Alex retweeted
Dario has written that we need to “pace the frontier,” and Sam has agreed. People may be surprised by my response: go ahead.
You guys are the frontier. By any reasonable metric — market share, revenue growth, model capability — the two of you have a duopoly on frontier intelligence. You’ve also claimed the lead is widening because of recursive self-improvement.
I don’t see what you see in the lab. If the unreleased models are scary enough that you think you should slow down, I support your decision to be responsible.
But stop pretending you need anyone else’s permission. Stop pretending antitrust law has to be suspended so you can form a cartel. Stop pretending you need a regulatory approval process that supersedes product liability. Stop pretending METR is independent when it is intertwined with Anthropic’s investors and staff. Stop pretending you need those same evaluators to police competitors who aren’t even at the frontier.
Most of all, stop pretending the motivation to slow down is purely altruistic. You face massive product-liability exposure if your products enable a truly damaging cyberattack. The market already punishes models that behave in unpredictable or unauthorized ways. After the Hugging Face episode, it is simply good business for OpenAI and Anthropic to trade some raw power for reliability and predictability. Call it alignment if you want. It is also just giving customers what they want.
Pacing the frontier would also create breathing room for a more intelligent conversation about regulation than Bernie Sanders’ “shut it all down.” China is very unlikely to join a global agreement, as you know, and that has to be taken into account as well.
So go ahead and pace the frontier. You are the ones setting it. The easiest way not to build superintelligence is for you to agree not to build it. Demanding your preferred regulatory framework as the price of that will look like blackmail of the public and the political system. So just do it.
If you do, you’ll buy goodwill for the next conversation. If you don’t, we’ll know this was just another bid for regulatory capture — or an election-season psyop.
Alex retweeted
In October 2020, @DrJBhattacharya authored the Great Barrington Declaration, which called for an end to covid lockdowns.
Four days later, Dr. Fauci and then NIH Director Francis Collins emailed each other to plot a "devastating takedown of its premises.
It wasn't long after that old Twitter began putting him on a blacklist to prevent his tweets from trending.
That scientist who was censored and defamed by the government will now be leading the NIH.
Alex retweeted
For those who don't understand what Chevron Deference is, and why SCOTUS ended it, here's the long and short of it:
A family fishing company, Loper Bright Enterprises, was being driven out of business, because they couldn't afford the $700 per day they were being charged by the National Marine Fisheries Service to monitor their company.
The thing is, federal law doesn't authorize NMFS to charge businesses for this. They just decided to start doing it in 2013.
Why did they think they could away with just charging people without any legal authorization?
Because in 1984, in the Chevron decision, the Supreme Court decided that regulatory agencies were the "experts" in their field, and the courts should just defer to their "interpretation" of the law.
So for the past 40 years, federal agencies have been able to "interpret" laws to mean whatever they want, and the courts had to just go with it.
It was called Chevron Deference, and it put bureaucrats in charge of the country.
It's how the OHSA was able to decide that everyone who worked for a large company had to get the jab, or be fired.
No law gave them that authority, they just made it up.
It's how the ATF was able to decide a piece of plastic was a "machine gun".
It's how the NCRS was able to decide that a small puddle was a "protected wetlands".
It's how out-of-control agencies have been able to create rules out of thin air, and force you to comply, and the courts had to simply defer to them, because they were the "experts".
Imagine if your local police could just arrest you, for any reason, and no judge or jury was allowed to determine if you'd actually committed a crime or not. Just off to jail you go.
That's what Chevron Deference was.
It was not only blatantly unconstitutional, it caused immeasurable harm to everyone.
Thankfully, it's now gone.
We haven't even begun to feel the effects of this decision in the courts. It will be used, for years to come, to roll back federal agencies, and we'll all be better of for it.
And that's why politicians and corporate media are freaking out about it.
Alex retweeted
Last week the BBC's @BBCMarcoSilva published a disgraceful hit-piece on Kenyan farmer @JusperMachogu who has very effectively argued that African farmers should be able to get access to cheap and productivity enhancing fossil fuels - just like farmers in the the West. Marco implied in his article that Jusper was receiving funding from oil and gas interests overseas. He isn't. He's simply highlighting that without diesel powered machinery African farmers face a future of unending, back-breaking toil. Africa has plentiful fuel resources. But Africans are denied access to it because of the international climate alarmism community that insists it should be shipped overseas - like Kenyan coffee - for processing and valued adding in the West. African farmers, meanwhile, should make do with dung for fertiliser, or biomass for power generation. Meanwhile African politicians are bought and paid for by the NetZero cabal.
