The AI leaders can’t be trusted for AI predictions
One of the most-radicalizing events of the past year in AI has been the co-ordinated change in messaging from AI leaders.
Early on, I suspect they were trying to be honest about the impacts of AI, talking about massive disruption in the labor force and economy. What happened -- and these genuises should have realized it was inevitable -- is that people didn't like the idea of massive disruption and losing their jobs.
Lately, that's manifest itself into a broad anti-data center populace. They're suddenly revield on both sides in the US, with 71% of Americans saying they're against them. That's led to a shocking policy turn in Texas and Ohio where incumbent Republican leaders switched their stance to block the projects.
Over the past year, AI leaders like Dario Amodei and Sam Altman have changed their tune and now say that jobs won't be lost with the nonsensical reasoning that technology in the past always eventually led to more jobs. At the same time, Anthropic is doing an IPO roadshow saying that its total addressable market is $30 trillion, or 20% of the entire global services economy.
On valuation alone, the only way to get there is to assume massive disruption by AI, replacing large parts of the software business and services.
A clue about Altman should have come early on when OpenAI's board rebelled against him for being not forthcoming and he then managed a coup.
Here's a good blog from Richard Ngo --who joined OpenAI in 2021 -- on Altman's ability to deceive:
For those who don't know Sam, it might seem odd that I ever took his arguments seriously even given my tendency towards sycophancy. One underappreciated factor is that he has something similar to Steve Jobs' reality distortion field—but in his case I'd call it an earnestness field. His intonation and body language send very strong signals of sincerity; and he does enough things motivated by earnest nerdiness that it’s easy to rationalize away discrepancies. Modeling this dynamic is necessary to explain the very high ratio between people who polarize against him and concrete evidence of his misbehavior. When people realize that Sam is lying (even about things that don’t matter much) while embodying that level of earnestness, there's a strong visceral update away from trusting him, which is hard to convey to others.
The whole thing reminds me of the recent episodes of Elon Musk, where he is telling everyone that money won't matter by 2036 but at the same time, he's spending his time cutting US aid programs via DOGE and angling for ludicrous pay packages.
The point is that it's all self-serving and it goes right on down the line. The problem with that is that everyone is now 'talking their book' and it makes it impossible to know where it's all headed.
The idea of safety and alignment has largely gone out the window on the basis of competition. The thinking is "someone else will do it if I don't" and of course, that also seems to align with financial incentives.
That goes back to Upton Sinclair, who said that “it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
At the moment, you can see some of the talking points shifting as they try to find messages that will allow them to win and continue to raise money and maintain power.
This is the latest from Altman:
"I thought when we got to GPT-4, which was back in 2023, that very quickly after that there was going to be much more disruption, software businesses up for grabs right away, than it turned out to be."
"I think I was wrong about a few things, but one in terms of the speed: the economy just has so much inertia."
"People keep doing the same things, buying from the same company, wanting to use their tools the same way. I think this is actually a positive in many ways, and it's going to make this big transition go smoother and slower. I'm grateful for it."
"But it means we've all been too ambitious on timelines. Even with this incredible technology, society and the economy will adapt more slowly."
I agree completely with this and have written about it as an investment theme in AI and it goes back to something Warren Buffett said near the dot-com boom:
"Our approach is very much profiting from lack of change rather than from change. With Wrigley chewing gum, it's the lack of change that appeals to me. I don't think it is going to be hurt by the Internet. That's the kind of business I like."
I wrote about how -- somehow -- there are more travel agents working today than in 1995. Realtors also continue to eat up 3-5% of real estate transactions despite the technological progress.
For me, this thinking helped lead to investments in airlines, a busines that won't be disrupted by AI. If you are investing in AI though, I lament that there are now very few insiders that are trustworthy and that makes investing in the area even more difficult.
This article was written by Adam Button at investinglive.com.提供 MainLink：Investinglive RSS Breaking News Feed
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