It is ‘nearly unavoidable’ that AI will cause a financial crash within a decade, SEC head says::undefined
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The chair of the SEC has warned that AI could trigger a financial crisis, as Wall Street rushes to adopt the new technology.
Gary Gensler told the Financial Times that it was “nearly unavoidable” that AI would cause a financial crash as soon as the late 2020s or early 2030s, and said that reliance on models developed by tech companies could lead to economic chaos.
Wall Street banks have been enthusiastic adopters of generative AI since the splashy launch of ChatGPT last year.
Morgan Stanley launched an AI assistant based on OpenAI’s GPT4 model to help employees access market information last month.
Rival JPMorgan, meanwhile, has reportedly filed a patent for an AI model known as ‘IndexGPT’ that would help traders choose securities to invest in.
The SEC did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Insider, made outside normal working hours.
The original article contains 326 words, the summary contains 144 words. Saved 56%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Is it because replacing employees with AI results in a never-ending cascade where your stupid system doesn’t keep consuming because AI don’t consume and won’t get paid?
Or is it because using AI will result in the climate to continually become more inhospitable?
Maybe it will be because AI will be used to create more and more believable misinformation that results in WW3?
Currently, I would rather guess it’s the usual bubble popping. AI has attracted billions of investments and will likely pull in even more, but it’s already foreseeable, that hardly any of the investments will turn a profit. So we’ll end up with a third dotcom bubble.
AI isn’t a bubble. The futurist/Rationalist/transhumanist communities were saying what’s happening now would happen in a few years about a decade ago, and our predictions are that the next phase is AI taking over all labor through sophisticated automation. We’ve been trying to warn everyone about this since the advent of Google Deep Dream, but sure stick your head in the sand again and let the world burn around you; it’s worked so well so far.
This comment will probably get bombed, but w/e. 🤷♂️ Go ahead and be ignorant and angry at me, I’m used to it.
Edit: yes I am bitter. I’ve had a bad day, and I’m annoyed.
How many times has that been predicted already? Three, four? Look at the history of AI, it happens every few years.
Anyway, you’re implying a dichotomy here. World domination or pipedream, but that’s not the case. The dotcom bubble was without a doubt a bubble, but much of the underlying technology was used a few years later, just without the hype and fanfare.
AI will probably find its uses, and has the potential to eliminate a lot of jobs, but the current iteration of AI businesses is utter garbage. Even something as comparatively simple as Microsoft’s Copilot is currently losing money - roughly as much as it costs to use. Yet, there are billions upon billions being poured into useless start-ups that will never produce anything of value in a profitable manner.
What exactly happened to self driving cars BTW? Weren’t those totally on track of what experts predicted?
OK, it is addressed in the article…
He’s specifically talking about the use of AI in finance, and that an algorithm that runs amok in a particular sector:
in the after action reports people will say ‘Aha! There was either one data aggregator or one model . . . we’ve relied on.’ Maybe it’s in the mortgage market. Maybe it’s in some sector of the equity market
I’ll throw out a microeconomic example. About a year into the pandemic, the price of used cars started going up… a LOT… in a short time. One of the reasons for the sudden changes in used car prices was that major used car resellers were using algorithms to set buying and selling prices for cars. While supply chain pressure on the new car market was unprecedented, and it trickled down to used cars, a facilitating cause is that the used car price-setting algorithms didn’t really have any humans in the chain checking to see if the numbers they were kicking out made a lick of sense.
So you had companies like Carmax and Carvana buying used cars for $X, and then a month later 5X, then a month later 10X, because they were programmed to just up the offering price until they reached target stock levels. Sometimes they were buying 3+ year old used cars for more than the current price of NEW cars of similar trim level. Carvana’s numbers got so whacked that it nearly sunk the company.
Now imagine that kind of a runaway algorithm in stocks, bonds, real estate, etc. It’s 2008 all over again.
My 2013 Prius got totaled around the peak of this. I wanted to just replace it with the exact same model, because it’s a good car. It would have been cheaper to buy brand new one at the time. I got a new electric car instead and with the $7k tax rebate ended up spending less than I would have to buy a 9 year old Prius.
Honestly hoping something like this happens in residential real estate, if it isn’t happening already. Housing is well overdue for a correction.