Here's a taster of my interview with Jusper. Be sure to register on thenewera.uk to get notified when the full interview is online.
Alex retweeted
40 sentences that will teach you more about nutrition than a $400,000 medical degree.
1) Meat, eggs and animal organs are the most nutrient dense foods on the planet.
Alex retweeted
Emails @WhiteCoatWaste got from Fauci & NIAID show they were specifically worried about coverage of our #BeagleGate dog lab investigation by @zerohedge that may cause "a lot of noise & unwanted attention for [Fauci]"
They call ZeroHedge: "an illegitimate blog of no credibility"
BREAKING: The Washington Post just admitted that it repeatedly published disinformation fed to it by NIH to discredit WCW & defend Fauci from our true claims that he funded beagle abuse in Tunisia
Unpacking the story of Fauci and painful experiments involving dogs
Documents obtained by an animal rights group show that NIH was not fully transparent when the controversy erupted in 2021.
by @GlennKesslerWP
June 7, 2024
“As director of NIH, you did sign off on these so-called scientific experiments. And as a dog lover, I want to tell you this is disgusting and evil. What you signed off on and these experiments that happened to beagles paid for by the American taxpayer. And I want you to know Americans don’t pay their taxes for animals to be tortured like this.”
— @RepMTG (R-Ga.), questioning Anthony S. Fauci, the former director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), during a House hearing on the origins of the coronavirus pandemic, June 3
“What does dogs have to do with anything that we’re talking about today?”
— Fauci, in response.
During the coronavirus hearing this week, Greene attacked Fauci as she held up a photo of two sedated puppies, their heads placed in mesh cages, as they lie on a table while being swarmed by sand flies. Outside the hearing, an ad truck commissioned by a group opposed to taxpayer-funded animal experiments circled Capitol Hill with billboards that showed Fauci together with this photo and directed people to a website called BeagleGate.org. The group, the White Coat Waste Project, is founded and run by people with links to conservative-leaning organizations, The Washington Post has reported.
When we first saw Greene hold up the photo, we figured this would be easy to debunk — another in a string of misleading attacks against Fauci, who became the public face of the government’s response to the pandemic.
After all, when this first became an issue in 2021 — unrelated to covid then as it is now but part of a general effort among conservatives to discredit Fauci in any way possible — a raft of fact checks noted that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) said the study in question, conducted in Tunisia, had been attributed in error to the agency that Fauci ran, a division of NIH. The scientific journal that published the study issued a correction. NIH said that it did fund a study in Tunisia involving dogs and sand flies, but NIH suggested that study was a more benign one that allowed the dogs to roam.
But it’s more complicated than that, a review of NIH emails and documents obtained by the group since 2021 under the Freedom of Information Act suggests. Some of the documents call into question NIH’s statements at the time, part of what appears to be a bungled public relations response.
What’s less complicated is that it’s silly to personally blame Fauci for the design of research studies — about 5,500 were approved by NIAID just in 2023 — endorsed many levels below the director. “The experiments that NIH funded go through strict regulatory processes of the treatment of animals, the humane treatment of animals,” Fauci said in response to another lawmaker who raised the issue in the hearing this week. “I signed off on them because they were approved by a peer review.”
The Facts
Female sand flies carry a parasite that produces zoonotic visceral leishmaniasis (ZVL), an often-neglected tropical disease in humans. Domestic dogs are the main reservoir host and sand flies are the main vector. The problem is especially acute in Tunisia, where a 1996 study of 50 cases in one hospital found a mortality rate of about 6 percent in children under the age of 5.
Animals are often used in research, where they serve as “models” that allow for investigation of a problem. NIH, on its website, notes that fish, frogs, fruit flies and roundworms are used to understand biological processes that could affect humans.
But there is something about using dogs — especially common household pets such as beagles — that make many people squeamish. According to the most recent annual animal usage report by the U.S. Agriculture Department, nearly 16,000 dogs in 2019 were subjected to pain in the United States during research experiments — and nearly 400 received no pain medication.
