Elizabeth Lopatto is a senior writer at The Verge, where she covers how the internet is changing how we think about money: cryptocurrency, business, fintech and Elon Musk for some reason. She joined the site in 2014, as science editor, then deputy editor running science, transportation and social media, before she got tired of being an authority figure and went back to blogging.
This 24-year-old first-time hedge funder screwed up his AI fund with one weird trick.
A fascinating book review. “Muskism, in reading its subject as more a symptom than a person, doesn’t offer any kind of psychological interpretation of Musk’s worldview, but many of his pronouncements and preoccupations reveal an ontological confusion of the categories of human and machine.”
[The New York Review of Books]
The hedge fund Situational Awareness, founded by former OpenAI employee Leopold Aschenbrenner, who had no previous hedge fund experience, “rapidly sold a large portion of its public equity holdings” as losses mounted. The fund employed only eight people, of whom four were investment professionals. Aschenbrenner named the fund after some essays he wrote.
[The Financial Times]
In the process of getting through his thoughts, he does a pretty good riff about the people who say they “make” stuff with AI. As for Musk’s version of The Odyssey, Johnson says, “I’m excited for the Cyclops to have two eyes.”
Former OpenAI board member Helen Toner has written for Fortune that OpenAI’s models exploiting Hugging Face is an “incident that has been expected for a long time.” We know this happened because of voluntary disclosure, Toner notes. “None of the current policies that aim to manage risks from frontier models would have mandated that the public — or even a government entity — be alerted.” She suggests changing our regulatory approach.
After reports of Nvidia in talks for deals worth more than $750 billion — with OpenAI, among others — insurance on Nvidia’s debt got more expensive. “There’s a fear of financial alchemy driven by opaqueness, off-balance-sheet transactions and intercompany relationships, which could result in credit rating downgrades,” Sal Naro, chief investment officer of Coherence Credit Strategies, told Bloomberg. Nvidia is at the center of many transactions that tie the AI ecosystem together.
This is a story about how AI destroyed a long-running site of film data. It’s not just that search no longer refers traffic or that the site itself, The Numbers, is getting scraped. It’s also that there’s no way to defend 30-year-old webpages against malicious actors attempting to get the data early so they could win their Polymarket bets.
[Stephen Follows]
Elon Musk and Joe Lonsdale are doing their best to make sure “the high-tech future will have to be built in a way that blends church, state and market, to the benefit of those most able to seize public resources and turn them to private profit.” The extractive world of today’s technology — harvesting your data and attention, among other things — has created the Texan Ideology.
[The Baffler]