8 ms·

The Doom Justifies the Valuation

144 points by inatreecrown2 4mo ago

siren2026 4mo ago
I came to the same conclusion. 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.
- digitalPhonix 4mo ago
  > This is how every benevolent dictator starts I don’t think “benevolent” is necessary in that sentence. It’s how many non-benevolent dictatorships started.
- _carbyau_ 4mo ago
  > This is how every benevolent dictators start. Every dictator is benevolent for the people that agree with them.
panarky 4mo ago
Simple minds want to believe one simple thing and then rationalize everything else to force consistency with that one simple idea. 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."
- dundarious 4mo ago
  What you have written does not seem to be in close contact with the OP. He talks positively about the GLM news and whatnot. He is highly skeptical only of the "doom" scenarios, including upending most or a massive amount of jobs, and how that is deployed to keep the investment machine working at such breakneck pace.
- jrflowers 4mo ago
  I love this website because people will write stuff like “I believe the hype because my brain is big, ‘believing the hype’ is actually very complex and cannot be embraced by lesser intellects”
  - bigyabai 4mo ago
    "I cannot be contradicted because I can hold conflicting viewpoints" was Chomsky's bit, HN can only take credit for imitating it.
    - jrflowers 4mo ago
      “Dario Amodei doesn’t seem like he can tell the future” - Simple. Pedestrian. The roughshod cogitation of a country oaf. “Maybe he can” - Complex. Divine, possibly? A breathtaking filigree of nuance, like an Alex Grey painting of conceptual allemande.
  - scarmig 4mo ago
    There are reasonable anti- and pro-AI views. There are also unreasonable ones on both sides, and it's best if they are ignored. 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.
    - jrflowers 4mo ago
      It’s funny that a lot of what gets framed as pro- vs anti- AI arguments would be better described as past/present vs future arguments. If one guy is saying “that’s a stochastic parrot” and the second guy says “it’s going to achieve apotheosis and bring about global communism or feudalism or whatever while maximizing shareholder value” they’re not arguing about technology, they’re arguing about the second guy’s status as a clairvoyant. 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
soundworlds 4mo ago
Even if Dario and Altman originally believed what they were saying, their scaretactics worked wonders for investment. Their companies are now incredibly incentivized to keep the AI Apocalypse narrative going further and further. It is hard to imagine them stopping, as that may lose them investment. 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.
- anuramat 4mo ago
  > NFTs and the Metaverse AI is not that bad
  - Blackthorn 4mo ago
    It's significantly worse! All NFTs did was separate fools from their money, and crypto in general increased GPU costs. All the Metaverse did was cause Facebook to throw away a bunch of money (lol). Meanwhile, AI has ruined the whole Internet and inflated the price of everything electronic.
    - rjzzleep 4mo ago
      The whole internet AND local computing. This may be cool for people on SF salaries but for the vast majority of the world memory has become a luxury good
      - getpokedagain 4mo ago
        While it is driving new hardware costs up remember you can run Linux on a potato and just wait it out. My pixel 8a is a phenomenal computer if ignore the hype monster.
    - anuramat 4mo ago
      so, twitter went from 98% shit to 99% shit, and landfills get less smartphones; I'd say it's worth it
lukeify 4mo ago
I stopped taking this guy seriously after he proposed "just" digging canals to bring desalinated ocean water into the U.S. desert.
- drc500free 4mo ago
  Even in this article, he claims COVID wasn’t a big deal because, essentially, only a million people died in the US instead of everyone. No one ever claimed 100% mortality.
  - coolThingsFirst 4mo ago
    Yet the measures taken far exceeded the damage than if we had let the virus take its course. 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.
  - sublinear 4mo ago
    COVID was a risk management disaster that should not have escalated to the level that it did if there was not so much political overreach.
  - kordlessagain 4mo ago
    > Remember when everyone died during COVID? 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.
hackingonempty 4mo ago
> If San Francisco was nuked tomorrow, the world would feel a weight off their shoulders. Who Would Jesus Nuke?
- deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]
_23sd 4mo ago
What's the evidence that the doom narrative is connected to valuations? It seems more like a marketing/recruiting strategy. As the post points out, institutional investors generally think the idea of mass unemployment is BS, and they are investing accordingly.
- coolThingsFirst 4mo ago
  Dumb thing to ask tbh. Dangerous new tech with military applications sounds harder to ignore than AI that spits out text.
  - _23sd 4mo ago
    AI obviously has military applications, no doom required to think the military will want a lot of it. I'm asking about the extreme scenarios like "AI is gonna take everyone’s jobs" and the other "totalizing narratives" that geohot is referencing.
    - coolThingsFirst 4mo ago
      If this is true: "AI is gonna take everyone’s jobs" then AI is the terminal technology and everyone who doesn't want to be poor forever needs to throw all their money in it. Of course it impacts company valuation.
