The Doom Justifies the Valuation

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.

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.

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 this narrative fails too (which I am almost certain is inevitable) I think society's love affair with Technology being the solver-of-all-things will finally fracture.

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 cynical take but I cannot unsee the elephant in the room: This doomerism allowed Anthropic to be the center of every AI conversation right now. Their market cap and upcoming IPO is indirectly benefiting from this.

I also cannot take that Anthropic while letting everyone know that Doom is coming (or is already here), are also the ones that want to decide who can profit from this Doomerism. This is how every benevolent dictators start.

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.

If you look at Anthropic's blogs about their model timelines, there is roughly a ~3m period between a model being in internal preview until release. That means that inside of Anthropic, the next version beyond Mythos/Fable is already in preview, already being tested internally. Despite what Geohot is describing here about GLM, my understanding is that Anthropic employees have spent a significant amount of time grappling with a technology that is considerably ahead of what is available to the public today.

In addition, if you look at the graph of LOC written by Claude vs Ants (I.e. AI vs human), there is an incredibly sharp uptick post-Mythos internal preview. Something like from 30% to 75% of code inside the company being written by AI.

While I sympathize with the viewpoint here, I still have to admit that that there's a very different feeling to working inside of a company where they've had months of time with a model that's at the frontier, quickly changing the way everyone around them works, and that _they themselves_ control the keys to.

If Geohot had those keys, I can be 100% confident he'd be raising the alarm at the top of his lungs about it.

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 time.

Some AI is useless. Some is incredibly powerful and useful even though it makes mistakes. Some companies are wildly overvalued. Some extremely large and expensive companies will quadruple from here. Some frightening scenarios will look silly in hindsight. Other frightening things will happen that none of the doomers foresee.

It would be great to explore those new ideas and possibilities.

It's so boring rehashing the same old tired and worn out ideas like "they're just hyping the danger to pump their shares up."

> The only possible conclusion is that it’s designed to cause panic.

Really? That's the only possible conclusion?

Anthropic has _always_ positioned itself as a company that cares about AI safety.

Journalism and public media in general needs to be a licensed profession with tangible standards, and malpractice suits should be pursued aggressively.

Would solve a lot of problems in the US, actually. Being financially incentivized to gleefully lie and spread misinformation at the expense of others should not be protected speech.

There are a few possible explanations of Dario and Anthropic's behavior, if you are not sure if all they want is pump up the valuation like me:

- Anthropic has a cult-like culture. AI Safety is their religion. The AI Constitution is their bible. Dario is their cult leader. Employees are the apostles. They just really really believe their church, and only Dario is qualified to manage the AI safety.

- Asymmetrical risk. If Dario speaks optimistically about AI and he turns out to be wrong, he'd face the rage of many people. If he fans the doomerism of AI and he turns out to be wrong, at most he will be mocked.

- Regulatory capture. After all, pretty much all the AI big shots in Biden government went to Anthropic. They produced the Biden's regulation, and they made it clear that they wanted to pick a few winners to back.

> Can someone write an AI 2027 but instead of some totalizing doom propaganda it talks about the bubble unwinding and what we can do to prevent this kind of crap in the future? How do we build an economy and society that’s sustainable?

I imagine tons of people have written that article. But no one reads it. They're all busy with the doomiest bullshit Facebook or Tiktok will serve them. It's what gets engagement.

No one is clicking on the "None of the things your scared of are scary and here's why" video when it's up against the "$x is the end of the world and will eat your children" agitprop.

HN is not immune to this. I do not take HN seriously, because empirically so many takes across so many subjects have been wrong in a melodramatic fashion and the “adults”, often people with training and first hand experience have to show up to set the subject matter right before someone gets hurt. But as a barometer of unhinged hype? Only X is comparable.

>>SF wants to come for your inner life and pimp you out and mediate every interaction and there’s not even a so.

I have been saying this for a while. I visited SF a couple months ago and god do people feel empty from the inside. Everything is revolving around AI this and AI that. Half of these people were not paying attention when we were training gradient boost models and now all of these people are 'AI Agents experts'.

Great article. Holtz is growing on me ngl…

The SFBA culture has given me the ick for a while now. Anyone who has done web development in the last few years is inevitably exposed to it. Idk how to describe it without breaking the rules of the site so I’ll just say nothing.

> Remember when everyone died during COVID? And when we finally ended racism during DEI? Can someone write an AI 2027 (...)

Oh no, the obvious strawmans that - despite the author's assertions - people did not actually widely believe in, were strawmans? Crazy, I tell you. It'd seem that people aren't actually as dumb as the author likes to characterize them being.

Sure love this genre of writing. It's a beautifully revealing tour de force in projection and narcissism. "Will somebody please think for all the fools who believe in the obvious nonsense I secretly fear?"

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

> If San Francisco was nuked tomorrow, the world would feel a weight off their shoulders.

Who Would Jesus Nuke?