago [-]
Why is anyone from FTX being trusted with money…
augment_me 29 minutes ago [-]
Does the actual outcome matter or does the promise/what is sold/pushed upon society matter?
Was social media a clean win for human social interaction? Was fast food the replacement of food that was promised in the 70s?
Were doctors and shrinks in phone apps rather than real life a clean win for diagnosis, understanding and improvement of life?
But society was completely shaped by the market in these questions anyways in a way that is impossible to deny.
While the author might be right about the arrogant PhDs imposing their view on other fields they know jack shit about, it doesn't make it less true when you have billions backing it and making it a reality, it will eventually be it, even if it's arguably worse.
Planktonne 19 minutes ago [-]
Is this really 'when genius fails' or actually another 'we're very bad at identifying genius'?
It's a word that's thrown around a lot (particularly in tech) that rarely has much to back it up. Often, it seems to be used for 'confident young man', or even 'grifter', and then when the idol falls, the same people quietly focus on lionising someone new.
mnewme 22 minutes ago [-]
Great read, though huggingface is French, not American
areoform 29 minutes ago [-]
> “Why don’t we just do this [super hard deep science problem] with ChatGPT ourselves?” I’ve seen this in multiple cases in similarly deep, difficult areas. Like bioengineering. Or semiconductor design. And so on and so forth. (And if you’re in the venture and startup community and think you know exactly who I’m referring to—there’s more than one. A lot more.)
Exactly. A lot of people are absolutely convinced that they can prompt their way to a bioweapon / cure for cancer / whatever.
And then when you push them, they then say Novice.
And then you push them a bit more and they say "expert."
I blame industrial illiteracy. Most people in our generation(s) (and I mean that from the teens to thirties / early forties) have never touched anything except computers. And they keep projecting outwards. See: the great biology and chemistry panic of 2025/26.
I am not denying the transformative nature of this technology. These systems are (arguably) the most important breakthrough of my lifetime. These systems are absolutely transformative and allow for intelligence amplification. But they're not magic.
None of this is magic. None of it is going to be free. Everything needs hard work.
Breakthroughs are paid for in blood, terror, uncertainty and spiritually-numbing tedium.
mbesto 39 minutes ago [-]
> It’s much easier to say someone else’s job is going to be fully replaceable by AI when you don’t actually know what they do.
This exactly. As someone who once lived in Silicon Valley and then ended up interviewing 700+ CxO's of profitable (or nearly profitable) SaaS businesses in various domain specific fields, it amazes me how many prominent "experts" in SV believed they were consistently "right" simply because they made enough bets to eventually get one right. Maybe not in enterprise value terms, but in volume of companies there are FAR more successful and profitable SaaS businesses that you've never heard of because they were started by entrepreneurs in their respective domains (the MD who started an EHR platform or the truck driver who started a TMS solution, etc.).
lern_too_spel 28 minutes ago [-]
The failure of an over-leveraged hedge fund run by someone with no investing background who was just regurgitating what other people have been saying does not mean that labor markets are going to survive. The author has intellectual arrogance of his own to consider.
johnnyApplePRNG 12 minutes ago [-]
This article is being downvote-brigaded HARD wherever it gets posted on the internet right now.
Interesting.
john_strinlai 10 minutes ago [-]
not here (no downvotes for posts on HN), and i dont think it's particularly interesting either.
anti-ai posts get downvoted by pro-ai people/bots. pro-ai posts get downvoted by anti-ai people/bots. the world keeps spinning.
dgellow 11 minutes ago [-]
HN doesn’t have downvotes for posts…
rvz 40 minutes ago [-]
This goes to show that everyone is an expert in a bull market, where everything you buy can go up. (until it doesn't)
jdw64 55 minutes ago [-]
Everyone has some sort of category error to an extent. But more than that, the part about safety guardrails really resonates with my experience. I inevitably have to go down to the low-level to inspect memory, but because of safety issues, I can barely use Codex as it keeps prompting me for 'trusted access.' AI is actually really good at catching bugs, so I'd love to use it, but it does this every single time...
Supermancho 48 minutes ago [-]
> I can barely use Codex as it keeps prompting me for 'trusted access.
If you run it in unsafe mode, it won't prompt. The problem is that you would probably want to run it in a container and that's annoying.
adastra22 30 minutes ago [-]
He’s talking about safety guardrails where the model shuts off.
GMoromisato 37 minutes ago [-]
Are there any interesting predictions in this post that I need to pay attention to? Or is this just venting at how "annoying" tech bros are?
