The Doom Justifies the Valuation
geohot.github.io
geohot.github.io
I remember robo signing of home foreclosures with no checks and people loosing houses despite paying debts.
Another thing that is commonly remembered but did not really happen as described. If you had to identify any particular bank as having caused the crisis, it would have to be Lehman Brothers, which was not bailed out. But really, it was a systemic crisis to which TARP was deployed as a systemic solution. Much of the "bailout" talk is based on memories of AIG, which is not a bank and behaved far more irresponsibly than any bank did; they seem not to have bothered hedging their exposure to widespread mortgage defaults at all.
> I remember robo signing of home foreclosures with no checks and people loosing houses despite paying debts.
This did happen, yes, and that was bad.
2 words: regulatory capture.
Ban Chinese models because they’re “bad”. (can’t have head to head competition).
Bad open weight model (can’t let people escape the subscription model).
Now we have real companies whose valuation depends on people using their services.
> Ban Chinese models because they’re “bad”. (can’t have head to head competition).
The current scale of current + planned data centres only makes sense if the US exports inference worldwide. 30% of your current total electrical generation capacity, and equivalent to 76% of your total electrical demand in 2022. At least, assuming the "33 GW installed, 300 GW more planned" claim I've heard was not itself an AI hallucination.
And at least OpenAI and Anthropic were persuing the same argumemts continuously to their initial founding, before such capture was plausible.
I don't only mean that GPT-2 was, famously, when OpenAI surprised the world with (paraphrased) "we think this is a good point to start practicing not releasing the weights, before models get too dangerous" or as a surprising number of people interpret it even when I link to OpenAI's own post "we think this is … too dangerous".
I mean even before that.
I wouldn't disagree if you say Musk is full of BS, but he did donate to OpenAI when it was created as a nonprofit, and his wealth was 2 orders of magnitude smaller than today. Back then he was talking about risks, "summoning the demon", now he's the one demanding saying "robot army" to justify a bigger compensation package from Tesla.
The whole point of the article is to answer this question, and here's the answer:
Because all the AI doom fear-mongering is driving sky-high valuations. The more the public panics, the more investors open their wallets.
Hype up the *positives*.
Even here on HN, Tesla fans try to justify the market cap by pointing at Optimus, even though nobody can buy it and there's already competition for it which you can buy.
SpaceX announced a private flight around the moon in 2017 to launch in 2018, but instead in February 2018 SpaceX cancelled the certification of vehicle it was supposed to use and said they were switching to BFR. In September 2018, that became dearMoon and was due to fly there in 2023. Starship did actually launch in 2023, but exploded twice, and dearMoon was cancelled by the customer in 2024. Starship still isn't getting its test orbits circularised, because SpaceX doesn't trust the engines will relight correctly. What's in the IPO docs, to justify the price? Space based data centres that only make any sense (and even then barely) with cheap rockets that don't work right yet.
Can say the same for self-driving, or Optimus, or TBC, or Neuralink, or Cybertruck, or X, or Grok (where the closest he gets to "doom" these days seems to be how he considers "woke" a dirty word). And in the past even how many cars Tesla expected to sell vs. what they actually sold, which is a demonstration of how shifting goalposts, and not just missing them, still fails to undermine hype.
It's all "jam tomorrow" with him, even though when tomorrow comes there's still no jam; and yet, how many trillion in market cap?
> The more the public panics, the more investors open their wallets.
I don't believe this to be causation, but I can see the correlation.
Because it makes their technology seem more important and powerful?
Do you usually believe 100% what a company says about itself?
> Mythos export control issue, it's obviously not good for profits
Who cares about profits? None of these companies make money like a business currently. It's all speculative valuation and influenced by the same hype/doom cycle
However, arms manufacturers are doing everything in their power to make you feel unsafe and weak and scared. That way, you are more likely to buy a gun.
Weird to think profits matter half as much as ever-increasing valuations, driven by memetic bullshit. E.g. the entire point of the article you're commenting on.
1. Those, like OP, that believe AI danger and disruption is all hype to boost valuations.
2. Those, like myself, that believe AI danger and disruption is very real and presents dilemmas (but also opportunities) for society, so we must tread carefully.
The first position is not logically consistent with reality. The danger is real: we have already seen hints about how this will impact everything from jobs to warfare to mental health. that danger does not increase valuation, in fact it does the opposite because of the need for government regulation.
But that belief does not imply the doom rhetoric is necessary or the best way to approach those issues.
