Say you're trying to value a 1% stake in a leading AI company. You use a standard "expected value" formula to calculate the current value of the investment oppo

Say you're trying to value a 1% stake in a leading AI company. You use a standard "expected value" formula to calculate the current value of the investment opportunity. For each possible outcome, you take the dollar value of that outcome, multiply it times the likelihood of the outcome, then sum the values of all possible outcomes. With this type of calculation, possible outcomes which are very unlikely can still be extremely valuable if the dollar value of that outcome is high enough to compensate for the low probability of success. Now imagine you believe that this AI company might eventually deliver AGI, or even a Kurzweilian superintelligence. It would be easy to justify a near-infinite dollar value on that best-case outcome. And, of course, a possible outcome with infinite value confers infinite value on the investment as a whole, as long as its value is non-zero.