I just skimmed it, so I'm hoping someone with more fortitude can summarize.
ACCount37 20 minutes ago [-]
Chuck it into an LLM lmao.
euthymiclabs 44 minutes ago [-]
> No one likes an arrogant prick—especially if they’re wrong.
I've been that arrogant prick. It's really hard to recognize the places where the Dunning-Kruger effect applies to you.
Too true. This isn't limited to AI, either. The most obvious example in my lifetime was during peak blockchain hype, when people who had never worked in finance convinced themselves that blockchain was going to act as the backbone for how money gets moved around. As if the problem that needing solving was Bank of America doesn't trust Capital One to update a number in their database.
The nice thing about AI, at least, is I can always push back and tell people, "Sure, we can do this with AI. I just need you to use Claude or ChatGPT manually to prototype how it would work." This normally results in the requestor realizing that there's human judgment calls involved in the inputs, process, or outputs that require meatbag intelligence.
Maybe they're right, maybe not, but it is ironic.
Are they expecting the equity they get in some AI company will save them personally from economic ruin, so they're fine with that outcome?
Or are they expecting AI technology will magically make our society communist?
I specifically remember a prolific HN commenter working on an AI video startup claiming that by the end of 2025, children would be able to create Hollywood-quality, feature-length movies using available AI video tools.
I believe this person's startup has (wisely) pivoted to building AI-powered tools for the movie industry.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Conqueror_(1956_film)
In other words, this is a failure of degree, not of category.
I still have no idea how far we are from something that would be good enough to render a Hollywood film.
Writing it is a separate problem, my experiments there show gradual improvement that has now reached the level of "obviously not publishable but also slightly less bad than going on reddit and sorting posts in short story groups by most recent instead of upvoted".
On that one, they were right enough that there are an enormous number of businesses that use crypto to avoid something government related.
> Climbing Mount Everest and getting a PhD are both hard. I wouldn’t say that doing one means you can do the other “no problem.”
and here:
> Surgeons and electrical engineers may be extremely smart and accomplished, but that doesn’t mean they have the ability to weigh in on climate science.
Feels tangentially like a version of Nobel disease[0], discussed here[1] a couple of weeks ago.
---
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_disease
[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49166918
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/aug/13/trump-aircra...
A bit of that is to be expected from any disrupter, but there’s now serious questions about if these startups have the basic competencies required to survive long term.
Regardless he was still able to build a giant pile of cash before alighting it on fire.
After he got fired, he wrote a 165 page thesis on AI in early 2024 that all ended up becoming true in 2026; you can read it for yourself and be the judge: https://situational-awareness.ai
That's what he based the fund on.
It's generational foresight not available to 99.999999999999999999% of 25 year olds. I want to get ahead of the default cynicism and "oh it's just dumb luck woe is me" aspect of HN.
And I want to get ahead of this absurd romanticism. I have plenty of counterpoints in all types of technical domains (3D printing, blockchain, you name it). Oracles don't exist, just stories of right place right time survivors.
> That's what he based the fund on.
His thesis was so true that his fund folded. Fancy that.
In fact, the returns were so astronomical that they took a $35B loss (around 67%) which means they were still UP 80% for the year in 2026.
Today they have around $10B under management.
As an investor, how would you feel about being up 80% for the year? Exactly. They're having a phenomenal year.
Calling the fund “situational awareness” and then demonstrating a complete lack of situational awareness was rather amusing.
What actually happened is that AI-assisted training of LLMs (mind you -- stuck on that same old transformer architecture, with nothing resembling a medium-term memory, and fine-tuning still doesn't really work as a form of "learning") is right now giving us ~linear-ish progress... beecause we already hit the slowdown in the S curve of what human researchers can achieve.
We are also energy-constrained in ways that the exponential forecasts have no answer for other. Compute is not getting more efficient fast enough to achieve anything close to exponential growth driven by growth in computing power. There are social, moral, and political limits on the amount of energy we can dedicate to AI training in any given time period. And it's not just energy, we're short on RAM wafers and water for cooling and eventually we're going to hit other limits on various minerals and elements of the supply chain etc. etc. So even if it were true that R&DEffort == RateOfProgress without resource constraints, we're likely not going to see that exponential progress because we also need corresponding exponential scifi-scale progress in computing efficiency, cooling, and, energy delivery.
Basically this kid made a bunch of very clever and grand predictions which were always kind of ridiculous and no, they have not come to pass in 2026 and we are not at all on track to achieve AGI in the next 12 months, despite what Altman keeps trying to make the public think.