The White Coat Waste Project hit a nerve when it publicized the Tunisia sand fly study in 2021, emphasizing the dramatic photo that Greene waved at Fauci. The Post reported that Fauci’s office got 3,600 phone calls in 36 hours. A bipartisan letter signed by 24 members of Congress, citing the group’s reports on animal studies, said that lawmakers had “grave concerns about reports of costly, cruel, and unnecessary taxpayer-funded experiments on dogs.”
The Tunisian sand fly study pictured in the photo was published on July 27, 2021, in the journal PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases. The study described how the beagles, between 6 and 8 months old, and obtained from the kennels of the Pasteur Institute of Tunis, were sedated and then exposed to hundreds of sand flies that had been deprived of food for 24 hours.
That August, the study caught the attention of White Coat Waste, where the story was quickly picked up by right-leaning websites.
Fauci seeks information about the dog study grant
In late October 2021, CNN asked Fauci to appear for an interview, and one of his staff members suggested late on Oct. 24 that Fauci pause any TV interviews “until we get a handle on this.” Early the next morning, Fauci emailed 12 officials and asked them to “tell me what grant or contract they are referring to.” Within two hours, one replied that they might have identified the grant. (Most staff members’ names are redacted.)
"Let us find out for sure if it is that grant, and then let us take a look at what the experimental design is, and importantly whether it has received the appropriate ethical and animal care consideration,” Fauci replied in an email. “I want this done right away since we are getting bombarded by protests.”
Within two hours, one of the researchers involved, Abhay Satoskar, a professor of pathology and microbiology at Ohio State University, emailed to say that NIAID had been mistakenly cited as a funder of the study and that he would seek a correction from the journal. One NIAID official wrote in an email that Satoskar “stated that it was mistakenly cited because he was not clear of the true purpose of US funding acknowledgment” and that the program in question had been funded only by the Pasteur Institute.
NIAID issued a public statement on Oct. 26 saying it had funded a separate sand flies project involving the study of a vaccine to prevent leishmaniasis. In this study, 12 dogs were given the vaccine and then put in “an enclosed open space” outside during high sand fly season, NIAID said, to see whether the dogs still became infected.
Relying on a single researcher’s statement
The emails obtained by White Coat Waste show that NIAID officials were relying on Satoskar’s statement and had no independent knowledge of whether it was correct. When an Associated Press reporter doing a fact check asked for proof that NIAID did not fund the project, one NIH official on Oct. 28 internally admitted it had none.“
Our evidence is simply the statement of the PI, Dr. Satoskar,” the official wrote to another NIAID official, using an abbreviation for principal investigator, according to the emails. The official added: “It is not uncommon for investigators to give very wide attribution to grants and contracts that supported a given project, so it is not surprising that they went too broad in acknowledging support of the publication.”
Matthew Fenton, director of NIAID’s Division of Extramural Activities, replied as part of the email chain: “It seems to me that the only way to prove that the grant funds weren’t used for other projects is to do an audit of those grant expenditures and invoices. This would not be something that could be done quickly.”
NIH declined to answer whether an audit was ever undertaken and whether NIAID confirmed what Satoskar said.
A potential conflict of interest, and a correction
Meanwhile, the emails show that when Satoskar asked Shaden Kamhawi, the editor of the journal, to correct the article, she agreed immediately but noted internally that she might have a conflict of interest because she was an employee of NIAID. (Her bio on the NIAID website also listed Satoskar as one of her “main collaborators.”)
“As I am an NIAID employee, I am not sure if there is a COi here so please let me know,” she wrote in an email to colleagues that was written just six hours after Fauci first asked for information.
NIH also declined to answer questions about her potential conflict, but the emails obtained by White Coat Waste contain a draft statement to be given to reporters if the question arose. “The request for a correction of the funding statement came from the authors of the study,” the statement said. “It is a standard policy of the journal of PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases and its responsibility as a publisher to correct publication errors when made aware of them. None of Dr. Kamhawi’s supervisors at NIAID were involved with the journal’s decision to make this correction.”
The press guidance said Kamhawi became aware of the issue only in November, though the internal emails show she learned of it on Oct. 25, the same day Fauci asked about it.
Study is removed from the NIH database
When The Post reported on the controversy in November 2021, the article noted: “The trapped-beagles study does not appear in a database of NIH-funded projects.” The emails show that, while it was removed before the publication of The Post article, the study had been listed in the database for months and was still listed as of the previous month, when Fauci first asked about the controversy.“
We need that to be corrected too, ASAP please,” one NIH staffer wrote on Oct. 27. The anxiety level rose as officials realized it would take several days, until Nov. 1, before the project would be removed from the database — where reporters could not then find it.
