Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Doom Justifies the Valuation

geohot.github.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 161 posts

Re: The Doom Justifies the Valuation

#31

Post by dartharva »

ajyoon wrote: post #18

I have never understood this line of thinking. Why would a company warn that their technology is dangerous if it wasn't? Looking at the ongoing Mythos export control issue, it's obviously not good for profits. If you assume AGI is possible, you must agree that it would be at the very least profoundly destabilizing. The companies are built around this assumption.

Regulatory capture and false AGI hyping, what else? You'd have to be willingly ignoring the writings on the wall if you still haven't identified it yet.

Re: The Doom Justifies the Valuation

#32

Post by sublinear »

drc500free wrote: post #14
lukeify wrote: post #7

I stopped taking this guy seriously after he proposed "just" digging canals to bring desalinated ocean water into the U.S. desert.

Even in this article, he claims COVID wasn’t a big deal because, essentially, only a million people died in the US instead of everyone. No one ever claimed 100% mortality.

COVID was a risk management disaster that should not have escalated to the level that it did if there was not so much political overreach.

Re: The Doom Justifies the Valuation

#33

Post by britch »

ajyoon wrote: post #18

I have never understood this line of thinking. Why would a company warn that their technology is dangerous if it wasn't? Looking at the ongoing Mythos export control issue, it's obviously not good for profits. If you assume AGI is possible, you must agree that it would be at the very least profoundly destabilizing. The companies are built around this assumption.

> Why would a company warn that their technology is dangerous if it wasn't?

Because it makes their technology seem more important and powerful?

Do you usually believe 100% what a company says about itself?

> Mythos export control issue, it's obviously not good for profits

Who cares about profits? None of these companies make money like a business currently. It's all speculative valuation and influenced by the same hype/doom cycle

Re: The Doom Justifies the Valuation

#34

Post by rjzzleep »

Blackthorn wrote: post #17
anuramat wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> NFTs and the Metaverse AI is not that bad

It's significantly worse! All NFTs did was separate fools from their money, and crypto in general increased GPU costs. All the Metaverse did was cause Facebook to throw away a bunch of money (lol). Meanwhile, AI has ruined the whole Internet and inflated the price of everything electronic.

The whole internet AND local computing. This may be cool for people on SF salaries but for the vast majority of the world memory has become a luxury good

Re: The Doom Justifies the Valuation

#35

Post by jamiek88 »

panarky wrote: post #3

Simple minds want to believe one simple thing and then rationalize everything else to force consistency with that one simple idea. If you want to believe the simple idea that AI is mostly hype, then you'll get stuck in a multi-year loop talking about stochastic parrots, ridiculous valuations, and doomer scaredycats. But the real world isn't so simple. Multiple seemingly contradictory things can be true at the same ti…

[flagged]

Re: The Doom Justifies the Valuation

#36

Post by dodu_ »

scarmig wrote: post #29
dodu_ wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[dead]

Regardless of whether you believe in doom or not, it's this kind of wild, willful misunderstanding that makes people roll their eyes and dismiss you. Yes, people at Anthropic (and OpenAI, for that matter!) really, genuinely do believe AI poses a potential existential threat to humanity; every single one that I know personally believes that. This has been pointed out hundreds of times, and to simply dismiss it as mark…

> genuinely do believe AI poses a potential existential threat to humanity; every single one that I know personally believes that. This has been pointed out hundreds of times, and to simply dismiss it as marketing hype by crypto bros to increase IPO valuations long ago passed into the realm of conspiracy thinking.

"They are not in a thought bubble YOU are in the thought bubble"

I am absolutely BTFO'd, you got me.

Re: The Doom Justifies the Valuation

#37

Post by _carbyau_ »

siren2026 wrote: post #2

I came to the same conclusion. Specifically Anthropic's whole PR has all been about danger, safety, doomerism all to make themselves indirectly more important and central to the debate. Calling meetings in Washington DC in order to let everyone know they made a cyberweapon is part of those PR moves. Then they seem surprised lawmakers actually called them out and asked to stop serving that model. I know this is the cy…

> This is how every benevolent dictators start.

Every dictator is benevolent for the people that agree with them.

Re: The Doom Justifies the Valuation

#38

Post by _23sd »

coolThingsFirst wrote: post #28
_23sd wrote: post #16

What's the evidence that the doom narrative is connected to valuations? It seems more like a marketing/recruiting strategy. As the post points out, institutional investors generally think the idea of mass unemployment is BS, and they are investing accordingly.

Dumb thing to ask tbh. Dangerous new tech with military applications sounds harder to ignore than AI that spits out text.

AI obviously has military applications, no doom required to think the military will want a lot of it. I'm asking about the extreme scenarios like "AI is gonna take everyone’s jobs" and the other "totalizing narratives" that geohot is referencing.

Re: The Doom Justifies the Valuation

#39

Post by chongli »

panarky wrote: post #3

Simple minds want to believe one simple thing and then rationalize everything else to force consistency with that one simple idea. If you want to believe the simple idea that AI is mostly hype, then you'll get stuck in a multi-year loop talking about stochastic parrots, ridiculous valuations, and doomer scaredycats. But the real world isn't so simple. Multiple seemingly contradictory things can be true at the same ti…

Some AI is useless

The question is not whether AI is useful. It is useful, full stop.

The question is whether AI is useful enough to justify valuations that dwarf the GDP of all but the top 20 countries in the world. As it stands right now, it's not even close! The leaked OpenAI financials put these AI companies in the same profitability territory as utilities, with zero justification for these crazy valuations.

Re: The Doom Justifies the Valuation

#40

Post by scarmig »

dodu_ wrote: post #36
scarmig wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regardless of whether you believe in doom or not, it's this kind of wild, willful misunderstanding that makes people roll their eyes and dismiss you. Yes, people at Anthropic (and OpenAI, for that matter!) really, genuinely do believe AI poses a potential existential threat to humanity; every single one that I know personally believes that. This has been pointed out hundreds of times, and to simply dismiss it as mark…

> genuinely do believe AI poses a potential existential threat to humanity; every single one that I know personally believes that. This has been pointed out hundreds of times, and to simply dismiss it as marketing hype by crypto bros to increase IPO valuations long ago passed into the realm of conspiracy thinking. "They are not in a thought bubble YOU are in the thought bubble" I am absolutely BTFO'd, you got me.

No; I'm only stating that your model of reality is off, and I'm correcting it. No, the folks at the frontier labs do not believe they are trying to scam people with an NFT-tier fraud, and their warnings are not an attempt at marketing hype.
Post reply on HN