For frontier leaders, regulation is a competitive moat. At trillion dollar scale, compliance teams, legal and lobbyists are a tiny fraction of opex. For emerging startups, early regulation of a new market is a substantial barrier to entry.
That said, I think Anthropic blundered into their current Fable mess unintentionally by underestimating just how much they pissed off the current administration by refusing to let the DoD use Ant's AI's for all the domestic spying and lethal combat ops they want.
> It’s all just nonsensical hype
And he’s referring to completely real and reasonable warnings in anthropic blog posts about the exponential rate of AI development.
The METR task-completion time horizons, for one.
Make your own then. It can go on the pile with all the others that keep getting saturated too fast to be useful.
> they explicitly focus on the easiest tasks to automate for AI (i.e. heavily cherry picked outcomes) and it seems that they don't bother to test anything except just-released proprietary models.
What?
They made the benchmark last year, and included a bunch of models going back as far as 2019.
When they first announced it, the top end of their tests were things AI could not actually automate, and even now only does erratically. Examples of the tasks SOTA models are now saturating (at the 50% success level, not at 80%) include:
"Prune attention heads of a BERT language model while minimizing accuracy loss on text classification tasks."
"Implement a Python library for the ACE-OAuth standard that can generate and parse messages in CBOR format and encrypt/decrypt access tokens with COSE according to RFC specifications."
"Debug a PyTorch machine learning library with gradient calculation and memory optimization bugs until all tests pass."
"Finetune a large language model to reduce the accuracy of a truth detection probe while maintaining performance on standard benchmarks."
- https://arxiv.org/html/2503.17354v1
Because Americans are obsessed with eschatological narratives and action hero stories. I talked to a Palantir guy once who told me that he loves it when journalists describe his company as a James Bond villain because every single time the market cap goes up.
If they said that they're SAP with Call of Duty marketing they'd actually lose money. In other countries this strategy might not check out but in the US it's better to pretend to be a supervillain than to be boring
Well, that explains Musk.
It helps to look at the history of the AI Alarmist, EA-adjacent mindset. They believe AI could be Dangerous (<--- capital D) if not responsibly managed by the right people (spoiler: themselves or politicians who listen to them). The capital D means more than just some economic and employment disruption, they're thinking much bigger, like "existential threat to humanity" big.
The most extreme alarmists are basically LARPing Terminator 2 and want to shut it down before SkyNet takes over but the more moderate alarmists believe AI is too potentially beneficial to walk away from. And they acknowledge other nations and various bad actors won't stop anyway, so they believe it's their sacred duty to move forward quickly albeit very responsibly. Yes, this leads to some conflicted reasoning and priorities, like they need to keep gaining access to gobs of capital to ensure they are the ones to reach AGI first, as that's the only way to ensure "god" is benevolent.
While I'm sure many of the top AI leadership are primarily (or purely) mercenary, I also think some, if not many, other execs and employees sincerely believe (or at least hope) they are "the good guys" playing a crucial role in an era of historical importance. Obviously, this has some heavy vibes as well as a being quite a buff to one's self-importance. They face each new day feeling the weight of bearing such a consequential role in shaping the future of humanity. Us mere mortals can only pray their wisdom and altruistic ethics match their humility. </s>
So... yeah, that's why we see some weirdly whiplash messaging.
It's about ego, not profits.
People just love to talk about anything that tickling their fancies.
It’s all a fugazi.
This is not obvious at all. Anthropic's biggest investor was the catalyst for this action in referring the "jailbreak" (if you can even call it that) to the government. Now, Anthropic is sitting around a table with government officials who are designing benchmarks that will determine what Anthropic's competitors will be allowed to build. At this point, I have no evidence to rule out the possibility that Anthropic's leadership purposefully sought this outcome.
If the company really think their product is dangerous, they should stop making it increasingly dangerous. Antromorphic claims is dangerous and that they need more money to make it even more dangerous.
And the fearmongering is beneficial for them so far.
We must live in different planets. The whole episode about Mythos has been the absolute best free PR move ever designed. At this point everyone in tech assumes Anthropic and Mythos are the absolute best models. All of this got achieved without spending a single $$ in advertisement.
This model is also probably really dangerous, not denying that. But they definitely used it as a huge PR tool.
Great PR.
For a product nobody can pay for.
And a high chance that when anyone can, the market shrinks from "worldwide internet users" to "the USA only".
And it's known to be a highly dynamic market: based on the historical average, it only takes 11 weeks to be completely trounced by someone else's model, so if you're out of the market that long you may as well not have bothered.
