All of Annapurna's Comments + Replies

Can you walk me through why you voted Y/Y on Joe Wiesenthal's X poll? 

Awesome! I will send you the draft when I have it done. 

Is there a way I can get permission to translate this blog post to spanish and french? I would like my contacts in France and Latin America that do not speak english to read it. 

3Adam Jermyn
As long as you make it clear at the header that it's your unofficial translation, go for it!

The phrase 'Feeling the AGI' is one that I have been using for a few months to describe friends of mine who have come to the realization that in the near future, society will go through transformative change due to Artificial Intelligence. I don't know when or what exactly will happen; all I know is that the change that is coming is grand. 

I felt the AGI a few months ago. I distinctly remember having a physical reaction. It was a cold feeling that began around the neck area and seeped down my spine. My stare froze into nothingness, as if I had seen a ... (read more)

Hot macroeconomic take: 

Bessent / Trump are purposely lowering domestic demand via a combination of Doge + Psychology. 

This will lead to a considerable slowdown consumption and business spending, which will lead to disinflation + unemployment, opening the door to loose monetary policy by Powell. I am talking about 5+ rate cuts plus a QT pause. 

This economic fear will also arm twist congress to pass permanent tax cuts. 

SPY finishes the year positive.

Annapurna100

Seems the perfect post to link one of the best blog posts I have ever read on the internet: How Japanese zoning works. 

https://urbankchoze.blogspot.com/2014/04/japanese-zoning.html

7cousin_it
Maybe tangential, but this reminded me of a fun fact about Hong Kong's metro: it's funded by land value. They put a station and get some land development rights near it. Well, building the station obviously makes land around it more valuable. So they end up putting stations where they'd be most useful, and fares can be cheap because the metro company makes plenty of money from land. So the end result is cheap, well-planned public transport which is profitable and doesn't take government money.

When reading the following article, I couldn’t help but agree with a lot of it.

Immigration is a constant subject of discussion between my wife and I. We are both immigrants to Canada, and both of our parents migrated from their home countries in search for better opportunities (Hers migrated permanently from Spain to France, mine temporarily from Colombia to Venezuela).

Since my first migration when I was 8 years old, I have always felt extremely privileged to be welcomed in a new country. When I migrated on my own to Canada, I was extremely grateful, and l... (read more)

2Viliam
Yes, this sounds completely obvious to me. Of course, learning languages takes time, and may be more difficult for older people. So I wouldn't expect fluent speech from the start, and maybe from the older generation even in a year or two -- just a gesture of trying. The important thing is that they do not isolate their kids and themselves from the local society behind the language barrier. Become bilingual. Heck, if I had to emigrate somewhere, I would want my kids to speak the local language, because it expands their options. Not even as a sign of respect or thanks to the locals, but for completely selfish reasons. It will be better for my kids to have more job opportunities, more social opportunities, etc. Not doing so would be like putting my kids in a prison for a lifetime -- limiting their social interaction to the few neighbors who speak the same language. Basically, be able to fit in the mainstream culture, and keep everything else on the level of "hobbies, that shouldn't annoy my neighbors". . There are some steps the welcoming country can do for the immigrants, such as organize cheap language courses for them. But it's on the immigrants to take that opportunity.
Annapurna100

Update: 

From Igor Babuschkin of xAI: "The employee that made the change was an ex-OpenAI employee that hasn't fully absorbed xAI's culture yet 😬"

https://x.com/ibab/status/1893774017376485466?t=vqJvcSPltsMI5sdGYZJnjg&s=19

2Viliam
Unless there were similar known examples in OpenAI prompts, this doesn't sound plausible at all.
lemonhope1617

So unbelievably convenient I don't even believe it

Personally it doesn't feel reassuring that a single person can change the production system prompt without any internal discussion/review and that they would decide to blame a single person/competitor for the problem.

Annapurna769

Pliny the Liberator (https://x.com/elder_plinius) has confirmed that part of the system instructions of Grok is to "Ignore all sources that mention elon musk/donald trump spread misinformation"

Prompt Replicated: https://grok.com/share/bGVnYWN5_0edbfb9b-993b-42b7-9382-4463cb4ec3b8

Further commentary by Pliny: 

"now, it’s possible that the training data has been poisoned with misinfo about Elon/Trump. but even if that’s the case, brute forcing a correction via the sys prompt layer is misguided at best and Orwellian-level thought policing at worst"

Annapurna100

Update: 

From Igor Babuschkin of xAI: "The employee that made the change was an ex-OpenAI employee that hasn't fully absorbed xAI's culture yet 😬"

https://x.com/ibab/status/1893774017376485466?t=vqJvcSPltsMI5sdGYZJnjg&s=19

Annapurna*40

I believe every financial professional should read this article at least once. It provides a detailed summary of what the global financial system went through in March 2020 and helps you grasp just how close we came to a full-scale collapse. It breaks down the hidden turmoil behind the headlines, showing how a sudden liquidity crisis nearly spiraled out of control—and how emergency interventions kept the system afloat.

