I don't understand the point of this piece. There is nothing breaking or remotely interesting which we didn't already know.
Mind you I don't particularly care about Aschenbrenner or his fund but it feels to me like typical journalists reporting on hindsight without any sort of skin in the game. "Hhm, how could you be so dumb so as to trust your money to a 22 year old".
Peter Thiel did the same with Zuck and like him or hate him he did pretty well.
If you want to show how smart you are hash your predictions, post them publicly with a commitment to reveal by a certain date and then show the world how this was so obvious in hindsight.
I just don't see the comparison one was a college aged tech founder making a product for college students the other was an AI maximalist who keeps riding red without taking anything off running around the crowd cheering him on and pulling cash out their pockets pointing to the roulette wheel and saying it's always red!
He's up, but he's wiped out because he was 4x leveraged, why was he 4x leveraged? Because he's a dumb kid who doesn't understand that markets have down days or how margin calls work. The same failure mode doesn't happen with facebook or rather, when giving money to a hedgefund in a bull market you expect at least some returns or that they will actually hedge. Not fuel a mid 20s gambling addiction. As of now most of the cash is in a private position with the worst of the AI companies.
If you want to show how smart you are don't waste your time predicting the future, since it's a fools errand. The belief that intelligence makes you better at prediction ironically makes you stupid.
> Good for Mr Aschenbrenner for chancing his arm. The mystery is what on earth his investors were thinking. Perhaps they weren’t. In which case, that would be more worrying than anything about Situational Awareness’s humbling.
The Economist should change its name to The Populist with this type of screed.
Here's the reality:
1. Lots of money is invested willy-nilly for all sorts of reasons (or no reason at all) in all sorts of dubious and poorly-managed vehicles.
2. Except for the profile of the fund manager and that this was AI, this failure wasn't all that special. The seed capital for the fund is reported to have been around $225 million and it was highly leveraged on top of significant gains so there's a whole class of LPs who probably aren't even going to lose anything on this. It's the people who put capital in more recently who are going to lose.
3. The people who will lose money investing in this fund are the type of people who have a full wardrobe. It's going to be a very long time before they "lose their shirts".
> The mystery is what on earth his investors were thinking. Perhaps they weren’t. In which case, that would be more worrying than anything about Situational Awareness’s humbling.
I think this piece is pointing out two things:
That this bubble still has a long way to deflate if it is indeed deflating. The numbers involved truly are spectacular and unwinding could be catastrophic.
That there is a lot of blind faith in the market in unsubstantiated predictions - like AGI this decade (or indeed AGI at all based on LLMs), and a lot of follower behaviour among investors chasing the latest trade.
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[ 0.24 ms ] story [ 39.7 ms ] thread> While at Columbia, he co-founded the university's effective altruism (EA) chapter.[5]
Just another smart, yet ethically challenged, individual. Nothing to see here.
> which posted a loss of 67% in July
So it's still up 44% this year? The article notes this, but seems unnecessarily adversarial against an investor who is still wildly successful.
Mind you I don't particularly care about Aschenbrenner or his fund but it feels to me like typical journalists reporting on hindsight without any sort of skin in the game. "Hhm, how could you be so dumb so as to trust your money to a 22 year old".
Peter Thiel did the same with Zuck and like him or hate him he did pretty well.
If you want to show how smart you are hash your predictions, post them publicly with a commitment to reveal by a certain date and then show the world how this was so obvious in hindsight.
He's up, but he's wiped out because he was 4x leveraged, why was he 4x leveraged? Because he's a dumb kid who doesn't understand that markets have down days or how margin calls work. The same failure mode doesn't happen with facebook or rather, when giving money to a hedgefund in a bull market you expect at least some returns or that they will actually hedge. Not fuel a mid 20s gambling addiction. As of now most of the cash is in a private position with the worst of the AI companies.
If you want to show how smart you are don't waste your time predicting the future, since it's a fools errand. The belief that intelligence makes you better at prediction ironically makes you stupid.
The Economist should change its name to The Populist with this type of screed.
Here's the reality:
1. Lots of money is invested willy-nilly for all sorts of reasons (or no reason at all) in all sorts of dubious and poorly-managed vehicles.
2. Except for the profile of the fund manager and that this was AI, this failure wasn't all that special. The seed capital for the fund is reported to have been around $225 million and it was highly leveraged on top of significant gains so there's a whole class of LPs who probably aren't even going to lose anything on this. It's the people who put capital in more recently who are going to lose.
3. The people who will lose money investing in this fund are the type of people who have a full wardrobe. It's going to be a very long time before they "lose their shirts".
Does anyone know if this refers to AUM or the gross size of his positions after leverage?
I think this piece is pointing out two things:
That this bubble still has a long way to deflate if it is indeed deflating. The numbers involved truly are spectacular and unwinding could be catastrophic.
That there is a lot of blind faith in the market in unsubstantiated predictions - like AGI this decade (or indeed AGI at all based on LLMs), and a lot of follower behaviour among investors chasing the latest trade.