The Doom Justifies the Valuation

https://geohot.github.io//blog/jekyll/update/2026/06/21/the-doom-justifies-the-valuation.html

by inatreecrown2 • 1 month ago

144 136 1 month ago

geohot.github.io

siren20263• 1 month 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• 1 month 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_• 1 month ago

This is how every benevolent dictators start.

Every dictator is benevolent for the people that agree with them.

panarky• 1 month 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• 1 month 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.

jrflowers3• 1 month 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• 1 month ago

"I cannot be contradicted because I can hold conflicting viewpoints" was Chomsky's bit, HN can only take credit for imitating it.

scarmig2• 1 month 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.

sublinear2• 1 month ago

Some AI is useless. Some is incredibly powerful... It would be great to explore those new ideas and possibilities.

I agree, but it's not so mysterious what will win out. Even if the criticism is repeated so often, that's because much of it is still valid.

LLMs are not AGI. A statistical model of language helps fill in gaps. This is super useful for new and much improved UI/UX ideas that converge with better accessibility. Similar is true for generating images, video, audio, etc. There are situations where it's the right tool for expressing an idea.

What we need is a sense of maturity. The limitations are very clear to everyone now, and we're already past the disillusionment. If we can rein in the abuse, there should be a good path forward. The technology is already boring and that's a very good sign.

chongli5• 1 month ago

Some AI is useless

The question is not whether AI is useful. It is useful, full stop.

The question is whether AI is useful enough to justify valuations that dwarf the GDP of all but the top 20 countries in the world. As it stands right now, it's not even close! The leaked OpenAI financials put these AI companies in the same profitability territory as utilities, with zero justification for these crazy valuations.

scarmig2• 1 month ago

Technically, it's the time discounted rate of future profits that determine valuations. If you take it as a given that they will provide exactly as much value as they do today, then, yes, your question has the obvious answer of no. If you think AI will provide greater value in the future, the answer depends on the value you think it will have.

snowe2010• 1 month ago

The question is not whether AI is useful. It is useful, full stop.

And nukes are useful by some metric too.

AI (llms) is not useful in any way that we as humanity should be pushing for. It’s more harmful than good in every way possible. It’s honestly astounding to me that everyone’s ethics are so weak as to believe that somehow these incredible destructive companies are somehow good for humanity.

soundworlds• 1 month 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.

anuramat4• 1 month ago

NFTs and the Metaverse

AI is not that bad

Blackthorn• 1 month 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.

rockwotj• 1 month ago

will finally fracture.

If true, it will only be replaced with something else. With what is anyone’s guess.

Glyptodon• 1 month ago

I think technology can actually solve a lot more things than it has, the problem is that foundational problem solving does not make a unicorn startup with earthshaking economies of scale in most cases, and especially so if there's a physical world piece involved, and even more so if it's going to go asymptotic.

Just to throw out a random example - could technology, in terms of advances and improvements to allocation, distribution, and consumption, play a part in solving the western US's water issues? Probably. But would it be something that make a trillion dollars and a household name? Maybe not. And could saner policy, like making farmers have to bid for acre feet instead of getting it for basically free + distribution cost also help? Sure.

Likewise, even with AI most software is still crap. Like when have you heard about a doctor who loves their EHR? Like never.

So I think technology could be a solver of at least a lot more things. But we've created a market where people want to exhaust every flavor of flim flam and trend of the moment first. Because we've glorified the business of tech more than the actual improvements and aspirations that should be possible.

lukeify• 1 month ago

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

drc500free• 1 month 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.

coolThingsFirst3• 1 month 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.

sublinear2• 1 month 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• 1 month 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• 1 month ago

If San Francisco was nuked tomorrow, the world would feel a weight off their shoulders.

Who Would Jesus Nuke?

_23sd3• 1 month 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.

coolThingsFirst3• 1 month ago

Dumb thing to ask tbh.

Dangerous new tech with military applications sounds harder to ignore than AI that spits out text.

_23sd3• 1 month 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.

ajyoon4• 1 month 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• 1 month ago

Setting up for the eventual bailout. Remember - "we can't let banks fail or it'll be a depression"?

SpicyLemonZest3• 1 month 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.

_aavaa_2• 1 month ago

*why would they warn if it they didn’t believe it.

