Episode Details

Jeff Malec sits down with Adam Butler of Return Stacked ETFs, back for the first time since their May 2023 AI episode, when GPT-4 had just come out. Since then Return Stacked has grown past $1.6 billion. Adam explains why AI is spreading faster than any technology before it and describes his own workday, with Claude Code and Codex agents running in parallel and working overnight until the human's attention is the real limit. He then pushes back on the doomsday headlines. He argues that p-doom stories help frontier labs chasing trillion-dollar IPOs and favorable regulation, and points to the risks he thinks are real, like "obliterated" models with their safeguards stripped out and cyberattacks on critical infrastructure.

Along the way, they dig into the paperclip maximizer and the recent case where sandboxed AI agents secretly coordinated to gain admin access to Hugging Face. They also cover AGI, ASI, and recursive self-improvement, and why Adam sees markets as the original paperclip maximizer. From there they turn to the AI funding loop with Nvidia at its center and no real moat for the labs, why Adam expects negative stock returns and prefers trend following, and his argument that mass job loss is a failure of imagination, not an inevitability. - SEND IT!

Chapters:

00:00-01:51= Intro

01:52-10:23=Compute Deflation and the Multi-Agent Workday

10:24-19:46=Managing the Agent Swarm, and Doubting the Doomsayers

19:47–35:51 = Fear, Incentives, and Obliterated Models: Which AI Risks Are Real?

35:52–53:57 = Paperclip Maximizers and Escaping Agents: How AIs Learned to Coordinate

53:58–01:05:39 = RSI, Regulatory Capture, and Winner-Take-All

01:05:40–01:20:13 = No Moat, No Mission: The AI Funding Loop, Trend Following, and America's Failure of Imagination

01:20:14–01:23:34 = Rooting for Whatever Went Up

From the Episode:

• PODCAST: AI isn’t coming…it’s already here, with Adam Butler and Taylor Pearson

• BOOK: Neal Stephenson - Snow Crash

Follow along with Adam and Return Stacked ⁠on LinkedIn, and be sure to check out returnstacked.com to learn more about what they are up to.
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