Aschenbrenner and his investors will gain financially from more and accelerated AGI progress.
Not necessarily—they could just invest in publicly traded company where the counterfactual impact is not very large (even a large hedge fund buying some say Google stock wouldn’t much move the market cap). They could also be shorting certain companies which might reduce economically inefficient overinvestment into AI, which might also have x-risk externalities. It would be different if he ran a VC fund and invested in getting the next, say, Anthropic off the ground. Especially if the profits are donated and used for mission hedging, this might be good.
The hedge fund could position Aschenbrenner to have a deep understanding of and connections within the AI landscape, making the think tank outputs very good, and causing important future decisions to be made better.
Yes, the outputs might be better as the incentives are aligned: the hedge fund / think tank has ‘skin in the game’ to get the correct answers on the future of AI progress (though maybe some big banks are also trying to move markets with their publications).
For your second point, you should skeptically expect their publishings/influence to be corrupted easily as the information they’d put out would be very connected to their investing alpha. The corruption could take the form of omission of key details, under-hyping stuff in which they were unable to get exposure(/investment) and biases like that.
Not necessarily—they could just invest in publicly traded company where the counterfactual impact is not very large (even a large hedge fund buying some say Google stock wouldn’t much move the market cap). They could also be shorting certain companies which might reduce economically inefficient overinvestment into AI, which might also have x-risk externalities. It would be different if he ran a VC fund and invested in getting the next, say, Anthropic off the ground. Especially if the profits are donated and used for mission hedging, this might be good.
Yes, the outputs might be better as the incentives are aligned: the hedge fund / think tank has ‘skin in the game’ to get the correct answers on the future of AI progress (though maybe some big banks are also trying to move markets with their publications).
For your second point, you should skeptically expect their publishings/influence to be corrupted easily as the information they’d put out would be very connected to their investing alpha.
The corruption could take the form of omission of key details, under-hyping stuff in which they were unable to get exposure(/investment) and biases like that.