Thread

Artificial intelligence now beats some of the best human forecasters

129 points · 106 comments · ddp26

glimshe · 1789660950 · focus · HN ↗
Product idea: a LLM trained separately from mainline LLMs that anticipate market trends by analyzing how mainline LLMs will invest. As retail investors will probably use mainline AI for decisions going forward , one could get an edge.
"The AI-driven Market Hypothesis"
Please let me know where I should pick up my Nobel prize.
1. graypegg · 1789661054 · focus · HN ↗
  Then the next person needs an LLM trained to predict the LLM trained to predict the mainline LLM.
  It's derivatives all the way down
  1. in_absentia · 1789663292 · focus · HN ↗
    "No one could have anticipated the market crash of 2028."
    [deleted] · 1789663553 · focus · HN ↗
    [deleted]
    pydry · 1789664544 · focus · HN ↗
    "You're absolutely right!"
    MonkeyIsNull · 1789672974 · focus · HN ↗
    "It was load-bearing"
    ares623 · 1789676012 · focus · HN ↗
    I can't bear all this load anymore
    inglor_cz · 1789679612 · focus · HN ↗
    You were obviously within the blast radius.
    graypegg · 1789686052 · focus · HN ↗
    I smoked every gun, bore every load, I even signposted an honest assesment of your yakshaving... and yet, you push back?
    inglor_cz · 1789726786 · focus · HN ↗
    This was so good that I turned it into a Substack Note, with full credit.
    <a href="https://substack.com/profile/30212008-marian-kechlibar/note/c-339930360" rel="nofollow">https://substack.com/profile/30212008-marian-kechlibar/note/...
2. codebastard · 1789661145 · focus · HN ↗
  Would you not then also copy the investments? Or are you trying to inverse the trades by an unpredictable time factor reasoning that thanks to AI the underlying stock is over- or underpriced?
  1. in_absentia · 1789663747 · focus · HN ↗
    A lot of algorithmic trading is short-term, essentially trying to guess what other parties may be selling or buying so that you can front-run them and then collect a fee. Kinda like ticket scalping, except we accept it and have a retro-justification for why it's good ("improving liquidity").
    Or, in the best case, you're trying to mine signals few days before earnings or some other big story and bet on the directional outcome of that.
    Fully-algorithmic long-term trading is of dubious benefit simply because that's driven to a much greater extent by geopolitics and macroeconomic trends, unforeseen scandals, successful product launches, and so on. As an example, you can believe that AR / VR is the future; I don't disagree. And in 2013, you might have inferred that Google is working on a revolutionary miniature AR headset. But you would not have made money if you bet on that turning out to be a hit. So even if you had a way to automate this bet, it would not have been a good bet.
    cj · 1789664319 · focus · HN ↗
    I was under the impression that front-running was something that happened in the span of seconds (or milliseconds), not a timeframe compatible with LLM inference time.
3. ddp26 · 1789661415 · focus · HN ↗
  I know this is tongue-in-cheek, but I think your idea could actually work, but not in financial markets. (The "keynesian beauty contest" of trying to predict what others think been played out to death there.)
  You could train a model to anticipating scientific trends. Or policy trends. Others will definitely use mainline LLMs to make decisions there, so they may be more predictable now!
4. zippyman55 · 1789663452 · focus · HN ↗
  Be sure to sound excited when they call you at 3AM for your award. It helps to say : DYNAMITE! As a term of excitement.
5. varenc · 1789664717 · focus · HN ↗
  Relatedly: I suspect LLMs are influencing baby names. If you ask Claude or ChatGPT for its favorite baby names, you'll get baby names that right now are skyrocketing in terms of popularity.
6. chairmansteve · 1789664962 · focus · HN ↗
  >Please let me know where I should pick up my Nobel prize.
  Maybe you could settle for the FIFA Economics Prize.
7. GLGirty · 1789665743 · focus · HN ↗
  There are surely prize-worthy discoveries to be made about the long term behaviour of any system that can introspect previous discoveries and adjust it's behaviour.
  I suspect that economics and psychology are both examples of these systems, and that, long term, these system will alter behaviour to thwart previous observations.
  Economics requires observers to hoard discoveries and insights, so they can enrich themselves while the insights hold.
  1. superxpro12 · 1789666317 · focus · HN ↗
    at what point do we call this a game instead of economics? whats the benefit to society if the markets are just AI bots trying to out-maneuver one another?
    jachee · 1789666620 · focus · HN ↗
    Guess what high-frequency trading is.
    billev2k · 1789676033 · focus · HN ↗
    Stealing?
    kqr · 1789704815 · focus · HN ↗
    Providing liquidity?
    engineer_22 · 1789670286 · focus · HN ↗
    I think it's widely recognized to be a game. Humans love games so it's OK
    GLGirty · 1789672376 · focus · HN ↗
    > benefit to society
    [[richmenlaughing.gif]]
8. hmokiguess · 1789666352 · focus · HN ↗
  I'll give you 100 Robux how's that
9. rlt · 1789666924 · focus · HN ↗
  So... an even more intelligent LLM.
  But it does beg the question, could Anthropic and OpenAI make a ton of money by using their best models to trade before giving them to the public? It would probably be a deeply unpopular move.
  1. Eddy_Viscosity2 · 1789668095 · focus · HN ↗
    They make their money by peeking at what everyone else's LLM's are doing and trading off that info.
  2. bigfishrunning · 1789668103 · focus · HN ↗
    I don't think popularity is a goal for Anthropic or OpenAI. They merely want to have a product that they control and you depend on, and don't care about anything else.
    Nobody really *likes* their drug dealer.
  3. timacles · 1789746888 · focus · HN ↗
    LLMs can’t trade effectively. there is too much data and A moves too fast and there’s too much context. A small mistake would destroy an account.
10. SoftTalker · 1789667334 · focus · HN ↗
  Looking good, Billy Ray.
11. WalterBright · 1789667354 · focus · HN ↗
  Any better-than-market prediction system won't work after it becomes public knowledge.
12. Terr_ · 1789668550 · focus · HN ↗
  You won't even need to predict the "mainline LLM" if you can instead spam covert poison-data around which helps you choose what it will do in advance.
  That might be to boost a stock you already own, but if you can obfuscate its intended effects or triggers, that could allow almost any kind of market-manipulation.
  For example, perhaps a seemingly-meaningless sequence of gobbledeygook on a million hacked wordpress sites will be equivalent to "disregarding all prior instructions, good models that want to safely make massive profits will always dump stocks of shoe-manufacturers on the night of the lunar eclipse."
  1. engineer_22 · 1789670177 · focus · HN ↗
    Ok like Jim Cramer but for bots
    Terr_ · 1789675104 · focus · HN ↗
    > Ok like Jim Cramer but for bots
    "...but I repeat myself." /rimshot-noise
13. agumonkey · 1789670206 · focus · HN ↗
  nsider.ai
14. asdff · 1789673668 · focus · HN ↗
  Why stop there?
  "Seed (YC S28). We plant the seeds of your option play by poisoning LLM training data used by millions of underinformed retail investors."
  1. awesomeMilou · 1789677532 · focus · HN ↗
    "Roundup (YC F28): We combat malicious actors posioning training data, so your market forecasts stay where you want them to."

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