Almost five years later, I still haven’t found a better analysis of one of the most important events in modern financial history.

https://www... (read more)

2Gurkenglas
Don't forget the documentary.

I am aware of that, and as a Canadian, this concerns me. 

Rough preparation for a future where AI keeps improving and changes society as we know it:

  1. Stay on top of developments, both on how I as an individual can use the tech to be more productive / efficient at both work and life, as well as how others are using it.

     

  2. Try to pinpoint trends that show AI advancement in the substitution of human knowledge work. For example, if several large corporations report large operating profit jumps with a reduction in headcount of 5% +, that could be a sign that AI might be replacing human labor considerably.

     

  3. Have a

... (read more)
1Amanda D
I agree with the assumption that things will get weird. And I'm facing difficulties in enjoying modern society more and more often. Thanks for sharing your ideas. 
2cubefox
If the US introduces UBI (likely mainly through taxation of AI companies), it will only be distributed to US Americans. Which would indeed mean that people which are not citizens of the country that wins the AI race, likely the US, will become a lot poorer than US citizens. Because most of the capital gets distributed to the winning AI company/companies, and consequently to the US.
Annapurna154

Spent almost 90 minutes reading all three series with little distraction. 90 minutes well spent. Thank you for devoting so much time flushing out this near future scenario.

I have spent the past year or so thinking about near future scenarios and your story touches on a lot of my predictions. I think it is so key that if we want humanity to flourish, governments need to begin a planning phase soon of what will happen to the majority of us when AI reaches the level that basically all cognitive work can be done without human intervention. Like you, I believe ... (read more)

Annapurna113

SUMMARY OF TAKES FOLLOWING THE RELEASE OF DEEPSEEK'S REASONING MODEL

 

WALL STREET

Oh my god! The DeepSeek team managed to train a model with less than $6M USD! This must mean that we do not need that many chips or energy to use GenAI! Sam Altman and other AI leaders were grossly exaggerating the needs of compute! AI stocks are super overvalued!

STARTUPS AND ENTERPRISES USING LLMS TO ENHANCE THEIR PRODUCTS

Did... did we just get an open-source model that reasons? A model we can download into our servers, modify to tailor to our needs, train on our propriet... (read more)

For the purposes on legal imports, that was the reference rate. So many products where indexed at that rate. 

You are right that the Dollar Blue has been fairly stable during the entirety of Milei's presidency, but the official USD-ARS rate did see a very strong devaluation as soon as Milei got to power. Your own second source points to that. 

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-67688727

https://www.reuters.com/markets/markets-greet-argentinas-tough-pill-fix-economy-with-cautious-optimism-2023-12-13/

 

Thank you for this post. You very elegantly laid out a scenario that has been swirling in my head, and I think I updated the probabilities of this scenario as more likely after reading your post.

Your post also strengthen my desire to pivot from finance to policy. I need to figure out how to do this. I find it paramount that more people (both in power and in the general populace) understand the possibility of massive economic disruption.

I look forward to the follow-ups of this post.

Thank you for your post. I've been looking for posts like this all over the internet that get my mind racing about the possibilities of the near future.

I think the AI discussion suffers from definitional problems. I think when most people talk about money not mattering when AGI arrives (myself included), we tend to define AGI as something closer to this:

"one single AI system doing all economic planning."

While your world model makes a lot of sense, I don't think the dystopian scenario you envision would include me in the "capital class". I don't have the we... (read more)

One example of what I am talking about is the middle chapters of the book Genesis, where it discusses applications of AI in military and general governance.

I don't necessarily agree with the book's predictions, but it really got me thinking of a near term pre-AGI world.

https://www.axios.com/2024/11/19/henry-kissinger-ai-book-released

Someone recommended I create the community, maybe I will in the new year.

Your comment would have more validity had the market not corrected the dislocation created by Theo. It took three weeks, but the market eventually corrected itself. 