2 words: regulatory capture.

Ban Chinese models because they’re “bad”. (can’t have head to head competition).

Bad open weight model (can’t let people escape the subscription model).

ajyoon4• 1 month ago

People have been warning about the dangers of advanced AI since long before open weight competition was a consideration.

ben_w10• 1 month ago

2 words: regulatory capture.
Ban Chinese models because they’re “bad”. (can’t have head to head competition).

The current scale of current + planned data centres only makes sense if the US exports inference worldwide. 30% of your current total electrical generation capacity, and equivalent to 76% of your total electrical demand in 2022. At least, assuming the "33 GW installed, 300 GW more planned" claim I've heard was not itself an AI hallucination.

And at least OpenAI and Anthropic were persuing the same argumemts continuously to their initial founding, before such capture was plausible.

I don't only mean that GPT-2 was, famously, when OpenAI surprised the world with (paraphrased) "we think this is a good point to start practicing not releasing the weights, before models get too dangerous" or as a surprising number of people interpret it even when I link to OpenAI's own post "we think this is … too dangerous".

I mean even before that.

I wouldn't disagree if you say Musk is full of BS, but he did donate to OpenAI when it was created as a nonprofit, and his wealth was 2 orders of magnitude smaller than today. Back then he was talking about risks, "summoning the demon", now he's the one demanding saying "robot army" to justify a bigger compensation package from Tesla.

chongli5• 1 month ago

Why would a company warn that their technology is dangerous if it wasn't?

The whole point of the article is to answer this question, and here's the answer:

Because all the AI doom fear-mongering is driving sky-high valuations. The more the public panics, the more investors open their wallets.

ajyoon4• 1 month ago

Is there any evidence of this? It seems like a thing people say all the time, but completely unsubstantiated.

dartharva• 1 month ago

Regulatory capture and false AGI hyping, what else? You'd have to be willingly ignoring the writings on the wall if you still haven't identified it yet.

britch• 1 month ago

Why would a company warn that their technology is dangerous if it wasn't?

Because it makes their technology seem more important and powerful?

Do you usually believe 100% what a company says about itself?

Mythos export control issue, it's obviously not good for profits

Who cares about profits? None of these companies make money like a business currently. It's all speculative valuation and influenced by the same hype/doom cycle

SpicyLemonZest3• 1 month ago

When people discuss the negative effects of climate change, do you think that boosts fossil fuel company valuations by making their products seem more important and powerful?

jmye2• 1 month ago

it's obviously not good for profits.

Weird to think profits matter half as much as ever-increasing valuations, driven by memetic bullshit. E.g. the entire point of the article you're commenting on.

ajyoon4• 1 month ago

Anthropic's valuation is driven by its revenue growth. Export controls harm this. Hype certainly plays a role, but it's simply not the case that revenue is not a major part of the picture.

manoDev• 1 month ago

It’s the same narrative as “the communists are developing nukes so we need to develop first”.

bryan02• 1 month ago

I agree. There are 2 groups of people:

1. Those, like OP, that believe AI danger and disruption is all hype to boost valuations.

2. Those, like myself, that believe AI danger and disruption is very real and presents dilemmas (but also opportunities) for society, so we must tread carefully.

The first position is not logically consistent with reality. The danger is real: we have already seen hints about how this will impact everything from jobs to warfare to mental health. that danger does not increase valuation, in fact it does the opposite because of the need for government regulation.

ekelsen2• 1 month ago

I don't think the first position is steel manned by assuming those holding it actually believe there are no potential problems or ways to use the technology badly.

But that belief does not imply the doom rhetoric is necessary or the best way to approach those issues.

mrandish3• 1 month ago

in fact it does the opposite because of the need for government regulation.

For frontier leaders, regulation is a competitive moat. At trillion dollar scale, compliance teams, legal and lobbyists are a tiny fraction of opex. For emerging startups, early regulation of a new market is a substantial barrier to entry.

That said, I think Anthropic blundered into their current Fable mess unintentionally by underestimating just how much they pissed off the current administration by refusing to let the DoD use Ant's AI's for all the domestic spying and lethal combat ops they want.