      - _23sd 4mo ago
        Companies say all sorts of things which investors don't take at face value, often for the sake of marketing and recruiting. Meta circa 2020 wanted us to believe we'd be swapping NFTs in a virtual mall and having all our meetings strapped into VR headsets by now. That doesn't mean their market cap at the time was based on an assumption they were right, in fact it is much higher now that the metaverse idea flopped. Unlike that situation where money was being spent on projects that turned out to be mostly pointless, AI labs don't have much of a financial stake in a scenario such as "lots of demand for AI, leading to mass unemployment and/or doomsday" as opposed to one like "lots of demand for AI, leading to the world being mostly the same as before but with more AI and expensive RAM".
ajyoon 4mo ago
I have never understood this line of thinking. Why would a company warn that their technology is dangerous if it wasn't? Looking at the ongoing Mythos export control issue, it's obviously not good for profits. If you assume AGI is possible, you must agree that it would be at the very least profoundly destabilizing. The companies are built around this assumption.
- prasadjoglekar 4mo ago
  Setting up for the eventual bailout. Remember - "we can't let banks fail or it'll be a depression"?
  - SpicyLemonZest 4mo ago
    I remember a meme that spread to that effect, but it was similarly divorced from reality. Hundreds of banks failed during the financial crisis, including multiple which were very large. There were a few cases like Wachovia, where an unhealthy bank was required to sell itself in order to avoid a technical failure that would have impacted over 10 million Americans' access to their money. But this was still unpleasant for existing Wachovia shareholders.
    - watwut 4mo ago
      I remember large banks that caused the failure to be bailed out. And talk of trickle down economics, except that average joe was not bailed outed, but punished. I remember robo signing of home foreclosures with no checks and people loosing houses despite paying debts.
      - SpicyLemonZest 4mo ago
        > I remember large banks that caused the failure to be bailed out. And talk of trickle down economics, except that average joe was not bailed outed, but punished. 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.
dwa3592 4mo ago
>>SF wants to come for your inner life and pimp you out and mediate every interaction and there’s not even a so. 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'.
- anuramat 4mo ago
  > AI Agents experts you mean loop engineers?
  - Avicebron 4mo ago
    I think they are trying to express that everyone and their brother is now an expert in AI. But everyone was already a decorated expert with decades of hands on "AI" experience by the summer of 2023. So "experts in agentic AI" is just the continuation of that trend.
    - anuramat 4mo ago
      I was trying to be funny
dodu_ 4mo ago
Journalism and public media in general needs to be a licensed profession with tangible standards, and malpractice suits should be pursued aggressively. 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.
jmye 4mo ago
> Can someone write an AI 2027 but instead of some totalizing doom propaganda it talks about the bubble unwinding and what we can do to prevent this kind of crap in the future? How do we build an economy and society that’s sustainable? 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.
groan 4mo ago
HN is not immune to this. I do not take HN seriously, because empirically so many takes across so many subjects have been wrong in a melodramatic fashion and the “adults”, often people with training and first hand experience have to show up to set the subject matter right before someone gets hurt. But as a barometer of unhinged hype? Only X is comparable.
slopinthebag 4mo ago
Great article. Holtz is growing on me ngl… 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.
perching_aix 4mo ago
> Remember when everyone died during COVID? And when we finally ended racism during DEI? Can someone write an AI 2027 (...) 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?"
aabhay 4mo ago
If you look at Anthropic's blogs about their model timelines, there is roughly a ~3m period between a model being in internal preview until release. That means that inside of Anthropic, the next version beyond Mythos/Fable is already in preview, already being tested internally. Despite what Geohot is describing here about GLM, my understanding is that Anthropic employees have spent a significant amount of time grappling with a technology that is considerably ahead of what is available to the public today. 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.
- mccoyb 4mo ago
  If the March leak of Claude Code was Mythos / Fable in preview ... I'm not sure I'm that worried about AI capabilities. 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"?
  - aabhay 4mo ago
    Claude code is a very small fraction of the code written by Anthropic and ultimately, despite being widely used, hardly dents Anthropic’s core priority of LLM performance. 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.
whacked_new 4mo ago
Somehow the Chinese phrases 内卷 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neijuan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neijuan and 摆烂 ("let it rot" https://zh-yue.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E6%93%BA%E7%88%9B https://zh-yue.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E6%93%BA%E7%88%9B) are quite appropriately used, even in stylistic tone. Don't know how much Chinese geohot actually speaks but it's a nice touch.
