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The Doom Justifies the Valuation

geohot.github.io

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Re: The Doom Justifies the Valuation

#61

Post by ajyoon »

jmye wrote: post #43
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.

> it's obviously not good for profits. Weird to think profits matter half as much as ever-increasing valuations, driven by memetic bullshit. E.g. the entire point of the article you're commenting on.

Anthropic's valuation is driven by its revenue growth. Export controls harm this. Hype certainly plays a role, but it's simply not the case that revenue is not a major part of the picture.

Re: The Doom Justifies the Valuation

#62

Post by ajyoon »

_aavaa_ wrote: post #26
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 they warn if it they didn’t believe it. 2 words: regulatory capture. Ban Chinese models because they’re “bad”. (can’t have head to head competition). Bad open weight model (can’t let people escape the subscription model).

People have been warning about the dangers of advanced AI since long before open weight competition was a consideration.

Re: The Doom Justifies the Valuation

#63

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

Re: The Doom Justifies the Valuation

#64

Post by ajyoon »

chongli wrote: post #30
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? The whole point of the article is to answer this question, and here's the answer: Because all the AI doom fear-mongering is driving sky-high valuations. The more the public panics, the more investors open their wallets.

Is there any evidence of this? It seems like a thing people say all the time, but completely unsubstantiated.

Re: The Doom Justifies the Valuation

#65

Post by _23sd »

coolThingsFirst wrote: post #41
_23sd wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If this is true: "AI is gonna take everyone’s jobs" then AI is the terminal technology and everyone who doesn't want to be poor forever needs to throw all their money in it. Of course it impacts company valuation.

Companies say all sorts of things which investors don't take at face value, often for the sake of marketing and recruiting. Meta circa 2020 wanted us to believe we'd be swapping NFTs in a virtual mall and having all our meetings strapped into VR headsets by now. That doesn't mean their market cap at the time was based on an assumption they were right, in fact it is much higher now that the metaverse idea flopped. Unlike that situation where money was being spent on projects that turned out to be mostly pointless, AI labs don't have much of a financial stake in a scenario such as "lots of demand for AI, leading to mass unemployment and/or doomsday" as opposed to one like "lots of demand for AI, leading to the world being mostly the same as before but with more AI and expensive RAM".

Re: The Doom Justifies the Valuation

#66

Post by bryan0 »

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.

I agree. There are 2 groups of people:

1. Those, like OP, that believe AI danger and disruption is all hype to boost valuations.

2. Those, like myself, that believe AI danger and disruption is very real and presents dilemmas (but also opportunities) for society, so we must tread carefully.

The first position is not logically consistent with reality. The danger is real: we have already seen hints about how this will impact everything from jobs to warfare to mental health. that danger does not increase valuation, in fact it does the opposite because of the need for government regulation.

Re: The Doom Justifies the Valuation

#67

Post by Barrin92 »

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 Americans are obsessed with eschatological narratives and action hero stories. I talked to a Palantir guy once who told me that he loves it when journalists describe his company as a James Bond villain because every single time the market cap goes up.

If they said that they're SAP with Call of Duty marketing they'd actually lose money. In other countries this strategy might not check out but in the US it's better to pretend to be a supervillain than to be boring

Re: The Doom Justifies the Valuation

#68

Post by Glyptodon »

soundworlds wrote: post #4

Even if Dario and Altman originally believed what they were saying, their scaretactics worked wonders for investment. Their companies are now incredibly incentivized to keep the AI Apocalypse narrative going further and further. It is hard to imagine them stopping, as that may lose them investment. The last 10 years have been a decade of Big Tech Vaporware. NFTs and the Metaverse were assured to be the future. Once t…

I think technology can actually solve a lot more things than it has, the problem is that foundational problem solving does not make a unicorn startup with earthshaking economies of scale in most cases, and especially so if there's a physical world piece involved, and even more so if it's going to go asymptotic.

Just to throw out a random example - could technology, in terms of advances and improvements to allocation, distribution, and consumption, play a part in solving the western US's water issues? Probably. But would it be something that make a trillion dollars and a household name? Maybe not. And could saner policy, like making farmers have to bid for acre feet instead of getting it for basically free + distribution cost also help? Sure.

Likewise, even with AI most software is still crap. Like when have you heard about a doctor who loves their EHR? Like never.

So I think technology could be a solver of at least a lot more things. But we've created a market where people want to exhaust every flavor of flim flam and trend of the moment first. Because we've glorified the business of tech more than the actual improvements and aspirations that should be possible.

Re: The Doom Justifies the Valuation

#69

Post by jbxntuehineoh »

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…

If I were building a technology that I thought posed a risk of exterminating the human race I would simply stop building it. But what do I know, I'm not a genius AI researcher.

Re: The Doom Justifies the Valuation

#70

Post by whacked_new »

Somehow the Chinese phrases 内卷 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neijuan and 摆烂 ("let it rot" https://zh-yue.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E6%93%BA%E7%88%9B) are quite appropriately used, even in stylistic tone. Don't know how much Chinese geohot actually speaks but it's a nice touch.
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