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Comment by mrweasel

5 days ago

It's is wild to see investors go crazy and hype the value of the AI labs when ever they talk about rogue agents. They completely ignore the possibility that these people don't know what they're doing operationally.

Same happened with FTX and co. during 2020 crypto boom. A lot of rogue stuff sloshing around, but investors were hyperventilating.

People keep saying this, but I haven't seen any actual instances of investors saying that rogue agents mean AI labs are valuable. Do you have any examples?

  • Yeah I think the truth is closer to the opposite. Jensen has complained that the warnings are discouraging investors.

    https://www.businessinsider.com/nvidia-jensen-huang-ai-doome...

    AI corp valuations are high because their revenue is skyrocketing, not because of the rogue AI stuff.

    • valuations are absurd because investors are low-information speculators.

      I just watched a YT with Dylan Patel in which he said, with a straight face, that OpenAI/Anthropic were going to "continue" exponential growth until, basically, their valuation was several times world GDP.

    • Their reported fantasy numbers ("annual revenue run rate", not revenue), you mean?

  • There is no such thing as bad publicity. (Technically not true, but definitely applicable in this concrete case, as planned P/E ratios are crazy)

Is it any more wild than gamestop? Investors think chaos is fun.

  • With Gamestop (without reflecting the current AI situation), there was a real fuckup which could be exploited with a high probability, and a few people saw it, and exploited it, and became rich. Whatever happened after January 2021 is the problem, when the short squeeze went already away, but somehow people still invest in a slowly dying company.

Investors are motivated by returns, not responsible decision-making or societal benefit. Our culture is rooted in rewarding greed and granting the greediest individuals power over the rest of us. Isn't this the inevitable end-state of unfettered capitalism?

  • > Isn't this the inevitable end-state of unfettered capitalism?

    Aren't capitalism built on exactly the opposite principles? It is not greed that rewarded, but the creation of societal goods, and power granted not to the greediest, but to the most useful individuals.

    • Unfortunately this turns in to a no true Scottsman argument as to what actually counts as capitalism and its side effects. "Real" capitalism and investment economy probably aren't that stable together so most economies are mixed with regulation and not fully free. This in turn leads to the richest attempting to rent seek and buy regulations.

      Simply put in every system there are corrupting agents attempting to monopolize the situation.