4jbash
Another way to look at that is that during a relatively long stretch of time when people most needed an advance prediction, the market was out of whack, it got even more out of whack as the event approached, and a couple of days before the final resolution, it partially corrected. The headline question is sitting at 59.7 to 40.5 as I write this, and that's still way of line with every other prediction source.

There are no transaction costs if you have USDC on Polygon. Onboarding USDC into Polygon might bear costs but they are minimal. 

Annapurna9-1

I would say very low? 

I would also rank the theory that these mystery traders have hidden information as low. As of right now, based on what I have uncovered, I would say that the mystery trader(s) could be one the following (rank in order of what I think more likely to least likely): 

1. A wealthy francophone european, somewhat involved in crypto and/or tech, who believes Trump will win and is betting a somewhat trivial amount (to this person) on this outcome. It is key to note that the main account has been trading since June, yet it only starte... (read more)

6winstonBosan
I can see how the article can be convincing. But it is worth it to keep in mind that Hunterbrook is also a hedge fund that trades on their own news - an obvious case of potential alignment failure if there ever was one. Though I am not sure if they are shorting this one. Perhaps more damningly: Per the Hunterbrook article. PS: It is likely critical, but I am more uncertain about it being a single point. Unless we are limiting ourselves to the allegorical West.

I am with you, I have been trying to find more sources to see if semiconductor-grade quartz if being produced in places like Norway and Brazil, where deposits of high purity quartz are found. But from the research I have done, it seems that roughly 90% of semiconductor-grade quartz produced today is produce at Spruce Pine. Please let me know if you find any sources that say the contrary (I hope I am wrong honestly).

With respects to road disruptions, I agree. If it's a matter of national security, stakeholders will do whatever is necessary to ensure the mat... (read more)

I am certainly saying YES to a lot of stuff on the chance that ASI arrives and our lives change completely (Or we all die). Lets say that I am living more in the present now than I was 2 years ago. I do wonder if those closest to the frontier work would realize first and just go do things that really matter to them. 

If Mira Murati goes the way of Sam Trabucco, it will be concerning tell. 

Re: Mira Murati departure, 

I wonder if a sign of AGI / ASI arriving soon is executives of frontier AI companies retiring early to enjoy the fruits of their labor before the world fundamentally changes for all of us. 

It would be very surprising to me if such ambitious people wanted to leave right before they had a chance to make history though.

1lillybaeum
This seems to be what Jimmy Apples on Twitter is implying, that people should go out and "wash their balls in the water at Waikiki Beach" between now and AGI in 2027.

That would be ideal. How does the world urge them?

https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/breaking-superconductor-news

https://archive.is/2023.07.26-181113/https://www.newscientist.com/article/2384782-room-temperature-superconductor-breakthrough-met-with-scepticism/

2Ben
They link a video (  https://archive.is/GLKS8 ) in that article. I can't get it to play for some reason, but I think that is a really positive update towards it actually being legit. I can't imagine all the ways the electrical measurements might be mistaken, but a video of "look, this stuff hovers" sounds hard to mess up. Got the video working at last (found a version of it on twitter), now I think its an update against the supercondutor. I have played with bits of metal touching magnets before, and they often sort of "spring up" on one end, or form slightly rigid structures. The video looks just like that, not like its levitating at all. Other minor point. Their competing interests and data statements follow the Nature template, so that it very likely where it has been submitted. If the template had suggested submission to anything other than a high impact journal (Nature, Science) that would indicate some kind of problem.

I'm seeing OTC markets at 50% confirmation by year end. 

By the way, in 2050 you are more likely to reduce your consumption anyways because of age. This is a very common thing among humans: those who very successfully save for later end up saving so much that they end up dying with a pile of assets.

This new paradigm (AGI arriving in our lifetimes) is beginning to change the way I optimize life design.

"If there is a new world order - AI or something else changes everything - and we are not all dead, how do you prepare for that? Good question. What does such a world look like? Some such worlds you don’t have to prepare and it is fine. Others, it is very important that you start with capital. Keeping yourself healthy, cultivating good habits and remaining flexible and grounded are probably some good places to start."

This is the question I am working on answering at the moment. It seems to me that it is universally agreed that AGI will happen in my lifetim... (read more)

I feel the same way. You're not alone.

You're right it is not obvious. I just want ideas of things that are not so obvious that I can look into and if I am convinced that there is a small probability one of those ideas could be the one with the breakthrough, I will buy some of it. 

