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mjr00 1 hours 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 18 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.
superjan 1 minutes ago [-]
[delayed]
AngryData 2 minutes ago [-]
Yeah, ive seen the same thing in construction and agriculture. People take the most strikingly visible part of the job, try to automate it, then wonder why nobody wants to spend $1,000K buying the automation for the easiest and simplest and solved parts of the job.
"You don't got to frame walls anymore!", something that is the most enjoyable part of residential construction, takes like a day of work at most, and can be done while on autopilot. "We can instantly generate wall plans for stud location from top-down blueprints!", oh that thing people do in their head because they just space it all on 16 or 24 inch centers and it doesn't actually matter which side you start on? "We can wirelessly drive your tractors!", the easiest task on the farm which all the weeks of maintenance and planning and setup led up to?
Now don't get me wrong, there are many things that can be improved in those industries certainly, but you aren't going to know what those things are until you actually go on the job site and learn how they currently do it daily. Most all of the low hanging fruits have already been picked one way or another and a fancy step stool is not going to be industry changing.
palmotea 7 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.
That's so true there's a term for it: engineer's disease/engineer's syndrome.
The AI researchers I know often say they expect the AI to replace their own jobs.
glimshe 18 minutes ago [-]
I've seen people saying that with other technologies. Years later, they are still where they were by a lot richer.
palmotea 13 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 for everyone else?
Or are they expecting AI technology will magically make our society communist?
oaweoifjwpo 6 minutes ago [-]
> 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?
Yes. Basically based on my conversations with coworkers who went to these frontier AI labs: this is happening anyway, so they may as well make the money while they still can.
palmotea 2 minutes ago [-]
> this is happening anyway, so they may as well make the money while they still can.
There's got to be a special name for that kind of treachery. I suppose "collaboration," but that doesn't have a nasty enough ring to it.
Like a fascist occupation, that dystopia isn't "happening anyway" without collaborators.
tokioyoyo 2 minutes ago [-]
The former.
bewareofscams 49 minutes ago [-]
This ship has sailed, they'll happily "prototype" the entire thing one-shot in 2-3 messages.
bazoom42 41 minutes ago [-]
Anyone remember when YC declared they would replace Hollywood?
theappsecguy 9 minutes ago [-]
they might manage to get a semi passable AI movie... but will people pay to watch it? I certainly would not.
mjr00 38 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 27 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 30 minutes ago [-]
Is that a prediction about where "Hollywood quality" is heading?
jnwatson 33 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 18 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. Well, a Hollywood that isn't a complete disaster.
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".
amelius 23 minutes ago [-]
Yeah but only because a meatbag is going to use the product :)
MattGaiser 24 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.
pinkytoes 8 minutes ago [-]
Every time I've done that, the people were so ignorant that they still didn't recognize that expert judgment was required... they just had the LLM make some slop.
n0rand0 26 minutes ago [-]
[dead]
sarreph 55 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.
thijson 9 minutes ago [-]
These kinds of late design decisions can cost a huge amount of money. And it may cost lives because it's now shoe horned in, less reliable.
_doctor_love 18 minutes ago [-]
Sounds like the Vasa to me!
23 minutes ago [-]
daemonk 2 minutes ago [-]
They are going to run out of real world data very soon. AI labs need to hire non-cynical domain experts to build physical hardware/automation that can generate experimental data. They are hard to find though. Most domain experts are so tunneled-visioned within their own domain that they can't think outside of it.
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.
askafriend 1 hours 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 45 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.
askafriend 31 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.
gorgolo 34 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 18 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 of a prior investment in Anthropic.
watwut 9 minutes ago [-]
That is called folding the fund. It did in fact fold. "My fund would not fold if I made different hypothetical decisions" argument means your fund did in fact fold.
Yes, being unable to pay margin call means your fund is folding.
gwerbin 38 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 57 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.
scoring1774 5 minutes ago [-]
I'm not sure failing to understand the concept of hedging and the difference between mean and median returns under heavily leveraged trading counts as generational foresight. Most 25 year olds I know in the tech world have been calling for AGI since about the same time. I do respect his ability to just dive headfirst into something even though he basically took wallstreetbets literally but with billions of dollars under management rather than thousands.
dghlsakjg 46 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 36 minutes ago [-]
You forgot to add that he was in a relationship and later engaged to the chief of staff at Anthropic while raising and running his fund, but I’m sure he had no access to material non-public information.
dgellow 18 minutes ago [-]
And the margin call literally happened during the wedding
129az 55 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 29 minutes ago [-]
I agree. If he predicted it using GPT-2 or GPT-3 I’d be quick to yell genius.
bonoboTP 37 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 28 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 25 minutes ago [-]
Ahhh elitism.
cmiles8 13 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.
recursive 56 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.
glimshe 15 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.
bix6 26 minutes ago [-]
Do you really need a 300 page thesis to say in 2024 that AI is going to become a big deal?
chermi 4 minutes ago [-]
Did you make big bets on specific things like memory? He had insight, he made money, didn't have enough experience to handle it well, but still made great returns after his "downfall"
steveBK123 27 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.
