Qasar Younis: prediction

Transcript context

…So they're two separate things, anxiety around technical shift and then the public investors reacting to specific stocks they've held. We have to separate those things. So let's talk about them separately. On the first one, the core root of fear is misunderstanding. And I think if you at home are very anxious about the impact of AI in some variant on your own job, the best thing that you can do is spend time to understand it and you will quickly see the limitations. There's some great videos on YouTube, which are trying to get Gemini to understand what a cup is by just holding it upside down and then they do it with ChatGPT. So it's like if the revolution is coming, the AI overlords have to first understand the top and bottom of a cup. And so you realize that you can see the video of nunchuck wielding humanoids, which are pre-programmed and that costs $15 million to do that video. Yeah, that is true. It's not fake. I'm not implying it's fake, but it's also not what your brain kind of fills in the gaps. You see nunchuck robots and you just feel like, well, the gap, these are sentient beings that are at their own volition going, rather than it's a bunch of motors that have been programmed to do a certain thing. If you really want to be impressed, you go to a car factory and we've been doing that for 25 years. We have very, very advanced robots moving extremely fast to build things. And why we don't have anxiety about the car factory, but we have anxiety about the nunchuck robots is because the human being doesn't... Like that gap, we understand the gap of a welding robot. You see, "Oh, okay, that's a robot. It's been programmed to make this weld." But we don't know the technology. We as in just as an individual human being living in the world. You don't know how that robot was made to do that nunchuck thing. And so you substitute that with anxiety and fear. And so I would really implore you to learn more about the technology and you start seeing the edges. Now, does that take away from the most fundamental thing that you're getting at, the string that you're pulling at? Which is like, is society going to be fundamentally harmed and is this net bad for society? I think in any technical shift, the emergence of WhatsApp, just as an example, there are people who are damaged by that, literally companies that go away, but also humans who are damaged by the advent of that technology. And so I think as members of society and as leaders in society, we can kind of move that funnel in whichever way technology first... Remove the word AI. AI is such a emotional word, because it's wrapped in these things you don't know. And so that fear then kind of deforms. So let's just say technology. So I think it's up to us to recognize this technology can be used for good and technology can be used for bad. And I think that's where really the focus is. d of deforms. So let's just say technology. So I think it's up to us to recognize this technology can be used for good and technology can be used for bad. And I think that's where really the focus is. So get to know it and then actively make the technology be used for good as a participant, whether you're a founder or all the way as an individual employee or citizen of a large company. Then on the second part of the question about public investors and stuff, I don't have any particular research on this, but this is what my guess is what's actually happened. Beyond being an engineer, which is my core identity, for lack of better word, I was also, I did an MBA at Harvard. And so that was the first time that this, let's say... I didn't come from very, very wealthy upbringings. And this was the first time when I went to Harvard, I saw that world, that world of people having private jets and stuff. It was a really eye-opening experience for me. But the real world I was exposed to was high finance and how high finance works. And you might think, as I did from far away, that folks at hedge funds or at large public equities funds are extremely nuanced and thoughtful. And they are on whiteboards with extremely deep and maybe even theoretical math to figure out, should they buy or sell Figma? And that's not actually how it works. Really what these folks are is, and in this specific case, I think what's happening is they buy and sell stock. They are smart people and they do work hard. It's not to take that away, but they don't have a fundamental edge that you would assume that somebody who sits in Skyscraper in New York has. And by the way, that's why retail investors have become such a active and significant part of the market. So those folks have gone to AI consultants and have gone to people who are literally developers at these firms, and they'll do something like, "Hey, why don't you build me this app in a week?" And then this consultancy will come back with an app, which kind of looks like maybe a Figma or another, some web app and said, "Hedge fund manager," they're like, "well..." And then if the company was sitting there, they would say, "No, no, this just looks like my app, but this is actually not my app. It's not as deep. It doesn't have all these things. There's the integrations with all these other systems." But for the public investor buy, they're like, "Yeah, but it only took a few weeks or a month to build this. It took you 500 engineers a couple of years." This AI thing could be real and the things I'm reading on X about just vibe coding your way to replace billion dollar companies, that might be the case and the market immediately prices in that risk. " And that's where that selloff comes from. That doesn't necessarily mean all of those. Just within the last 24 hours, I had a... I can't say his name, but a very, let's say, calibrated investor who said, "This is the time to buy because these companies are not actually going away." And so I think those are two... Anxiety within society and the selloff are two very different things. They're motivated by different things. o buy because these companies are not actually going away." And so I think those are two... Anxiety within society and the selloff are two very different things. They're motivated by different things. They're part of the larger AI narrative, but I wouldn't conflate those two things. It's not that the hedge fund investor is like, "I'm worried about society, sell service now." It's different than that, or at least that's my impression.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.