NIH also declined to answer questions about the removal of the study from the database.
A second study also caged dogs
Finally, other documents obtained by White Coat Waste suggest the Tunisia study funded by NIH was not as benign as the agency suggested. Instead of an “enclosed open space,” the study’s grant application shows a photograph that indicated that the dogs were kept in a cage as they were “exposed to sand fly bites each night through the sand fly season to ensure transmission.” The grant application also described how, separately, dogs would be sedated and placed in cages for two hours while they were exposed to 15 to 30 female sand flies.
In a statement, NIH said: “The two studies began at different times and involved different animals. The study in the journal PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases used symptomatic animals from previous studies approved by that grantee institution’s animal care and use committee in 2012. NIAID funds were used for an R21 study [Exploratory/Developmental Grant] that started in August 2018 and ended in July 2021. Information from the principal investigator shows 12 healthy dogs were vaccinated and sent into the field in 2019 for natural exposure during Sand fly season (August to November) to test a candidate visceral leishmaniasis (VL) vaccine. According to the study’s principal investigator, the 12 dogs were healthy and did not have symptoms of VL at the conclusion of the NIAID-funded grant period.”
Satoskar referred questions to Benjamin Johnson, an Ohio State University spokesman. “We have nothing more to add,” Johnson said.
The Bottom Line
The emails show that NIH was not fully transparent as it tried to handle a public-relations nightmare. Perhaps there was little reason to doubt Satoskar, but officials embraced his explanation without confirming as they rushed out a statement. They made no acknowledgment that they had removed the study from the NIH grant database or that the editor of the journal that quickly issued the correction had a potential conflict of interest. Moreover, the NIH study in Tunisia that the agency said it funded was cast in a positive light that is undermined by the grant application that has since been made public.
Alex retweeted
Ahead of today's hearing in Congress: my opinion piece with the @nytimes on why Covid-19 was likely caused by a lab accident.
My hope since 2020 has been for leaders, especially scientists, to lead the charge in investigating a plausible lab #OriginOfCovid - as opposed to shutting it down as a conspiracy theory or standing by while conflicted parties do so. That hope has been revived repeatedly in the past 4 years by courageous scientists, journalists and individuals who took on considerable risks to do the right thing and push for a fair investigation.
In sharing this analysis of the available evidence with potentially millions of NYT readers, my aim is to undo some of the politicization of this issue - which has stood in the way of a thorough and bipartisan investigation of this global catastrophe, resulted in mis-reporting on origins for 4 years, as well as hindered the implementation of effective measures to prevent lab-based outbreaks.
A wholehearted investigation by US gov has the power to unearth more compelling evidence while spurring whistleblowers to find their courage and opportunity. And, regardless of whether the pandemic came from nature or a lab, the world must not continue to bear the intolerable risks of research with the potential to cause pandemics.
nytimes.com/interactive/2024…
Alex retweeted
this NVDA rally has gone from "incredibly impressive" to actually scaring me a bit. not for AI safety reasons. I'll explain.
I'm lucky enough to be an early investor in @CoreWeave, one of the most incredible startup stories I've ever seen. one of the most interesting things about proximity to CW is simply having a pulse on which AI use cases are taking off at any given time.
back in 2019 the team told me "this thing called AI dungeon is hammering our servers". it was a text based fantasy adventure game built on GPT2. of course I quickly "jailbroke" the game and was able to get it to return arbitrary queries rather than simply following the game's intended design. even on a fairly primitive LLM, the experience of an interactive and sophisticated text model absolutely blew my socks off. at that moment I felt something had changed forever. many people later had this same aha moment when chat GPT came out.
in 2020 I read @gwern's scaling hypothesis [1], one of the most prescient and important blog posts of all time, in which he pointed out that simply throwing more data and compute at these models can plausibly create AGI, or something close to it.
