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Comment by openquery | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> don't understand the point of this piece

>> What, then, to make of Situational Awareness’s plunge? ...Mr Aschenbrenner was hardly alone in such bets; over 80% of fund managers responding to Bank of America’s latest monthly survey named “long global semiconductors” as the most crowded trade. The big worry is that this trade’s whiplash-inducing reversal will have set other investment firms teetering, too.

If Citadel hadn't stepped in, Situational Awareness may have had to fire sell tens of billions of dollars of assets. Assets others have leveraged positions in. That, in turn, could have triggered margin calls and a potential credit or even bank crisis.

Is this firm big enough to cause a financial crisis on its own? Has the leverage situation gotten so dire? Is this just postponing the inevitable at this point?

> Is this firm big enough to cause a financial crisis on its own?

I'm still trying to figure out what their gross and net positions were. But taking reported figures at face value, yes, $45bn is more than enough to start a credit crisis, particularly if everyone is crowded into a small set of leveraged positions that begin fire selling.

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.

Mostly I found it odd to open with a comparison of hobbit to human ages when it's well known that hobbits can live to 130.

> I don't understand the point of this piece. There is nothing breaking or remotely interesting which we didn't already know.

The piece is published in a weekly magazine. It may include some interesting things that nobody knew one week ago.

"I don't understand the point of this piece."

Its purpose is entertainment

It highlights the age of the Situational Awareness founder and what he was doing before he started the fund

"There is nothing breaking or remotely interesting which we didn't already know."

It's a weekly column not "breaking news"

The column author shares his perspective on current events and usually reflects on the past. It's unlikely that readers "already know" which current events the columnist will select, what he will write about them, including which comparative history he might reference. As such, it does provide something readers "don't already know", namely, the columnist's views on the current event he has selected. As for "remotely interesting", that's an opinion. Surely this column has a readership that finds the author's writing "remotely interesting"

The Economist does at times try, incorrectly, to predict the future

But that's not what is going on in this column. It's looking backward, not forward

If the parent comment is coming from a 20-something recipient of Silicon Valley VC funding and hoping to profit from an "AI" startup, then perhaps a bias disclosure is in order

If, hypothetically, no predictions were ever shared with the public over the internet, what would that do to Silicon Valley. What would happen to the volume of HN submimssions/comments

What would happen to "AI" startups if there was no "AI" hype, including endless predictions about the future

Of course there is no way to know unless and until it occurs

*submissions

It's like asking what is the point of Matt Levine's column as it contains no breaking news, nor anything readers don't already know nor anything remotely interesting

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