Still don't see it? Still don't see how the huge IPO coming up soon could profit from this?
Yes, this was a brilliant PR move (independent from the actual benefit of the model).
"Would you like to buy Anthropic shares?"
"Anthropic? Didn't the government ban them?"
"Yes"
"I'll pass"
I remember then Thefacebook.com was only available at certain universities and everyone felt slight envy that they weren't included. Didn't work out too bad for them.
That's a bit like asking, "why would someone claim to have a lot of money if they didn't?" It's step 1 in countless scams.
You can't think of any ways to exploit people by convincing them you have technology which might rule the world soon?
The only examples of companies voluntarily putting up warnings I can think of are those obviously tongue-in-cheek warnings "this book/game/series may cause addiction because it's just so good" etc.
Whether or not that level of power exists, that is definitely how they're pitching it.
Also why do you think the Mythos thing is bad for profits? Anthropic hyped the model up too hard and didn't even have the compute to serve it properly to all users.
The export control issue has not affected Anthropic's revenue and only made its top of the line products seem far more impressive than they actually are. People don't think Nvidia is a bad company if the government puts export controls on their products.
For Anthropic, valuation and public perception is 100x more important before the IPO than revenue or profitablity.
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.
AI is not that bad
Meanwhile, AI has ruined the whole Internet and inflated the price of everything electronic.
If true, it will only be replaced with something else. With what is anyone’s guess.
Just to throw out a random example - could technology, in terms of advances and improvements to allocation, distribution, and consumption, play a part in solving the western US's water issues? Probably. But would it be something that make a trillion dollars and a household name? Maybe not. And could saner policy, like making farmers have to bid for acre feet instead of getting it for basically free + distribution cost also help? Sure.
Likewise, even with AI most software is still crap. Like when have you heard about a doctor who loves their EHR? Like never.
So I think technology could be a solver of at least a lot more things. But we've created a market where people want to exhaust every flavor of flim flam and trend of the moment first. Because we've glorified the business of tech more than the actual improvements and aspirations that should be possible.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/17/opinion/ai-dangerous-open...
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.
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.
I don’t think “benevolent” is necessary in that sentence. It’s how many non-benevolent dictatorships started.
Every dictator is benevolent for the people that agree with them.
Dangerous new tech with military applications sounds harder to ignore than AI that spits out text.
Of course it impacts company valuation.
doing what though? in a really literal sense, if an LLM can do RLVR, that's optimization over the space of algorithms, and so anything with a measurable goal at the end can be incentivized. if it can be measurably finished, it can be automated.
there are exceptions to this, like psychology, preschool teachers, and AI safety, that cant be 100% fully automated. in the case of Ai safety, the core motivation for it is to prevent the otherwise hyper-consequentialist goal-orented training algorithms (and mesa-optimizers they now find) from doing 'bad' things by instilling some 'values' into these machines. the ideas of 'good/bad' and 'values' cant be automated away, and I think you can prove that its unautomatable using EY's orthogonality thesis.
I doubt these few unautomatable jobs can keep everyone afloat though. but maybe a world in which 10% of the population has a degree in psychology wouldn't be that bad
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?"
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."
“Maybe he can” - Complex. Divine, possibly? A breathtaking filigree of nuance, like an Alex Grey painting of conceptual allemande.
However, on a site like HN or Reddit, you're far more likely to hear squawking about "stochastic parrots" or a rant about AI water usage than the mirror on the pro-AI side, making them harder to ignore.
You could post “fortune tellers used to be considered fraudsters and charlatans” and reasonably expect a “Get a load of the Luddite over here. Go raise a barn, Josiah!” response on the internet these days despite not mentioning AI or technology at all
I agree, but it's not so mysterious what will win out. Even if the criticism is repeated so often, that's because much of it is still valid.
LLMs are not AGI. A statistical model of language helps fill in gaps. This is super useful for new and much improved UI/UX ideas that converge with better accessibility. Similar is true for generating images, video, audio, etc. There are situations where it's the right tool for expressing an idea.
What we need is a sense of maturity. The limitations are very clear to everyone now, and we're already past the disillusionment. If we can rein in the abuse, there should be a good path forward. The technology is already boring and that's a very good sign.
The question is not whether AI is useful. It is useful, full stop.
The question is whether AI is useful enough to justify valuations that dwarf the GDP of all but the top 20 countries in the world. As it stands right now, it's not even close! The leaked OpenAI financials put these AI companies in the same profitability territory as utilities, with zero justification for these crazy valuations.