You can’t tell me that most people can afford a $400,000-$700,000 mortgage. Median incomes don’t support that price point. Median household incomes might support the lower end…barely. So I am starting to wonder just who is buying/selling all these houses. When I see a $600,000 “average” house last 3 days on the market and then sell for $760,000…I have questions.
Median incomes don’t support that price point. Median household incomes might support the lower end…barely.
I swear if I ever marry it will just be to combine finances so we can actually buy a house and stuff
I’ve been reading that nobody can afforrd to buy houses for at least a decade now and the price just keeps going up so clearly people can afford it.
In my blue collar, median wage earning workplace the vast majority are homeowners and having an investment property is seen as normal and expected., it’s the new baseline for doing ok. They have dual incomes, two cars, and overseas holidays every year. They are migrants who had no bank of mom and dad and they prefer to send their kids to private or carholic schools.
They are not poor, but if you believe what you read on the internet they should have zero kids and be living paycheck to paycheck.
I traded in a 2014 Toyota hatchback to Carmax and got an Audi A3 when the algorithms went haywire. It didn’t cover the whole cost but it was a silly enough trade that I thought for sure someone would call me and say it was a computer error.
While that’s really interesting, there was a lot more at play than a pricing algorithm. It was a culmination of a lot of things, starting with Cash for Clunkers that had a huge impact on the used car market. Then there were a ton of supply chain issues during COVID that squeezed the new car market. Probably some other factors I’m not aware of, too.
Right, my point is that relying on pricing algorithms when faced with novel “black swan” conditions nearly drove major used car dealers out of business. Obviously, the algorithm didn’t cause the novel conditions, but neither did they buffer the effects. Instead, they accelerated the financial effects.
If you go back and read about Carvana before the pandemic, their big selling point to investors was that their algorithms were “smarter” than the competition and would realize more consistent profits for the company and their investors. When it became clear that these “smart” algorithms went insane, investors abandoned the company and their valuation dropped from $60 billion to $7.5 billion between 2021 and 2023. Carvana has narrowly avoided bankruptcy.
It was pretty bananas for a minute. The Mazda dealership offered us 5,000 more than we paid brand new for my wife’s Mazda 3 in 2018. I told the salesperson that it makes no fucking sense and he couldn’t explain it either. Didn’t go for it for a bunch of reasons but it was really odd.
Heavy doubt on this one.
There is still so much misunderstanding on the state of AI and its potential based on current technology (spoiler: reduce your expectations significantly). How can you expect anyone to make predictions with such misunderstanding.
That said it kinda seems like a financial crash is already happening, regardless of AI.
I don’t know why everybody keeps downplaying where AI is already at and the speed at which it is improving. It can already disrupt multiple industries with where image, voice, and LMM AI is at right now.
For me personally it’s not that I want to downplay it, it’s that I want to balance the scales. I see far more over-estimating of AI happening than downplaying.
The current form of AI is great as a tool and sadly there are definitely jobs out there that are nearly completely replaced by this tool. But that scope isn’t about to change much based on where we are currently at. Many jobs require actual intelligence to make judgment calls, and the current form of AI just isn’t going to cut it here as it has no real intelligence.
Of course, that won’t stop dumb business leaders from still trying to use AI here, but that’s an error in judgment that imo will correct itself over time.
I’m not dismissing its usefulness for those scenario’s (see my response to Veltoss below). But people tend to way over-estimate what it is capable of.
Generating an office layout? Yeah absolutely, because that’s largely based on prior art, no real innovation required. Though as you noted you’ll almost certainly need to “steer” the AI because there’s so many variables and permutations that it cannot realistically come up with a perfect solution without real intelligence. It’ll require iteration from “someone” no matter how advanced it gets.
But AI as it exists right now won’t replace let’s say your office manager, who would probably be given the responsibility of planning the office layout. Because their job entails making lots of intelligence based judgment calls. That said; given they will get more AI powered tools to do their job there may be fewer jobs available overall because now your office manager at some big office won’t need an assistant anymore.
Note I am not saying that AI affecting our economy isn’t happening or won’t happen. I’m merely saying that any predictions people are making should be met with a heavy amount of doubt, because there is so much misunderstanding out there.
Financial expert predicts that (what is already) the longest bull market in world history will end within the next 10 years? And the thing that the world’s largest companies are investing the most in might play a roll in that?
Bold.
And? Is it something this person thinks we would avoid without AI? You would need a lot of faith that ‘the market’ won’t dunk on itself some other way. What a non-statement…