JMiao2• 1 month ago

that's an inaccurate characterization on #1. he's not saying ai risk is _all_ hype to boost valuations, but that it's misused to serve purposes other than warning.

Barrin92• 1 month ago

Why would a company warn that their technology is dangerous if it wasn't?

Because Americans are obsessed with eschatological narratives and action hero stories. I talked to a Palantir guy once who told me that he loves it when journalists describe his company as a James Bond villain because every single time the market cap goes up.

If they said that they're SAP with Call of Duty marketing they'd actually lose money. In other countries this strategy might not check out but in the US it's better to pretend to be a supervillain than to be boring

ben_w10• 1 month ago

If they said that they're SAP with Call of Duty marketing they'd actually lose money. In other countries this strategy might not check out but in the US it's better to pretend to be a supervillain than to be boring

Well, that explains Musk.

mrandish3• 1 month ago

Why would a company warn that their technology is dangerous if it wasn't?

It helps to look at the history of the AI Alarmist, EA-adjacent mindset. They believe AI could be Dangerous (<--- capital D) if not responsibly managed by the right people (spoiler: themselves or politicians who listen to them). The capital D means more than just some economic and employment disruption, they're thinking much bigger, like "existential threat to humanity" big.

The most extreme alarmists are basically LARPing Terminator 2 and want to shut it down before SkyNet takes over but the more moderate alarmists believe AI is too potentially beneficial to walk away from. And they acknowledge other nations and various bad actors won't stop anyway, so they believe it's their sacred duty to move forward quickly albeit very responsibly. Yes, this leads to some conflicted reasoning and priorities, like they need to keep gaining access to gobs of capital to ensure they are the ones to reach AGI first, as that's the only way to ensure "god" is benevolent.

While I'm sure many of the top AI leadership are primarily (or purely) mercenary, I also think some, if not many, other execs and employees sincerely believe (or at least hope) they are "the good guys" playing a crucial role in an era of historical importance. Obviously, this has some heavy vibes as well as a being quite a buff to one's self-importance. They face each new day feeling the weight of bearing such a consequential role in shaping the future of humanity. Us mere mortals can only pray their wisdom and altruistic ethics match their humility. </s>

So... yeah, that's why we see some weirdly whiplash messaging.

ekelsen2• 1 month ago

Because it makes them feel important because they are developing something so dangerous everyone else ought to listen to what they say.

It's about ego, not profits.

grebc• 1 month ago

They banned exporting bad cryptography algorithms/code 30 years ago too.

People just love to talk about anything that tickling their fancies.

It’s all a fugazi.

anon373839• 1 month ago

Looking at the ongoing Mythos export control issue, it's obviously not good for profits.

This is not obvious at all. Anthropic's biggest investor was the catalyst for this action in referring the "jailbreak" (if you can even call it that) to the government. Now, Anthropic is sitting around a table with government officials who are designing benchmarks that will determine what Anthropic's competitors will be allowed to build. At this point, I have no evidence to rule out the possibility that Anthropic's leadership purposefully sought this outcome.

watwut5• 1 month ago

They did not wanted export controls, but they did wanted everyone so scared and thus pay for license. The decision backfiring does not imply it was not intended to be self serving.

If the company really think their product is dangerous, they should stop making it increasingly dangerous. Antromorphic claims is dangerous and that they need more money to make it even more dangerous.

And the fearmongering is beneficial for them so far.

siren20263• 1 month ago

> Looking at the ongoing Mythos export control issue, it's obviously not good for profits

We must live in different planets. The whole episode about Mythos has been the absolute best free PR move ever designed. At this point everyone in tech assumes Anthropic and Mythos are the absolute best models. All of this got achieved without spending a single $$ in advertisement.

This model is also probably really dangerous, not denying that. But they definitely used it as a huge PR tool.

ben_w10• 1 month ago

The whole episode about Mythos has been the absolute best free PR move ever designed.

Great PR.

For a product nobody can pay for.

And a high chance that when anyone can, the market shrinks from "worldwide internet users" to "the USA only".

And it's known to be a highly dynamic market: based on the historical average, it only takes 11 weeks to be completely trounced by someone else's model, so if you're out of the market that long you may as well not have bothered.

vintermann• 1 month ago

Why would a company warn that their technology is dangerous if it wasn't?

