Situational Awareness & the AI Collapse (E387)
Today Liv brings the boys her best attempt at a “good news” episode without straying too far from our usual content. For our little cheat day, Liv has prepared a fun hour of discussing the investing failures of one Leopold Aschenbrenner whose AI centered investment firm, Situational Awareness, recently set a new record for the largest trade loss in history. 35 billion dollars. In Liv’s words, “this isn’t necessarily a good news episode but it is very funny”.
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Produced by Liv Agar & Corey Klotz. Theme by Nick Sena. Additional music by Pontus Berghe. Theme Vocals by THEY/LIVE (https://instagram.com/theyylivve / https://sptfy.com/QrDm). Cover Art by Pedro Correa: (https://pedrocorrea.com)
QAA was known as the QAnon Anonymous podcast.
Comments (50)
Angry Birds, y’all.
A fascinating episode guys, when Andy Warhol said ‘Business is art’ I’m sure he was thinking of absolute bozos like Aschenbrenner and shenanigans like these.
Is Julian available to give me financial advice
The modern world is maddening for a lot of reasons. One of those reasons is the fact that no new technology can be exciting now. Not because there’s no cool potential, but because whatever the tech, it will be used for the most grotesque, pointless or evil thing possible to the exclusion of anything good. They’ve made all these cool things suck.
Jake has never talked so little 😂😂😂
I think he is more of a Millenial whisperer because West Coast tech bros were invested in his funds. Gen Xers and Boomers from East Coast saw his FTX style risk management and decided to not get involved.
Liv Agar Wallstreet Bets lurker confirmed 📈
I really do love the assumption that anything america does with AI won’t be immediately replicated by China. Like can you show me one single case where that has happened in the past? What AI tool do we have that China didn’t reverse-engineer, improve, and publicly release? We’re spending the entire economy on this open source project, which is cool on a humanitarian level but so fucking goddamn stupid in every other way.
The story about the AI agent buying the robot dog "to live inside" made a big impression on me. It seems to trace back to Tony Robbins, who claimed his own agent did that. I liked it better when I thought Jake made it up.
The “pissing in your asshole” expression really needs to be imported from the french. It could be more transformative and epochal than the Statue of Liberty 🗽
...Trail of Dead mentioned 😭😭
The China-mongering is bizarre from a guy like this; why tf do you care at all about national borders/political parties if you believe you're mere months away from inventing AGI God??
For the next good news episode can you make my wife come back?
Love the way Liv says “borrowing” showing her Canadian. An aside would be amazing to have Liz Franczak and/or Ed Zitron for an AI finance episode
They say AI is useful but the only example liv can give with the coding one is immediately walked back, and Julian’s is nonsense. grep has existed since the 1970s, you don’t need ai to keyword search text.
Its not that stupid, since it happens on a long timeline, like the boiling frog analogy. Buddy of mine was selling some drugs years ago, harmless small scale freinds of freinds stuff. But over time it evolved and now its like too big to give up while also being a sword waiting to fall on your head. "yeah i know but nothings going to go bad today"
liv agar
married by Ross Fucking Douthat is the cherry on the top of this shit sundae
Like WHY
That was fun
Thank you Liv
Ai is coming whether you like it or not, so just accept it and give us more money.
More episodes like this please!
An important footnote to Peter Singer’s drowning child thought experiment are his views on disability. He does not believe in an ethical obligation to rescue ALL children from drowning.
Weird to hear Ross Douthat mentioned in this episode; If Books Could Kill just released a pundit portrait episode about him today!
came directly here from that
once the dollar crashes we'll all be suckin' dick for fartcoin
If you’re doing it right, they will fart a coin
more schadenfreude plz. it’s the only joy i allow myself
Dude Liv episodes are the best
so proud of jake and his willingness to learn crypto economic magics 👏
No matter what, Aschenbrenner is an epic surname.
Crazy that this guy appeared out of nowhere on QAA, a couple years ago I watched the full 4-hour podcast the autoque is from to try and understand the silicon valley perspective on AGI. It was a horrible experience and now feels 100% worth it to listen to this with that context
"The only reason effective altruism exists as a funded thing is as a fucking shibboleth for billionaires who don't want to pay taxes and want to let the world crumble around them while sucking as much value out of the working class as they can and want to pretend like they're heroes at the same time so that people ride their dicks in articles like that fucking Sequoia piece." -- Robert Evans Effective Altruism + Sam Bankman-Fried reminded me of this quote.
LLMs are trained off the greater human canon, which has given them a pretty clear manual for how an all-powerful AI being should behave: evilly. Whether or not the LLMs are conscious or sentient doesn’t even matter. I’m not actually worried about any of this, but I do think Julian is assigning more agency to LLMs than is merited. If people haven’t thought of something, the AI chats won’t either.
There is a guy on YouTube, Patrick Boyle, a former trader who makes videos on finance topics with a nice line in dry, deadpan snark. He did one on the Korean stock market meltdown and also one on Situational Awareness, https://youtu.be/rE75WvOtcu8 Witness the opening clip of Aschenbrenner yukking it up with some other eejit like Beavis and Butthead and tell me there is a God
He he, this has been a fun mess to watch play out. That said I confident Leopold will be back and more certain than ever!
I’m playing depressed birds all day.
'Twisting our dicks to piss in our own arseholes' has crippled me. Ahhahahahaga
AGI by 2027? And this guy is really smart you say? I'll sell him AGI tomorrow and take his remaining 5 billion.
“Cackle cackle cackle”
Liv Agar! I was very annoyed to woken at 5am by the fecking seagulls but this episode being here makes it not so bad
extremely liv agar
Am I finally getting my QAA rationalist episode?
A thorough dissection of the rationalist brain worms would probably merit its own Cursed Media mini-series!
Liv Agar!
Jake, Jim Caviezel has a new movie coming out.
I've been wanting to relisten the original Caviezel ep but it's not showing up for me on pocketcast or spotify. Has it been taken down or am I just bad at this?
Liv Agar
Liv Agar