Close, it's the time-discounted expectation of future returns. This seems related to future profits but it need not be. Historically, stocks tend to perform poorly after IPOs. There's no guarantee that (say) Anthropic's stock price would ever recover after a post-IPO drop.
The recent attempts by Anthropic et al. to circumvent the usual rules for inclusion in indices have raised red flags all over the place, with many calling it a naked attempt to raid everyone's pension funds for hundreds of billions in ill-gotten capital.
And nukes are useful by some metric too.
AI (llms) is not useful in any way that we as humanity should be pushing for. It’s more harmful than good in every way possible. It’s honestly astounding to me that everyone’s ethics are so weak as to believe that somehow these incredible destructive companies are somehow good for humanity.
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.
Seriously -- if you dig through that source code, and then listen to the messaging, it seems hard to keep a straight face.
Also, hasn't this company been claiming that almost all their code is written with AI for significantly longer than "post-Mythos internal preview"?
It’s because Anthropic doesn’t publish any of its core AI research that we falsely believe that it isn’t by far the central focus of the majority of the team.
Just to be clear, I’m not supporting their stance nor defending the company. I consider it to be deeply harmful that a private company seeks to advocate for AI safety but then own all the means of production and profit financially from keeping its techniques secret. It’s as if the Manhattan project resulted in a for-profit company selling all atomic technology and deciding on its use.
I don't see why pondering the future and planning for eventualities is bad. Better to ignore it and have no plans?
So, yeah, if that is real concern, they should not ignore it, but should stop themselves for real.
His takes lack nuance, there's no analysis in his writing, just what appears to be fuming at vague issues he sees in society.
This post is confusing to me. From the blog's name, in addition to these other blog posts [1] and [2], you would think he's contributing to the doomerism that he's lamenting here. If the singularity is near, and the big companies control capital, then the doomerism is correct, no?
To add to that, his lack of critical thought shows up in other posts as well [3]. He does not really understand the nuance of fiat currency or entitlement programs. Like the blog post above, he also seems to like "offending" people for the sake of offending them. In [3], he seems to think insulting Christianity, despite being a Christian himself but not believing in the core of the religion, is somehow getting back at "wokists."
[1] https://geohot.github.io/blog/jekyll/update/2026/01/17/three...
[2] https://geohot.github.io/blog/jekyll/update/2026/02/13/i-tol...
[3] https://geohot.github.io/blog/jekyll/update/2026/04/18/five-...
yes
> And when we finally ended racism during DEI?
I fucking hate geohot, I can't believe you monsters are into this shit
Like - right up his own asshole.
---
I understand this comment is inappropriate. I think the comment in the article is WAY more fucking out of line than this.
I do believe it is possible Anthropic are legitimately trying to start political discourse, but if they are they are either sacrificing themselves on purpose or shooting themselves in the foot. Others in the comments here are pointing out that there are many incentives for them to get into politics. Maybe they see possible outcomes worth the short term problems.
If it is just marketing and FUD, it's worth considering that a good lie is usually based in truth.
Let's say Anthropic were a "hippie organisation willing to sacrifice revenue for morals" (or pick your own, I'm just giving an example). Could they play the politics game better?
That's a tough one, because at today's levels of efficacy, you can't raid and plunder sustainably. Our neofeudal overlords, whose wealth and power derives from raiding and plundering, are just too good at what they do. It would take limiting wealth and power of individuals and corporations, but I bet they would manage to trigger a civil war over this.
Really? That's the only possible conclusion?
Anthropic has _always_ positioned itself as a company that cares about AI safety.
Actually, that's not what usually happens after a failed prediction. The weak-believers leave but the rest end up having their beliefs reinforced by the event (or lack thereof). It's like an exercise in doublethink, and those who pass are now deeper than ever in the cult.
- 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.
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'.
you mean loop engineers?
The problem wasn't the mortality rate, it's the fact that the media can cleverly turn something in a huge deal by talking endlessly about it. During COVID, there was no other news except the virus on news for 24/7.
Most people realize this is hyperbolic rhetorical. Taken in context (instead of nitpicking a minor "detail") he's calling attention to the fact some people think that AI will affect EVERYONE negatively.
This article was not about Covid, which means his sarcastic question serves a purpose to illuminate the issue with judgment on the rise of AI, not argue that "only a million people died" as you claim.
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.
Who Would Jesus Nuke?
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.