- matheusmoreira 4mo ago
  Thanks for the references.
- MattyRad 4mo ago
  "Involution" is spot on.
- xhevahir 4mo ago
  The English article for "let it rot" (or a related phrase) seems to be here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tang_ping https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tang_ping
  - whacked_new 4mo ago
    In my interpretation, 躺平 (tang ping / "lay flat") and 摆烂 (bai lan / ..."let it rot" I guess) overlap in meanings in the "do nothing" aspect, but in the tang ping / lay flat case, it is out of learned helplessness / nihilism, while bai lan / let it rot case, it is out of purposeful negligence / noncompliance, which suits geohot's vibe
shepherdjerred 4mo ago
> The only possible conclusion is that it’s designed to cause panic. Really? That's the only possible conclusion? Anthropic has _always_ positioned itself as a company that cares about AI safety.
hintymad 4mo ago
There are a few possible explanations of Dario and Anthropic's behavior, if you are not sure if all they want is pump up the valuation like me: - 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.
- mizzao 4mo ago
  Is "being mocked" not also "facing the rage of many"? What do you imagine with the latter that would be so much worse?
  - hintymad 4mo ago
    I assume that "you didn't warn us" and "why are you so pessimistic" would lead to different scale of anger.
cootsnuck 4mo ago
Yea, the "doom trolling" seems to be starting to reach its limit. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/17/opinion/ai-dangerous-openai-anthropic.html https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/17/opinion/ai-dangerous-open...
- overlord1109 4mo ago
  Can you share a non-paywalled version? Wayback machine doesn't seem to have this.
  - skygazer 4mo ago
    https://archive.ph/UTcTa https://archive.ph/UTcTa
    - tim333 4mo ago
      The argument in the article seems dumb. Basically if companies believe AI is risky then morally they have to stop developing it. Which would be kind of stupid - if Anthropic etc. don't do it the Chinese or some other bunch will and likely less responsibly.
      - empw 4mo ago
        Good thing the Chinese have given up all AI research now that Anthropic is on the case.
petterroea 4mo ago
I can't decide if this is a "techbro doesn't understand human factors" post or not, especially considering geohots reputation. 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?
daft_pink 4mo ago
I think when chinese models figure out how to partner with SOC 2 providers in the USA in a way that offers a $20-$100-$200 subscription is an easy convenient way, anthropic and open ai will be screwed.
- mi_lk 4mo ago
  You mean 2, 10 and 20? Otherwise at the same price I'm going with big 2
smackeyacky 4mo ago
Did Hotz hit his head or something? Atheistic hedonists oh my!
thrance 4mo ago
> And like most cults when the end times don’t come they are just going to fade out and everyone forgets. 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.
functionmouse 4mo ago
> Remember when everyone died during COVID? yes > And when we finally ended racism during DEI? I fucking hate geohot, I can't believe you monsters are into this shit
- horsawlarway 4mo ago
  I just want to say, as someone who lost literally every single grandparent I had to covid... this dude can go fuck himself. 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.
sometimelurker 4mo ago
I was hoping for more analysis here :\ like from a technical standpoint, why is the doom and gloom incorrect? I've heard some really interesting arguments for that, and non of them are here.
- tim333 4mo ago
  I think the counter arguments to doom are more social and economic. If we make AI smarter than ourselves it's likely people will still have jobs/income and a higher standard of living in the same way that in invention of the tractor didn't lead to millions of unemployed potato diggers and a potato tycoon with a million tons of spare potatoes.
  - sometimelurker 4mo ago
    > likely people will still have jobs/ 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
josefritzishere 4mo ago
Exponential rate? No it's not. That's not what that word means.
tim333 4mo ago
>It’s all just nonsensical hype, ... It’s a questionable promise of future technology. I don't see why pondering the future and planning for eventualities is bad. Better to ignore it and have no plans?
- watwut 4mo ago
  They are literally the companies who are actively working to create the future they warn about. So, if they are genuine, they should stop being evil and stop trying to bring in armagedon. So, yeah, if that is real concern, they should not ignore it, but should stop themselves for real.
  - tim333 4mo ago
    Trouble is if ethical people don't develop it, less ethical will instead. Like if the US had said nukes are dangerous so we won't develop them and let some dictator get there first instead.
jackling 4mo ago
Can't speak to his technical skill, but going through this post, and several of his other posts, this man doesn't seem all that bright. 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-minutes.html https://geohot.github.io/blog/jekyll/update/2026/01/17/three... [2] https://geohot.github.io/blog/jekyll/update/2026/02/13/i-told-you-so.html https://geohot.github.io/blog/jekyll/update/2026/02/13/i-tol... [3] https://geohot.github.io/blog/jekyll/update/2026/04/18/five-simple-steps.html https://geohot.github.io/blog/jekyll/update/2026/04/18/five-...
zombot 4mo ago
> How do we build an economy and society that’s sustainable? 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.

