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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.
I am trying to fathom a more catastrophic failure in communications than the lab CEO's using this narrative. The reality ends up being closer to Radiology jobs [1], but we're never able to fully realize this because the press is running around like headless chickens and unloading the fear on a public that then reaches for any leverage they can get (see: Datacenter NIMBY-ism).
Any short term FOMO valuation bumps they got from this narrative has to now be liquidated into paying premium for server racks in a warehouse.
Reminder folks: There is no evidence that AI is not normal technology [2]
[1]: https://www.apollo.com/wealth/insights-news/insights/daily-s...
[2]: https://knightcolumbia.org/content/ai-as-normal-technology
Maybe they're right, maybe not, but it is ironic.
It seems like, at least for tasks like distilling the work done at lower levels and passing it up the management tree, LLMs should be good at that. Maybe they could take out some levels at least.
And they can be programmed to be 100% selfless and on-mission: no turf battles or other internal politics. Everybody’s job involves office politics of course, but my gut says management has a lot more of it than engineering, so zeroing that out could be more significant.
The models don’t generate what’s right and good: they generate what people are likely to generate.
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.
> 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...
I have seen this personally, where merely identifying a possible solution (harmless, reversible) is misinterpreted as selecting and implementing that solution (may be irreversible).
This is how all people solve problems. Now everyone are not great at all parts, but this really is what anyone does.
Surely the title ”engineer” means something else?
"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.
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.
On that one, they were right enough that there are an enormous number of businesses that use crypto to avoid something government related.
Yeah but only because a meatbag is going to use the product :)
> 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...
Having a machine that's even as smart as most human's + cheap robotics, does seem to lead to us having no jobs in near-ish future eventually. (5-15 years)
Though obviously AI progress could hit a brick wall tomorrow.
His fundamental thesis is as an AI maximalist, with expertise on who will be the winners.
His fund completely blew up, even though his fundamental thesis still may be correct.
He made a ton of money early, but then he just kept increasing his bet size via leverage. The problem is that these stocks may be going up, but they are EXTREMELY volatile. When the whole market went down with some of the Iran news, his margin levels dipped too low, and his lenders issued margin calls. He had to sell his stakes at losses, and his fund collapsed.
Now, part of the problem is he was not a legacy hedge fund with great relationships with his banks, because if he was, he might have been able to postpone the margin calls. Had he been able to do that, he would have been ok, because his positions actually recovered within a few weeks.
It didn’t matter, though, because he was forced to sell at the low point.
In other words, even if your long term bet is correct, if you are maxing out your margin to max out your bet, you are one volatile dip away from blowing up.
No matter how good the bet, you have to be able to ride out the volatility to survive.
It’s like if someone offered you a bet on a coin flip, where they will pay 5x your bet if you win. How much should you bet on each flip?
Well, by expected value you should bet everything you have, because your EV is 2.5x, so the more you bet the higher your expected value.
However, if you bet it all, you have a 50% chance of losing all your money and not being able to make any more bets.
Regardless he was still able to build a giant pile of cash before alighting it on fire.
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.
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.
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.
This is why hedging and neurotic levels of risk-management are necessary. Running a highly levered and highly correlated portfolio is a disaster waiting to happen regardless of whether your overall thesis is correct or not.
...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.
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.
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.
I know people preaching about LLMs being the Next Industrial Revolution, who couldn’t place the industrial revolution in the correct century.
I have people at work talking about jobs and technologies getting replaced by AI who don’t understand how a lawn mower works, who don’t know who Lenin was or what a differential equation is, because they’ve simply been writing JavaScipt since high school.
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.
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.).
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.
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.
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.
and there can be several motivations for it (e.g. downvoting a competition's posts, someone upset with how much pro-ai stuff there is on their favorite subreddit, etc.)
I just skimmed it, so I'm hoping someone with more fortitude can summarize.