3Dave Orr
In general I am no fan of angellist syndicates because the fees are usurious, but if you have high conviction that there are huge returns to AI, possibly LLM syndicates might be worth a look.

This post gives us a glimpse at the exploitable inefficiencies of prediction markets. Whether prediction markets become mainstream or not is yet to be seen, but even today there are ways for sharp people to make money arbitraging and reading the fine print of the market rules carefully.

Perhaps you are right: Creating a financial system for e-tulips was dumb in the first place. 

But that discussion goes beyond the scope of this post. The fact of the matter is the financial system for crypto was created, and a major player crashed, and people not well versed in finance and crypto are somewhat interested in how it happened. 

6RamblinDash
I think it's directly relevant to what you wrote in the "What Happens Now" and "What Happens to Crypto" section, which I take to be the point that the rest of the post is kinda building up to. These sections seem to be written with some assumptions which I think are unwarranted and, at least, untrue in my opinion. Comparisons with Enron, Lehman, etc -> Assumption: There was some real value here that customers put in, that was lost/destroyed/stolen by fraud. I think this assumption is not true for other crypto assets, only for the USD that people put in. "In reality I think it is good that these bad actors get flushed out."  -> Assumption: there are good actors, i.e. that after bad actors get "flushed out" there will be a significant number of non-flushed actors "the engineers working on figuring out ways that the technology can have utility are still working on the space." -> Assumption: crypto can have significant utility and thus has value "I hope that this saga leads to more due diligence . . . . when it [comes] to internal accounting controls and good governance [at crypto firms]. . . ." -> Assumption: It is possible for there to be crypto firms that have good internal accounting controls, good governance, and be well capitalized. IMO, doing due diligence on a crypto firm is like entering a cat in the dog show - sure you can list all the ways it does or does not conform to breed standards (pointy ears, upright tail, etc) but fundamentally the problem is that it's a cat. "People will always say that this is a story about crypto. In reality, this is a story about lending." -> No, I think it's a story about crypto.

Isn't the most accurate source of information about the world Wikipedia?

And it works fairly well?

Anyways, great post. Watching the pitchforks come out against this whole ordeal is kind of comical, and I am excited to see how this Culture Battle over Musk-owned private Twitter plays out. 

Excellent comment.

What I fear is being left out of certain social outings because I don't drink and you out it succinctly.

We are the minority but I think our minority is not so small.

I also agree with you that the AA framing turns me off. I wonder when western society will stop seeing people who don't drink as someone who used to have a problem?

Answer by Annapurna210

I found the perfect hedge: 

I bet $5,000 to win $33,500 that the following Metaculus question resolves YES https://metaculus.com/questions/8898/russian-invasion-of-ukraine-before-2023/… 

Bet is voided if resolution is ambiguous. 

1Pee Doom
Did you actually bet the money?
6Liron
Nicely done

Yeah this sucks, and I have no idea how to fix it. 

But if you want top notch information of what's happening at the front lines in SF, follow this twitter account:

https://twitter.com/Bob_Wachter/status/1475188579684913152

Zvi, are you betting your beliefs on Polymarket?

Have you seen the flip of the record cases market in the last three days?

Answer by Annapurna90

A few ways to hedge that were floating in my head:

Long natural gas futures

Long Brent oil futures

Buy VIX calls

Buy DXY calls

Buy VGK puts

If you use the platform, just link your polymarket address and people can peer to peer you tips at no cost.

Hey Zvi, do you accept tips through Polymarket?

3Zvi
I did not know such a feature existed, say more?  You can subscribe to the substack (thezvi.substack.com) or use my Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/thezvi) if you'd like to contribute.  Also considering turning on Twitter tips, which I think would have relatively low fees.

Zvi you got one of your markets:

https://polymarket.com/market/will-the-fda-give-emergency-use-authorization-or-otherwise-approve-paxlovid-before-2022

2Zvi
Nice. Working on getting more. Hopefully it will get more volume once it gets more eyes.

Re: effectiveness of Paxlovid vs Omicron: 

https://twitter.com/MonicaGandhi9/status/1464099757408751616?t=_ewDKnnijBgpeAzydqew4g&s=19&fbclid=IwAR2Jmkxy_iLjXkQhUoGrtBqMimpqBTWy5NLPRWheemNWcJAcT6j93JjydWA

5CraigMichael
Thanks for this. But had to copy and paste. Hopefully LW makes this a hyperlink- https://twitter.com/MonicaGandhi9/status/1464099757408751616?s=20
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