> 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.
> 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.
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 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.
> 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.
> “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.
The failure of an over-leveraged hedge fund does not mean that labor markets are going to survive. The author has intellectual arrogance of his own to consider.
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.
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 300 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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".
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?
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...
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.
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.
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.
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:
> 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.).
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...
> 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.
Anyone remember when YC declared they would replace Hollywood?
> 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.
This ship has sailed, they'll happily "prototype" the entire thing one-shot in 2-3 messages.
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 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.
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.
---
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_disease [1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49166918 [1] -
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.
The failure of an over-leveraged hedge fund does not mean that labor markets are going to survive. The author has intellectual arrogance of his own to consider.
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.
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 300 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
A lot of sci-fi authors have published in their 20s.
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.
> 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".
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?
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...
Did you read TFA? It has lots of examples offered as precedent.
> 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.
ha you beat me to it by mere seconds
You would expect someone following quant trading to have sensitivities to quantity, but alas.
I'm not writing a technical paper and I refuse to write like what you're suggesting. It's just a rhetorical device!
your claim would be suspect with only 1 nine, given the evidence. Like, the guy failed spectacularly.
You missed the years long work at FTX under Sam Bank Friedman all the way to FTX's bankruptcy.
> 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.
It includes the multiverse
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.
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.
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.
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:
https://xcancel.com/porterstansb/status/2083606266388029691
(I also enjoyed the meandering in to Amex and Wells & Fargo's founding stories)
Trading like forecasting cannot be evaluated. They could be right in a different reality. We just experience one realization of the uncertainty.
It's better than performance art, it's something you couldn't write.
And before OpenAI, he was at FTX.
Why is anyone from FTX being trusted with money…
> 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.).
This goes to show that everyone is an expert in a bull market, where everything you buy can go up. (until it doesn't)
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.
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...
> 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.
He’s talking about safety guardrails where the model shuts off.
> 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.