144 points by inatreecrown2 4mo ago

siren2026 4mo ago

I came to the same conclusion. 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.

digitalPhonix 4mo ago
> This is how every benevolent dictator starts I don’t think “benevolent” is necessary in that sentence. It’s how many non-benevolent dictatorships started.
_carbyau_ 4mo ago
> This is how every benevolent dictators start. Every dictator is benevolent for the people that agree with them.

panarky 4mo ago

Simple minds want to believe one simple thing and then rationalize everything else to force consistency with that one simple idea. 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."

dundarious 4mo ago
What you have written does not seem to be in close contact with the OP. He talks positively about the GLM news and whatnot. He is highly skeptical only of the "doom" scenarios, including upending most or a massive amount of jobs, and how that is deployed to keep the investment machine working at such breakneck pace.
jrflowers 4mo ago
I love this website because people will write stuff like “I believe the hype because my brain is big, ‘believing the hype’ is actually very complex and cannot be embraced by lesser intellects”
- bigyabai 4mo ago
  "I cannot be contradicted because I can hold conflicting viewpoints" was Chomsky's bit, HN can only take credit for imitating it.
  - jrflowers 4mo ago
    “Dario Amodei doesn’t seem like he can tell the future” - Simple. Pedestrian. The roughshod cogitation of a country oaf. “Maybe he can” - Complex. Divine, possibly? A breathtaking filigree of nuance, like an Alex Grey painting of conceptual allemande.
- scarmig 4mo ago
  There are reasonable anti- and pro-AI views. There are also unreasonable ones on both sides, and it's best if they are ignored. 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.
  - jrflowers 4mo ago
    It’s funny that a lot of what gets framed as pro- vs anti- AI arguments would be better described as past/present vs future arguments. If one guy is saying “that’s a stochastic parrot” and the second guy says “it’s going to achieve apotheosis and bring about global communism or feudalism or whatever while maximizing shareholder value” they’re not arguing about technology, they’re arguing about the second guy’s status as a clairvoyant. 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

soundworlds 4mo ago

Even if Dario and Altman originally believed what they were saying, their scaretactics worked wonders for investment. Their companies are now incredibly incentivized to keep the AI Apocalypse narrative going further and further. It is hard to imagine them stopping, as that may lose them investment. 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.