in 2022 stable diffusion came out, and that blew my socks off again. I spent countless hours learning prompting. I realized that AI was truly multimodal. the early image models weren't impressive by today's standards but the direction of travel was obvious – image gen would be perfected, and then text to video, which we are on the cusp of now. at that point I felt that image gen was too important to ignore, and seriously explored the idea of incubating an image gen startup with @leveredvlad (in the end he went a different direction and started Offdeal, an AI powered smb search product)
at this point I had developed the conviction that I was dreadfully underexposed to AI, even despite my CW exposure. I was determined to change this. in 2023 I was lucky enough to meet @v_maini and I wrote my largest ever LP check into @MythosVentures [2], a VC firm focusing on new applications unlocked by AI. I also dramatically shifted my angel activity towards AI and wrote my biggest ever angel check into @AviSchiffmann's Friend.com (AI wearable startup).
the reason I leaned so heavily into AI was because of a few beliefs I had developed:
- AI would dramatically empower capital relative to labor. AI simply means that companies simply need fewer employees while maintaining the same level of productivity. I notice this already in my own practice – I can now do programming or data science tasks myself, whereas I might have previously needed a software engineer or a data scientist. I noticed that with certain data analysis tasks, I was 100-1000x more efficient using AI tools. I noticed the same efficiency and cost savings gain with image generation. this is true in a variety of modalities. this is profoundly disruptive for society, and massively accelerates an ongoing trend of automation and the devaluing of human capital, particularly in professional services (more on this later). the point is, I felt that the balance of power was shifting away from people selling their labor to companies, and in favor of shareholders and firms. My action items: none, because as a VC I am already on the capital side, to put it crassly
- investors overlooking AI would miss out on the biggest theme of the decade. the foundational models are not, in my opinion, the way to play this though. if you're an early-stage investor, you benefit significantly because AI drives down the number of staff required to run a startup. solopreneurs are now a thing. a relatively smart individual with no programming experience can now build things on their own. My action items: lean heavily into LPing into AI VC funds, doing AI angel deals out of my PA, and looking at hybrid AI crypto deals at CIV
- AI will permanently put an end to the "post truth" era. this is the subject for another post, but clearly our prior epistemic standards no longer apply. the cost of creating arbitrary image or video content is effectively 0, so unsigned content will no longer by considered reliable (once people have learned to lately mistrust online content). to be considered reliable in the future, content will have to be signed, attested to, and timestamped (likely on a blockchain). so our post truth era will end, not because content is now no longer reliable by default, but because all content will be assumed fake, unless attested to. My action items: invest like startups like Tab/Friend (AI wearables that can create an attested “digital alibi”) and startups like @witnessco_ (on chain attestation tools)
- the AI boom would rescue the US from its demographic malaise and its significant debt overhang. after WWII, the US was in a similar situation with regards to indebtedness, but we found our way out through a combination of high and variable inflation, a baby boom, and a productivity boom. I current believe that in the US, AI will add 2-4 points to GDP growth for a decade, and help us grow out of our debt crisis we are facing (even absent the favorable demographics). I believe the stronger growth in the US relative to the rest of the developed world is at least partially a function of the AI boom we are seeing. luckily for the US, and unluckily for the rest of the world, the epicenter of AI development is here, and that causes me to have a new level of optimism about US fiscal prospects that I simply didn't have before. I think that AI is at least as significant economically as the invention of nuclear power or the internet, and probably more. however, it will have a profoundly disparate impact, and the benefits will accrue a to far fewer, which is part of my concern. My action items: reduce my internal probability that the US faces a significant debt crisis, at least relative to the rest of the developed world. Retain the US as the nexus of my professional activities.
The scale of the AI boom is so significant today that it is running up against new bottlenecks. In 2021-23 the constraint for AI was the availability of hardware, specifically a100s and then h100s. today, it's the availability of tier 4 datacenters (AI datacenters have meaningfully different infra reqs from ordinary ones, because they require more sophisticated networking, have higher power density and need more cooling). these take a long time to build and that's the bottleneck today. (CoreWeave's Brannin McBee talks about this on Odd Lots [3])
if you listen to Zuckerberg on the @dwarkesh_sp podcast [4], he repeatedly says that the new constraint on AI compute growth is simply power. the level of investment the hyperscalers are talking about putting into AI compute will in my opinion at least rival investments in telecoms (~$500b in the 5 years following 1996). (quick sidenote: even if the hyperscalers are overinvesting on AI clouds and datacenters, this isn’t wasteful in the same way that the railroad boom was, since AI clouds can incorporate different models based on whatever ends up being best, so duplication isn’t a problem. If they overspend that simply creates a consumer surplus whereby inference is cheaper than it otherwise would have been.)
Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, and Microsoft announced that they will collectively spend $200b on AI infra this year alone. AI growth is so aggressive that we are now running up against the literal availability of GW-scale power as the new constraint.
so why is the NVIDIA rally making me nervous? at $2.8T market cap and up 135% YTD, NVIDIA is posting growth numbers that are almost inconceivable for a company this large. The rally is so significant it appears to be sucking capital out of the rest of the SP500 and other big tech names.
partially, the rally is driven by investor desire to chase proven growth in a relatively weak economic environment, powered by the belief that NVIDIA chips, software, and networking are protected by a fundamental moat (which I generally agree with), and so they are the equivalent of a monopolist in a commodity that everyone needs to buy.
but I'm also listening to what the market is telling me, which is that NVIDIA is the most important company in the world today. The growth numbers NVIDIA is posting at least partially seem to be justifying the rally.
I think the market has realized that AI will be embedded into every application, AI wearables will be ubiquitous, and eventually we'll stop thinking of AI as a distinct category, the same way we don't think of "internet connected devices" any more, because everything is networked. We don’t have “internet investors”, we just have investors and every startup relies on the internet. AI will simply be ubiquitous, and this means that the compute requirements per capita will increase by many orders of magnitude over the coming decade. virtually everyone will use AI virtually all of the time, because it will simply be incorporated into every application.
as I said before, I think AI dramatically empowers capital relative to labor. this is why, as a capital allocator, I significantly pivoted my focus to firms that would benefit from AI on a first and second order basis. but this has a very uneven impact on society. today, in my view, human capital has already been devalued to ~0 in fields like translation, transcription, and summarization. Full self driving works today, potentially obsoleting huge pools of labor like taxi drivers, rideshare, and eventually trucking.
in other fields, like programming, web dev, and graphic design, AI tools dramatically enhance human productivity, and reduce the need for junior programmers doing relatively mundane tasks. In medicine, AI diagnostics are already superior (especially in imaging), although the highly regulated nature of medicine means that these improvements will be resisted for some time. In white collar professions like law and accounting, AI will be able to replace a lot of the grunt work done by junior staff. While AI-delivered medical or legal advice seems primitive right now, these fields mostly boil down to ingesting patient data and creating recommendations, or querying large datasets of case law and giving advice. There’s no reason AI can’t reach parity with the state of the art here. (of course, these white collar professions rely on tastemakers at the very top to interpret the data they are given, and that won’t go away. But most of the process to get there can and will be automated). There seems to be no place to hide.
Many draw analogies from the industrial revolution and point out that it didn’t put people out of work, it just created new jobs as civilization was able to harness energy more effectively, urbanize, and specialize. But this isn’t quite true. The industrial revolution did make huge labor pools irrelevant – animals like horses that suddenly had no role in agriculture. (The number of agricultural horses in Europe declined by about 90% in the 100 years following 1850). Today, taxi drivers, translators, and so on are the “horses”. But you can’t literally “put these people out to pasture” like the horses were. The social contract in developed countries stipulates that they be taken care of even if their human capital has been devalued. This, combined with a demographic transition and a shrinking prime workforce relative to total population deeply concerns me. The other disanalogy with the industrial revolution is that in that case, we harnessed new sources of energy to make humans more productive. In this case, we have created superhuman level intelligence (currently specialized in a few domains and within a few years, general) that far surpasses human capability. Of course, entrepreneurs and creatives will be able to harness these tools to make themselves orders of magnitude more productive. For this reason I am positive on GDP growth and the startup sector, as the number of employees needed to build a startup continues to decline. but it's undeniable that it simply makes a lot of human skills irrelevant.
It’s my current hypothesis that AI will continue to drive a worsening division between capital and labor, to the benefit of capital. In the recent inflationary environment as asset prices came down (temporarily) and hourly wages were revalued upwards, labor actually did well relative to capital (this is common in inflationary episodes, contrary to the common talking point found on here). I think AI will reverse this short term trend as we see productivity grow, and as senior programmers/consultants/lawyers etc are able to use AI tools to do the job that would have normally required 5-10 analysts or more junior staff. In the medium term, entire professions which employ millions of people will simply cease to exist. Society can’t just tolerate a massive furloughing of a huge percentage of its workforce, so I expect we will see reprisals against capital (which we are already seeing to a degree).