7 minutes ago [-]
jayd16 41 minutes ago [-]
A lot of sci-fi authors have published in their 20s.
jdw64 1 hours 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 59 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 43 minutes ago [-]
Did you read TFA? It has lots of examples offered as precedent.
afavour 56 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".
gloryjulio 35 minutes ago [-]
Not sure if that's true. Tons of r/wallstreetbets redditors did the same.
skrebbel 37 minutes ago [-]
Appreciate the context
Aperocky 59 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 34 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 58 minutes ago [-]
ha you beat me to it by mere seconds
Aperocky 55 minutes ago [-]
You would expect someone following quant trading to have sensitivities to quantity, but alas.
askafriend 51 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 28 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 46 minutes ago [-]
your claim would be suspect with only 1 nine, given the evidence. Like, the guy failed spectacularly.
askafriend 25 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.
guardiangod 1 hours ago [-]
You missed the years long work at FTX under Sam Bank Friedman all the way to FTX's bankruptcy.
27183 58 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 46 minutes ago [-]
It includes the multiverse
3737488484 1 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
lordnacho 54 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 46 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 40 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 33 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.
cmiles8 14 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.
chermi 7 minutes ago [-]
Yeah. And he made good returns even after the downfall everyone was so gleeful about.
Quarrel 60 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:
Not FTX the exchange, he was working at the FTX Future Fund which is part of the philanthropic foundation SBF created as part of his effective altruism commitment (the same SBF who also provided $500M to help Anthropic get started btw, just a few weeks before going bust).
As a side note, it’s pretty insane how many people of the AI industry have a relationship to effective altruism
adastra22 42 minutes ago [-]
Why is anyone from FTX being trusted with money…
augment_me 39 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.
cmiles8 19 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.
Planktonne 29 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.
areoform 40 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.
mnewme 32 minutes ago [-]
Great read, though huggingface is French, not American
chermi 13 minutes ago [-]
Ahh well. Let them fail if it's so obvious they will. Let the financiers fail too since they're all so dumb.
There's idiocy and overconfidence everywhere. When more money is involved, I guess it's more entertaining to watch. At least they're trying something. Maybe there's more effective ways to fleece people of their money that yield greater societal benefits, but I think there's some beauty in someone thinking they have it all figured out being able to lose their money on a shitty bet.
Now once they cry for government help, that's where I care.
mbesto 50 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 39 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 22 minutes ago [-]
This article is being downvote-brigaded HARD wherever it gets posted on the internet right now.
Interesting.
john_strinlai 20 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. (i suspect one of these teams has more bots than the other, but that's just a guess). in any case, the world keeps spinning.
customguy 3 minutes ago [-]
anti-ai-bots? people who dislike LLM et al use LLM to repeat what is public opinion anyway? like, where?
john_strinlai 1 minutes ago [-]
downvoting a post doesn't require an LLM. and there can be several motivations for it (e.g. downvoting a competition's posts)
dgellow 22 minutes ago [-]
HN doesn’t have downvotes for posts…
rvz 51 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 1 hours 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 59 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 40 minutes ago [-]
He’s talking about safety guardrails where the model shuts off.
euthymiclabs 54 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.
GMoromisato 47 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.
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.
"You don't got to frame walls anymore!", something that is the most enjoyable part of residential construction, takes like a day of work at most, and can be done while on autopilot. "We can instantly generate wall plans for stud location from top-down blueprints!", oh that thing people do in their head because they just space it all on 16 or 24 inch centers and it doesn't actually matter which side you start on? "We can wirelessly drive your tractors!", the easiest task on the farm which all the weeks of maintenance and planning and setup led up to?
Now don't get me wrong, there are many things that can be improved in those industries certainly, but you aren't going to know what those things are until you actually go on the job site and learn how they currently do it daily. Most all of the low hanging fruits have already been picked one way or another and a fancy step stool is not going to be industry changing.
> Too true. This isn't limited to AI, either.
That's so true there's a term for it: engineer's disease/engineer's syndrome.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/engineer%27s_disease
https://ask.metafilter.com/297591/Origin-of-the-term-Enginee...
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 for everyone else?
Or are they expecting AI technology will magically make our society communist?
Yes. Basically based on my conversations with coworkers who went to these frontier AI labs: this is happening anyway, so they may as well make the money while they still can.
There's got to be a special name for that kind of treachery. I suppose "collaboration," but that doesn't have a nasty enough ring to it.
Like a fascist occupation, that dystopia isn't "happening anyway" without collaborators.
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. Well, a Hollywood that isn't a complete disaster.
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...
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.
Yes, being unable to pay margin call means your fund is folding.
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.
Calling the fund “situational awareness” and then demonstrating a complete lack of situational awareness was rather amusing.
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.
Regardless he was still able to build a giant pile of cash before alighting it on fire.
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
As a side note, it’s pretty insane how many people of the AI industry have a relationship to effective altruism
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.
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.
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.
There's idiocy and overconfidence everywhere. When more money is involved, I guess it's more entertaining to watch. At least they're trying something. Maybe there's more effective ways to fleece people of their money that yield greater societal benefits, but I think there's some beauty in someone thinking they have it all figured out being able to lose their money on a shitty bet.
Now once they cry for government help, that's where I care.
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. (i suspect one of these teams has more bots than the other, but that's just a guess). in any case, 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've been that arrogant prick. It's really hard to recognize the places where the Dunning-Kruger effect applies to you.
I just skimmed it, so I'm hoping someone with more fortitude can summarize.