anuramat 4mo ago
> NFTs and the Metaverse AI is not that bad
- Blackthorn 4mo ago
  It's significantly worse! All NFTs did was separate fools from their money, and crypto in general increased GPU costs. All the Metaverse did was cause Facebook to throw away a bunch of money (lol). Meanwhile, AI has ruined the whole Internet and inflated the price of everything electronic.
  - rjzzleep 4mo ago
    The whole internet AND local computing. This may be cool for people on SF salaries but for the vast majority of the world memory has become a luxury good
    - getpokedagain 4mo ago
      While it is driving new hardware costs up remember you can run Linux on a potato and just wait it out. My pixel 8a is a phenomenal computer if ignore the hype monster.
  - anuramat 4mo ago
    so, twitter went from 98% shit to 99% shit, and landfills get less smartphones; I'd say it's worth it

lukeify 4mo ago

I stopped taking this guy seriously after he proposed "just" digging canals to bring desalinated ocean water into the U.S. desert.

drc500free 4mo ago
Even in this article, he claims COVID wasn’t a big deal because, essentially, only a million people died in the US instead of everyone. No one ever claimed 100% mortality.
- coolThingsFirst 4mo ago
  Yet the measures taken far exceeded the damage than if we had let the virus take its course. 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.
- sublinear 4mo ago
  COVID was a risk management disaster that should not have escalated to the level that it did if there was not so much political overreach.
- kordlessagain 4mo ago
  > Remember when everyone died during COVID? 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.

hackingonempty 4mo ago

> If San Francisco was nuked tomorrow, the world would feel a weight off their shoulders. Who Would Jesus Nuke?

deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]

_23sd 4mo ago

What's the evidence that the doom narrative is connected to valuations? It seems more like a marketing/recruiting strategy. As the post points out, institutional investors generally think the idea of mass unemployment is BS, and they are investing accordingly.

coolThingsFirst 4mo ago
Dumb thing to ask tbh. Dangerous new tech with military applications sounds harder to ignore than AI that spits out text.
- _23sd 4mo ago
  AI obviously has military applications, no doom required to think the military will want a lot of it. I'm asking about the extreme scenarios like "AI is gonna take everyone’s jobs" and the other "totalizing narratives" that geohot is referencing.
  - coolThingsFirst 4mo ago
    If this is true: "AI is gonna take everyone’s jobs" then AI is the terminal technology and everyone who doesn't want to be poor forever needs to throw all their money in it. Of course it impacts company valuation.
    - _23sd 4mo ago
      Companies say all sorts of things which investors don't take at face value, often for the sake of marketing and recruiting. Meta circa 2020 wanted us to believe we'd be swapping NFTs in a virtual mall and having all our meetings strapped into VR headsets by now. That doesn't mean their market cap at the time was based on an assumption they were right, in fact it is much higher now that the metaverse idea flopped. Unlike that situation where money was being spent on projects that turned out to be mostly pointless, AI labs don't have much of a financial stake in a scenario such as "lots of demand for AI, leading to mass unemployment and/or doomsday" as opposed to one like "lots of demand for AI, leading to the world being mostly the same as before but with more AI and expensive RAM".

ajyoon 4mo ago

I have never understood this line of thinking. Why would a company warn that their technology is dangerous if it wasn't? Looking at the ongoing Mythos export control issue, it's obviously not good for profits. If you assume AGI is possible, you must agree that it would be at the very least profoundly destabilizing. The companies are built around this assumption.