He didn’t have the foresight to avoid collapsing his hedge fund in a minor selloff by hedging.
You might be overselling his ability to predict the future.
For example, doing it at Columbia is meaningful. Doing it at a random school, not so much.
His strategy was to trade on MNPI available to him via relationships that no larger fund/bank compliance department would sign off on, in a portfolio no fund/bank risk department would allow.
...no? The essay is literally titled "The Decade Ahead", its predictions have not come true in 2026.
> The AGI race has begun. We are building machines that can think and reason. By 2025/26, these machines will outpace many college graduates. By the end of the decade, they will be smarter than you or I; we will have superintelligence, in the true sense of the word
I'd argue even the 2025/26 part of that isn't true, though the "many" in "many college graduates" makes the claim very difficult to verify.
But even putting all that aside I think it's still a valuable evidence point when discussing "intellectual arrogance". No doubt this 25 year old is very smart when it comes to AI. But there's this belief that if someone is smart at one thing then they're surely smart at everything. Turns out "smart at AI" doesn't automatically translate to "can sensibly manage a $45bn fund".
There are not enough human 25 years old in history for this many 9s. You had 21 nines, which would only make sense if there were 10 billion billion humans ever and that he is the only one. However, the current estimate is there were 107 billion humans ever alive in history, so your statement is impossible even if the estimate is off by 10000 fold.
It's a rhetorical device that I have yet to see used to good effect. The kind of rhetorical device that undercuts the argument rather than strengthens it.
18 decimal places... goddamn that's more than you get on a computer usually. We must be counting 25 year olds that won't even be born for millenia.
It's an interesting look into who gets opportunities in our society.
His "main thing" is success in calling economic impacts of undervalued large shifts, and the premise of the fund is basically that the same thing is occurring around AI, where he also has specific subject matter expertise.
I'm going to need better evidence to believe he has any skill.
From what I can see, his investors could have just bought AI related stocks themselves.
i know nothing about this specific person, but the typical rule is that if it has already reached the general news cycle, you are too late.
https://xcancel.com/porterstansb/status/2083606266388029691
(I also enjoyed the meandering in to Amex and Wells & Fargo's founding stories)
They though they would laugh all the way to the bank...but that laugh was already the problem...
"We Need To Talk About Leopold" - https://youtu.be/rE75WvOtcu8
Was social media a clean win for human social interaction? Was fast food the replacement of food that was promised in the 70s? Were doctors and shrinks in phone apps rather than real life a clean win for diagnosis, understanding and improvement of life?
But society was completely shaped by the market in these questions anyways in a way that is impossible to deny.
While the author might be right about the arrogant PhDs imposing their view on other fields they know jack shit about, it doesn't make it less true when you have billions backing it and making it a reality, it will eventually be it, even if it's arguably worse.
It's a word that's thrown around a lot (particularly in tech) that rarely has much to back it up. Often, it seems to be used for 'confident young man', or even 'grifter', and then when the idol falls, the same people quietly focus on lionising someone new.
And then when you push them, they then say Novice.
And then you push them a bit more and they say "expert."
I blame industrial illiteracy. Most people in our generation(s) (and I mean that from the teens to thirties / early forties) have never touched anything except computers. And they keep projecting outwards. See: the great biology and chemistry panic of 2025/26.
I am not denying the transformative nature of this technology. These systems are (arguably) the most important breakthrough of my lifetime. These systems are absolutely transformative and allow for intelligence amplification. But they're not magic.
None of this is magic. None of it is going to be free. Everything needs hard work.
Breakthroughs are paid for in blood, terror, uncertainty and spiritually-numbing tedium.
This exactly. As someone who once lived in Silicon Valley and then ended up interviewing 700+ CxO's of profitable (or nearly profitable) SaaS businesses in various domain specific fields, it amazes me how many prominent "experts" in SV believed they were consistently "right" simply because they made enough bets to eventually get one right. Maybe not in enterprise value terms, but in volume of companies there are FAR more successful and profitable SaaS businesses that you've never heard of because they were started by entrepreneurs in their respective domains (the MD who started an EHR platform or the truck driver who started a TMS solution, etc.).
Interesting.
anti-ai posts get downvoted by pro-ai people/bots. pro-ai posts get downvoted by anti-ai people/bots. the world keeps spinning.
If you run it in unsafe mode, it won't prompt. The problem is that you would probably want to run it in a container and that's annoying.
I just skimmed it, so I'm hoping someone with more fortitude can summarize.
I've been that arrogant prick. It's really hard to recognize the places where the Dunning-Kruger effect applies to you.