In a normal functioning ecosystem, when the price of tokens drops below the cost of production, the quantity of tokens declines to normalize with pricing. In this case, nothing in AI has any unit economics and you don’t see normalization because everyone is still going full-speed ahead with external funding. (Sort of like shale oil in 2016-2019). Meanwhile, compute prices are based on LT contracts that were signed at above market prices, and are now capital destructive. They’ll eventually catch down to token prices in free-fall. What we’re seeing here is spot price negatively diverging from term pricing. Usually, when this happens in a cyclical industry, it’s INCREDIBLY BEARISH. Especially when there are take-or-pay contracts that make it difficult to ration supply at prices below cost. What we’re witnessing is a world where losses will accelerate, just as more supply comes online….

I'll say it again for the AI risk experts in the back: We've already run a real life, large scale experiment on what happens when a superintelligence is unleashed on a narrow objective. Look no further than U.S. capital markets. Millions of investors, analysts, traders and algorithms, backed by trillions of dollars and wired together through prices, all chasing one goal: the highest risk-adjusted return on capital. And it is spectacularly good at its job. It funds the best ideas, punishes the worst ones, and turns new information into prices faster than any of us can react. No individual can out-think it. 99+ percent of professionals can't beat it. But look at what else it's done along the way: - Optimized the measure instead of the intent. Quarterly earnings became the scoreboard, so companies learned to manage the scoreboard. - Treated anything without a price as free. Pollution, addiction, obesity, depression, political fragmentation, fragile supply chains, the long-term health of the communities it operates in. - Found every gap in the rules, then paid lobbyists to help write the next set and pull up the ladder behind incumbents. - Remade the world around its objective. Companies, pension funds and our retirement accounts now answer to the S&P 500. - Made itself impossible to switch off, because everything else now depends on it. None of this required malice. Nobody sat in a room and chose these outcomes. It's simply what a very capable optimizer does when its objective is a narrow proxy for what we actually care about. And note that we never solved this alignment problem. We've managed it, imperfectly, with regulation, taxes, disclosure rules and the occasional crisis to show us where the guardrails were missing. Over time, the market has captured the instutions designed to constrain it. We've been at it the better part of a century, and the misalignment is the worst it's ever been. So the next time someone tells you AI is only dangerous if it "wants" something bad, or if its goals are mis-specified, point them at the S&P 500. It doesn't want anything. It just optimizes. That's the whole problem.

Episode 90: FUNKY TOWN! This Week Broke Every Correlation in the Book! Bonds ripped, oil dumped, Nasdaq vol got crushed and Meta went vertical. All in the same week. We are back to unpack the divergences that had pod shops getting tapped on the shoulder and macro tourists reaching for the antacids. @BenBrey youtu.be/VbBVq3EdyEA?si=J3AJ…

Someone has an awesome opportunity right now…