prasadjoglekar 4mo ago
Setting up for the eventual bailout. Remember - "we can't let banks fail or it'll be a depression"?
- SpicyLemonZest 4mo ago
  I remember a meme that spread to that effect, but it was similarly divorced from reality. Hundreds of banks failed during the financial crisis, including multiple which were very large. There were a few cases like Wachovia, where an unhealthy bank was required to sell itself in order to avoid a technical failure that would have impacted over 10 million Americans' access to their money. But this was still unpleasant for existing Wachovia shareholders.
  - watwut 4mo ago
    I remember large banks that caused the failure to be bailed out. And talk of trickle down economics, except that average joe was not bailed outed, but punished. I remember robo signing of home foreclosures with no checks and people loosing houses despite paying debts.
    - SpicyLemonZest 4mo ago
      > I remember large banks that caused the failure to be bailed out. And talk of trickle down economics, except that average joe was not bailed outed, but punished. 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.

dwa3592 4mo ago

>>SF wants to come for your inner life and pimp you out and mediate every interaction and there’s not even a so. 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'.

anuramat 4mo ago
> AI Agents experts you mean loop engineers?
- Avicebron 4mo ago
  I think they are trying to express that everyone and their brother is now an expert in AI. But everyone was already a decorated expert with decades of hands on "AI" experience by the summer of 2023. So "experts in agentic AI" is just the continuation of that trend.
  - anuramat 4mo ago
    I was trying to be funny

dodu_ 4mo ago

Journalism and public media in general needs to be a licensed profession with tangible standards, and malpractice suits should be pursued aggressively. 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.

jmye 4mo ago

> Can someone write an AI 2027 but instead of some totalizing doom propaganda it talks about the bubble unwinding and what we can do to prevent this kind of crap in the future? How do we build an economy and society that’s sustainable? 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.

groan 4mo ago

HN is not immune to this. I do not take HN seriously, because empirically so many takes across so many subjects have been wrong in a melodramatic fashion and the “adults”, often people with training and first hand experience have to show up to set the subject matter right before someone gets hurt. But as a barometer of unhinged hype? Only X is comparable.

slopinthebag 4mo ago

Great article. Holtz is growing on me ngl… 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.

perching_aix 4mo ago

> Remember when everyone died during COVID? And when we finally ended racism during DEI? Can someone write an AI 2027 (...) 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?"

aabhay 4mo ago

If you look at Anthropic's blogs about their model timelines, there is roughly a ~3m period between a model being in internal preview until release. That means that inside of Anthropic, the next version beyond Mythos/Fable is already in preview, already being tested internally. Despite what Geohot is describing here about GLM, my understanding is that Anthropic employees have spent a significant amount of time grappling with a technology that is considerably ahead of what is available to the public today. 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.

mccoyb 4mo ago
If the March leak of Claude Code was Mythos / Fable in preview ... I'm not sure I'm that worried about AI capabilities. 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"?
- aabhay 4mo ago
  Claude code is a very small fraction of the code written by Anthropic and ultimately, despite being widely used, hardly dents Anthropic’s core priority of LLM performance. 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.

whacked_new 4mo ago

Somehow the Chinese phrases 内卷 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neijuan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neijuan and 摆烂 ("let it rot" https://zh-yue.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E6%93%BA%E7%88%9B https://zh-yue.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E6%93%BA%E7%88%9B) are quite appropriately used, even in stylistic tone. Don't know how much Chinese geohot actually speaks but it's a nice touch.

matheusmoreira 4mo ago
Thanks for the references.
MattyRad 4mo ago
"Involution" is spot on.
xhevahir 4mo ago
The English article for "let it rot" (or a related phrase) seems to be here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tang_ping https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tang_ping
- whacked_new 4mo ago
  In my interpretation, 躺平 (tang ping / "lay flat") and 摆烂 (bai lan / ..."let it rot" I guess) overlap in meanings in the "do nothing" aspect, but in the tang ping / lay flat case, it is out of learned helplessness / nihilism, while bai lan / let it rot case, it is out of purposeful negligence / noncompliance, which suits geohot's vibe

shepherdjerred 4mo ago

> The only possible conclusion is that it’s designed to cause panic. Really? That's the only possible conclusion? Anthropic has _always_ positioned itself as a company that cares about AI safety.

