Money Stuff & more
July 3rd, Money Stuff: AI Is Bad at Snacks
AI Rollup
Anthropic partnered with Andon Labs, an AI safety evaluation company, to have Claude Sonnet 3.7 operate a small, automated store in the Anthropic office in San Francisco. …
I am always wrong in my intuitions about what tasks will be easy or hard for AI. If you had asked me a week ago, “which task will be easier for a computer, driving a car or operating a vending machine,” I would have said “driving a car requires integrating lots of visual and other data in real time and seems really complicated, while a vending machines just … are … computers? And have been operated by computers for decades?” But, nope, vending machine operation is still hard for AI. To be fair, running a vending machine at the Anthropic office poses unusual challenges:
I feel like this demonstrates something deep about artificial intelligence. A normal dumb vending machine, bound by inflexible programming, simply would not give away a tungsten cube for free. But you’ve probably met a human being who would give away a tungsten cube for free, if you asked nicely.[1] If you are trying to build artificial general intelligence, if you want your computer to address real-world situations the way an intelligent human would, you run the risk that it will be flattered or bamboozled into giving away free tungsten cubes.
Tokeninzation
Robinhood’s attempt at democratizing the private investment market to retail customers
OpenAI posted on X:
These “OpenAI tokens” are not OpenAI equity. We did not partner with Robinhood, were not involved in this, and do not endorse it. Any transfer of OpenAI equity requires our approval—we did not approve any transfer.
Elon Musk replied “Your ‘equity’ is fake,” which is honestly pretty funny. (OpenAI’s stock is weird!)
July 7th, Money Stuff: Oh Elon
Sure! Okay! Whatever! What if your thesis was “Elon Musk’s America Party will do great, it will be very popular, it will back great candidates who will win a lot of seats, those candidates will be more generous to electric vehicles than the current government, and ultimately this political endeavor will be good for the business fortunes of Tesla specifically”? Ha ha ha. The market consensus is otherwise.
July 9th, Money Stuff: Goldman Wants Quarterly Loyalty Updates
On-cycle recruiting
An interesting world of investment banking analysts roles
I guess that’s another reason for Goldman to check in every three months. “Have you taken another job yet? No? Why not? Are you working on anything? Can we help?”
Anti-woke
In 2025, having “ESG” in the name is more of a mixed bag, and there is a rising trend for “anti-woke,” “anti-DEI,” “anti-ESG” or what have you funds that market to people who want to be able to say that they are not investing in environmentally conscious ways. Some of these people probably care a lot about the details (just as some ESG investors do), but some probably do not. Some just want to be told that they are investing in an anti-woke way, but don’t care very much about exactly what stocks are in their portfolio. So there’s an obvious opportunity for the Money Stuff S&P Anti-Woke Fund, which will also consist of all of the stocks in the S&P 500 Index, with the same weightings as in the index. There are huge efficiencies here, since the same portfolio manager could run both the ESG Fund and the Anti-Woke Fund, and also she wouldn’t have to do much because they are index funds.
Buffett Bet
Again, a lot of money managers would happily have paid $500,000 just to be able to begin a sentence “Warren and I,” but he also got multiple dinners with Buffett, plus one with a podcaster.[7] An absolutely insane bargain, a brilliant trade.
July 10th, Money Stuff: Do Your Betting With Your Broker
Gambling?
The modern way to gamble is through the financial markets, and people like betting on sports, so of course the modern way to gamble on sports is through the financial markets. Now that is also the tax-advantaged way to gamble on sports.
Agentic AI
There is something a little indirect about asking a smart computer “please code me up a system to find good stock trades,” rather than “please tell me some good stock trades,” but I guess this is the state of the art right now.
HNTRBRK
They should publish those too. “BREAKING NEWS: We looked into this company to see if it’s a fraud, but actually they’re very nice and you should buy their stock.” There’s not enough good news these days; scandals are more newsworthy than “everything’s fine here.” Unless you are long the stock.
Writer scams
The classic advance fee scam is: I have a foolproof way for you to get $5 million, but to clear up the last few technicalities, you need to give me $100,000 now. Of course it is a scam, so if you give me the $100,000, (1) I will not actually get you $5 million but (2) no see that’s not my fault, there was an unanticipated holdup at the Ruritanian register of wills, but if you give me another $50,000 we can get that expedited. And so forth. I am trying out this scam on a lot of people, and most of them aren’t biting; if you bite once, I am going to come back to you over and over again. “You’ve spent so much already,” I will eventually tell you, “what’s another $170,000 to finally get that $5 million?”
LLMs bring new nature of abstraction
An optimistic and somewhat measured take on LLMs impact in the software world by Martin Fowler.
As we learn to use LLMs in our work, we have to figure out how to live with this non-determinism. This change is dramatic, and rather excites me. I'm sure I'll be sad at some things we'll lose, but there will also things we'll gain that few of us understand yet. This evolution in non-determinism is unprecedented in the history of our profession.