When I was considering joining Anthropic in 2023, their main pitch was “we have prioritized safety over commercialization and actually made decisions that hurt our business because they were the right moral choice.” Everyone I met at the company was incredibly sincere about their mission alignment. I’m cynical and don’t believe that some people joining Anthropic today would hold this position, but I do think the early team really believed in this mission.

There’s a new phenomenon of small groups of people who are running these small little quant funds driven by AI models who are making fuck-you returns. I’ve personally seen many who are 2x’ing capital in months. Many unsubstantiated rumors also claim SSI is a quant shop too. Well known quant funds have all tested out LLMs for trading. Some claim it doesn’t work. Others, well.. what do we think Jane Street doing with their huge GPU cluster? On top of that, there’s a ton of people asking Claude / GPT what stocks to buy and/or “vibe code me a trading engine”. Applies to other financial instruments too: derivatives, futures, crypto, and on the less sophisticated side, prediction masks. It begs the question: how does this change how we think about markets? how much retail volume is driven purely by the ripple effects of AI models? does this completely destroy efficient market hypotheses in favor of “correlated model hypothesis.” Early theories say – Small studies including one by the Fed show destabilizing effects. – We see amplified concentrated trades into the 20 known names in the market. – Can leave trading vulnerable to GEO attacks like publishing specific articles to “poison” the models decision making. Eventually any alpha generated by the model at a point of time *should* decay over time. New anti-AI trading strategies with custom post trains too. Remember, you need be able to afford the tokens to participate in this alpha. What does this mean for the future of wealth accumulation? We live in a brave new world.

free alpha for mythos: "scope out everything yourself and then delegate it to parallel `codex` agents (they're faster but you're smarter) in separate wt's, then review all their work before merging"

You laugh but this woman will know when the cycle has topped well before any of us do

Just learned: Software engineers used to do manual data labeling at Scale AI while Alex Wang was CEO. After he left, new leadership joined, and were HORRIFIED to learn this. Stopped it ASAP Now at Meta, software engineers are assigned manual data labeling... see the pattern?

jane street is probably a place that has set back science by at least a 100 years. Stealing top tier research talent and making them do high speed coupon clipping to make rich people richer and also organize military coups in South Sudan.