hintymad 4mo ago

There are a few possible explanations of Dario and Anthropic's behavior, if you are not sure if all they want is pump up the valuation like me: - 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.

mizzao 4mo ago
Is "being mocked" not also "facing the rage of many"? What do you imagine with the latter that would be so much worse?
- hintymad 4mo ago
  I assume that "you didn't warn us" and "why are you so pessimistic" would lead to different scale of anger.

cootsnuck 4mo ago

Yea, the "doom trolling" seems to be starting to reach its limit. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/17/opinion/ai-dangerous-openai-anthropic.html https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/17/opinion/ai-dangerous-open...

overlord1109 4mo ago
Can you share a non-paywalled version? Wayback machine doesn't seem to have this.
- skygazer 4mo ago
  https://archive.ph/UTcTa https://archive.ph/UTcTa
  - tim333 4mo ago
    The argument in the article seems dumb. Basically if companies believe AI is risky then morally they have to stop developing it. Which would be kind of stupid - if Anthropic etc. don't do it the Chinese or some other bunch will and likely less responsibly.
    - empw 4mo ago
      Good thing the Chinese have given up all AI research now that Anthropic is on the case.

petterroea 4mo ago

I can't decide if this is a "techbro doesn't understand human factors" post or not, especially considering geohots reputation. 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?

daft_pink 4mo ago

I think when chinese models figure out how to partner with SOC 2 providers in the USA in a way that offers a $20-$100-$200 subscription is an easy convenient way, anthropic and open ai will be screwed.

mi_lk 4mo ago
You mean 2, 10 and 20? Otherwise at the same price I'm going with big 2

smackeyacky 4mo ago

Did Hotz hit his head or something? Atheistic hedonists oh my!

thrance 4mo ago

> And like most cults when the end times don’t come they are just going to fade out and everyone forgets. 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.

functionmouse 4mo ago

> Remember when everyone died during COVID? yes > And when we finally ended racism during DEI? I fucking hate geohot, I can't believe you monsters are into this shit

horsawlarway 4mo ago
I just want to say, as someone who lost literally every single grandparent I had to covid... this dude can go fuck himself. 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.

sometimelurker 4mo ago

I was hoping for more analysis here :\ like from a technical standpoint, why is the doom and gloom incorrect? I've heard some really interesting arguments for that, and non of them are here.

tim333 4mo ago
I think the counter arguments to doom are more social and economic. If we make AI smarter than ourselves it's likely people will still have jobs/income and a higher standard of living in the same way that in invention of the tractor didn't lead to millions of unemployed potato diggers and a potato tycoon with a million tons of spare potatoes.
- sometimelurker 4mo ago
  > likely people will still have jobs/ 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

josefritzishere 4mo ago

Exponential rate? No it's not. That's not what that word means.

tim333 4mo ago

>It’s all just nonsensical hype, ... It’s a questionable promise of future technology. I don't see why pondering the future and planning for eventualities is bad. Better to ignore it and have no plans?

watwut 4mo ago
They are literally the companies who are actively working to create the future they warn about. So, if they are genuine, they should stop being evil and stop trying to bring in armagedon. So, yeah, if that is real concern, they should not ignore it, but should stop themselves for real.
- tim333 4mo ago
  Trouble is if ethical people don't develop it, less ethical will instead. Like if the US had said nukes are dangerous so we won't develop them and let some dictator get there first instead.

jackling 4mo ago

Can't speak to his technical skill, but going through this post, and several of his other posts, this man doesn't seem all that bright. 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-minutes.html https://geohot.github.io/blog/jekyll/update/2026/01/17/three... [2] https://geohot.github.io/blog/jekyll/update/2026/02/13/i-told-you-so.html https://geohot.github.io/blog/jekyll/update/2026/02/13/i-tol... [3] https://geohot.github.io/blog/jekyll/update/2026/04/18/five-simple-steps.html https://geohot.github.io/blog/jekyll/update/2026/04/18/five-...

zombot 4mo ago

> How do we build an economy and society that’s sustainable? 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.