I do wonder why HN thinks it understands risk better than the people hired at multi trillion dollar companies whose whole sole job it is to understand and minimize these risks - people who also understand the company way better than anyone on HN.
Is it possible that these companies feel they have more to lose by missing out on AI than by taking on debt? Or that they genuinely are in a race to superintelligence, which easily justifies this debt and far more?
When I worked at Apple, I remember seeing the commentariat insisting that <project> was bound to fail, that we didn't know what we were doing. When in fact extremely competent people knew precisely what they were doing. Of course, the commentariat were wrong and I'd wager most of them use what I had a part in building. The same story tended to repeat across my subsequent jobs in big tech. All this seems quite similar to me.
The FOMO argument is exactly what was used by banks in GFC: as long as the music is playing need to dance.
But current era also has echoes of capex financing (eg cisco lending to its buyers) and Enron (eg use of SPVs).
I don’t think that most people who are concerned about a bubble think people and orgs fueling it are stupid, but they’re operating with local incentive structures that can result is systematic problems.
And for folks who have lived through multiple of these (and maybe lost paper wealth, retirement savings, or homes), I think being concerned is reasonable.
But why be concerned about this? If people are really so confident in their takes, they can exclude these companies from their investments, or bet against them. If you truly believe these bets are going to fail, it's not hard to get rich off of it.
That people don't do this, makes me think that it is more posturing and venting than an actual belief. People are uncertain about what will happen, but are angry and feel a lack of agency, and perhaps some FOMO as well. This becomes reflexive denialism.
No it's not. I think it's a good financial literacy exercise to figure out how to exclude companies from index investments btw. I think it's perfectly reasonable for people to want to exclude certain companies from their portfolios for any number of reasons and I think it's a good thing to think about over all.
I get the anger. These people are gambling with my (and all the other plebs) life and are likely going to get rich in the process.
I think AI is huge and it’s going to make a lot of money. So I’m keeping my investments in. But I’m also sure there is going to be a massive amount of turbulence to get there. Unfortunately I don’t know enough (or care to know enough) about finance to really capitalize on it.
"But why be concerned about this? If people are really so confident in their takes, they can exclude these companies from their investments, or bet against them. If you truly believe these bets are going to fail, it's not hard to get rich off of it."
Is this comment satire? Do you just sit in that weird ass Apple donut building, drifting further and further out of touch with real humans? Or do you leave it some times and interact with your average citizen now and then?
Go watch "The Big Short." Why should we trust the people that analyze risk? I was working during the dot com boom. I remember the 2008 housing crash and the fallout. Then combine that with Enron style fraud.
Also many of us are working in these AI / data center companies.
HN has devolved considerably. It is practically general Reddit-tier kneejerk contrarianism now. I'm getting literal "Cool story bud" replies to me within the last day.
Year after year of the advent of LLM's has repeatedly shown HN overall consensus gettings things wrong again and again. AI lab employees aren't here they're on Twitter/lesswrong. 6 months ago Mythos was announced and it has been an absolute deluge of "it's just marketing stunts." Practically 75% of many threads had that take. Strange, we don't hear much about that anymore, now that the plethora of hacks has taken place and increasing. There will be no mea culpa, just moving on to the next kneejerk dismissal as peoples' subconscious fearfully grapples with our immediate future. They want the AI boom to fail, because the implications of what happens next when it doesn't fail is unknown and vaguely frightening to them, for now.
It's been that way forever here, don't worry. Signal to noise is lower today, but it's the same vibes, trust me. That said, earlier this year I got really frustrated, and put out https://github.com/vessenes/hn1k/, which lets you build a local hn restricted to 1k / 10k / 100k commenters (and threads they engage in) which will massively de-ragebait you.
I don't know why you've been flagged, I've noticed this trend and the Mythos thing as well.
Lots of people here called Mythos a marketing stunt, yet continue on in HN today having totally forgotten their original takes. I would bet some of them are reading this very post.
They don't even acknowledge that they were wrong, yet continue with the same behavior (reflexive contrarianism and denial) without updating. This confuses me greatly: why would anyone choose to be this stubborn, when it results in worse correctness? What do these people gain out of it?
(If anyone reading this fits the description - I'm genuinely curious.)
Obviously some bets will fail, but by and large most bets have succeeded spectacularly. Yet the commentariat often vehemently denied even the successful bets.
The world is run by completely average people making series of mundane decisions. There is no super genius who’s job it is to understanding the risk of investing in AI.
It’s just some nameless regular guy crunching some numbers and feeding to another regular guy who interprets the numbers. And so on
But the regular guy working at the place has more information about the place than some random HN commenter.
If it's just regular guys, then it would be arrogant for the HN regular guy to assume they can make better decisions with less information.
In reality it's not regular guys, these companies are very selective and have a very high talent bar compared to the median member of the commentariat. They also hire within domain expertise, whereas most of the commentariat is not of the same domain.
So in addition to an inside information disadvantage, the HN guy is also often at a talent and domain-knowledge disadvantage (as hard as it may be for the ego to accept this). This makes the confident contrarianism even more confusing, not even considering all the times it's been wrong.
They might have a conflict of interest so that they shouldn't be trusted implicitly even if they can theoretically do a better job. Also, we live in a democracy, and these are public companies. With that much money on the line, they become quasi-governmental in shaping the economy and such. If they don't like public scrutiny, probably best not to be a public company. The workings of a public company should probably be a public interest, so the public can support laws and regulations appropriate for them
Since when did any employee ever do that? "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it". The higher up the food chain often relates in great part to accepting anything thrown at you with a nod and a smile. 6-7 figure incomes don't arise from sounding the alarm and creating problems for everyone within range
OR they think it is a no lose situation. (aka the US Govt will step in and buy their debt if they falter, aka privatize the profits, socialize the losses)
> Most 401ks and pension funds do not invest in pre IPO companies
Pensions do, individuals don’t.
“Less than 1% of the $14 trillion in assets in the defined contribution retirement system is invested in private markets, compared with approximately 24% for U.S. public pension funds and 17% for private pension funds as of 2023” [1].
This is really fascinating, I'm thinking of putting a significant chunk of my net worth into the four AI labs (maybe 40/30/20/10% across Anthropic/OpenAI/Google/Meta, alongside another large investment across the chip supply chain).
It seems obvious to me that we will get superintelligence in the next 5 years, and that is a winner take all race. Who knows to whatever extent money will matter after this.
There is nothing to indicate that they will achieve general intelligence. Their models have stagnated and are incapable of continuous learning, so the architecture is a dead end.
The mistake is assuming that science is linear. You could give me a trillion dollars, there’s still no guarantee I’ll invent cold fusion. You can’t predict or guarantee inventions.
I don’t believe in betting on single companies but I’d be more inclined to bet on Amazon and Google. Most AI deployments go through bedrock, and Google has their own cloud business and other businesses to make money. That means they can win regardless of who develops the next cool model.
Interesting, the current gen of models feels quite close to AGI to me. If you showed it to me 5 years ago and told me nothing about how it works, I'd probably have called it AGI.
It's so interesting seeing all of these breaches and then going back to the old threads on Mythos and seeing the widespread skepticism and denial on HN.
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