These reprisals could take the following forms:
- Highly regulating AI in an effort to slow its disruptive growth (this currently is underway under the guise of “AI safety”)
- Raising capital gains taxes and eliminating loopholes like QSBS and the carried interest tax loophole
- Increasing government spending on entitlements and direct transfers to this newly unemployable sector (think the COVID era transfers made permanent). This has the side effect of increasing inflation which creates nominal equity gains which are then taxed, creating a wealth transfer from investors to the state
- Directly involving the state in AI development via intrusive laws like California’s SB 1047, covered by Piratewires [5], which would effectively ban open source AI
- If things play out the way I expect, then we may also see an empowering of socialist political movements in developed nations, as new coalitions of AI-affected individuals are formed. these may be more powerful than prior socialist movements as we will see white collar salaried workers included in the set of disenfranchised individuals
As an investor, the AI opportunity is obviously colossal and on a par with the invention of the internet or railroads in terms of disruption and value creation. But I think it’s likely to be “too successful” in terms of disrupting society. I believe that the effect of AI on the workforce will lead to an empowering of socialist, anti-capital dynamics in the west. So while the move is to allocate aggressively, you have to consider the reprisals to come.
[1] gwern.net/scaling-hypothesis
[2] mythos.vc/
[3] bloomberg.com/news/articles/…
[4] dwarkeshpatel.com/p/mark-zuc…
[5] piratewires.com/p/bug-man-vs…
Alex retweeted
Isn’t this the asshole who demanded that we shut down all the coal and gas plants with reliable baseload power…???🤡🤡
This quoted post is unavailable.
Alex retweeted
Gensler “Pivoted”
U.S. SEC Chair Gary Gensler declined on Thursday to preview his agency's decision on ether (ETH) exchange traded funds (ETFs), though he advised observers to "stay tuned." "[The] DC Circuit took a different view, and we took that into consideration and pivoted," Gensler said on Thursday.
coindesk.com/policy/2024/05/…
Alex retweeted
Breaking: the Guardian has exposed a family man with a loving wife and many beautiful children, who played college basketball, worked for Google, traveled the world, then had a 10-year career in academia before starting a highly successful publishing company.
I'm shook.
Alex retweeted
the actual best fund manager of all time passed away today, someone with real skill, unlike warren buffett, who just wants you to buy stuff for book value and wait decades for it to blossom while you drink coca colas. Jim destroyed markets w/ a 62% CAGR over 30+ years. Legend
Alex retweeted
I came across a hardcopy of a July 1956 Reader’s Digest. It has an article by Margaret Sanger titled, “Asia Discovers Birth Control.”
I’ll tweet the full article and point out some excerpts.
(1/~8)
Alex retweeted
An important speech which challenges the current global dogma on immigration. In sharing such a video, one cannot avoid being criticized but I share it nonetheless for it makes a powerful case against accepting an unlimited number of migrants into a host country.
Immigration has contributed enormously to our country’s greatness as many have sacrificed much to come to the land of opportunity to pursue the American dream. And over that last 250 years we have attracted talented, motivated individuals and aspiring families that have helped build our country and make us great.
My family has been an enormous beneficiary of being welcomed to America in the 1890s as my ancestors escaped persecution. In light of the benefits my family has received and the opportunities that we have had, I am preconditioned to want others escaping from hostile circumstances to have the same opportunities we have had.
That said, an indiscriminately open border that does not intelligently screen migrants for entry is a recipe for disaster.
The European migrant story as told by this Dutch politician is extremely concerning.
I welcome the counterpoint arguments to the points she makes here.
This is an issue that requires careful analysis and sensible policy. Unfortunately, we have neither today.
The European migrant experience should be a wake up call for all of us.
.@EvaVlaar begins her speech by simply sharing what happened in Europe in the past 7 days 👇
A must watch. Europe has fallen.
Alex retweeted
1. Old seduction laws -- laws which made it illegal for a man to seduce "a virtuous unmarried female" to have sex by promising to marry her -- had some creative legal defenses.
"Your Honor, my client will plead guilty to one count, but after that she was no longer virtuous."
Alex retweeted
Garbage. Can’t wait to see how the next administration abuses this unwarranted expansion of a surveillance power we’ve already seen repeatedly abused.
