The AI Whateverpocalypse Trade
Also defeasance and Bitcoin margin loan securitization.
Okay so I have a business plan for Sam Altman. Here’s what you do. You build an artificial intelligence application for some specific sort of business, coding or tax planning or whatever. You roll it out on a Tuesday morning. You announce it in blandly optimistic terms and do some cool demos. You go on financial television, and when they ask you — as they will — a question like “won’t this disrupt the business model of software-as-a-service companies” or “won’t this put financial advisers out of business,” you smirk ruefully and shake your head and say “well there is a lot of disruption coming, and it may be difficult to know what role money will play in a post-artificial general intelligence world.”
And by Tuesday afternoon every software company or wealth management company or whatever sector you’re targeting will have sold off by like 10%. Oh and of course the other thing you do is, on Monday — before you announce the new product — you buy a bunch of put options on all of the software/wealth management/whatever companies’ stocks. And you make like a 1,000% one-day return on your money, probably not in huge size but in useful size.