That's a bit like asking, "why would someone claim to have a lot of money if they didn't?" It's step 1 in countless scams.

You can't think of any ways to exploit people by convincing them you have technology which might rule the world soon?

xg15• 1 month ago

You could also turn this around: Why would a company put up warnings about their product, or at least more than they're legally obligated to. The tobacco and social media industries certainly didn't go "this product has the risk to do great harm, but we also believe in its potential, so we'll go with a responsible approach".

The only examples of companies voluntarily putting up warnings I can think of are those obviously tongue-in-cheek warnings "this book/game/series may cause addiction because it's just so good" etc.

NichoPaolucci• 1 month ago

To me, they're selling the "power" of their product by mentioning the danger. "It's TOO powerful to even release yet!"

Whether or not that level of power exists, that is definitely how they're pitching it.

altmanaltman• 1 month ago

A common line of logic would be that a company would never put a dangerous sticker on their product unless they absolutely have to by regulation. So if they do it, it absolutely means they see a benefit of doing it.

Also why do you think the Mythos thing is bad for profits? Anthropic hyped the model up too hard and didn't even have the compute to serve it properly to all users.

The export control issue has not affected Anthropic's revenue and only made its top of the line products seem far more impressive than they actually are. People don't think Nvidia is a bad company if the government puts export controls on their products.

For Anthropic, valuation and public perception is 100x more important before the IPO than revenue or profitablity.

cainxinth• 1 month ago

When the U.S. first legalized pharmaceutical ads on TV, one of the requirements was that the drug companies had to disclose side effects during the ads. The companies chafed at that, thinking it would make the drugs less appealing, and only included the bare minimum the rules required them to. But their own data eventually showed that consumers actually responded positively to hearing the side effects. They found that people think if a drug is powerful, it must also have strong side effects. So instead of just scaring them, it reassured them the product was good. After learning that, the drug makers started including more side effects in the ads than they were required to.

binary132• 1 month ago

the headline literally explains that it is to maximize hypothetical valuation

dwa3592• 1 month 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'.

anuramat4• 1 month ago

AI Agents experts

you mean loop engineers?

Avicebron• 1 month 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.

dodu_• 1 month 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.

jmye2• 1 month 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• 1 month 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• 1 month 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• 1 month 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?"

aabhay2• 1 month 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.

mccoyb2• 1 month 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"?

aabhay2• 1 month 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.

watwut5• 1 month ago

I mean, my company is also having internal test release before going out. That is just a normal process.

whacked_new2• 1 month ago

Somehow the Chinese phrases 内卷 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neijuan and 摆烂 ("let it rot" 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• 1 month ago

Thanks for the references.

MattyRad• 1 month ago

"Involution" is spot on.

xhevahir• 1 month ago

The English article for "let it rot" (or a related phrase) seems to be here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tang_ping

whacked_new2• 1 month 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• 1 month 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.

hintymad2• 1 month 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• 1 month ago

Is "being mocked" not also "facing the rage of many"? What do you imagine with the latter that would be so much worse?

hintymad2• 1 month ago

I assume that "you didn't warn us" and "why are you so pessimistic" would lead to different scale of anger.

cootsnuck• 1 month ago

Yea, the "doom trolling" seems to be starting to reach its limit.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/17/opinion/ai-dangerous-open...

overlord1109• 1 month ago

Can you share a non-paywalled version? Wayback machine doesn't seem to have this.

skygazer• 1 month ago

https://archive.ph/UTcTa

petterroea• 1 month 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• 1 month 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• 1 month ago

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

smackeyacky• 1 month ago

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

thrance• 1 month 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• 1 month 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• 1 month 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.

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I understand this comment is inappropriate. I think the comment in the article is WAY more fucking out of line than this.

sometimelurker2• 1 month 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.

tim3335• 1 month 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.

sometimelurker2• 1 month 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• 1 month ago

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

tim3335• 1 month 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?

watwut5• 1 month 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.

tim3335• 30 days 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• 1 month 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...

[2] https://geohot.github.io/blog/jekyll/update/2026/02/13/i-tol...

[3] https://geohot.github.io/blog/jekyll/update/2026/04/18/five-...

zombot• 30 days 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.

The Doom Justifies the Valuation

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