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by _cjse 1036 days ago
>Oh wait…every hedge fund bro is already doing this. And most of them aren’t billionaires.

The contra to this is some of them are billionaires, and therefore this strategy is working, but for just a few of them.

>why would any one system ever have a large majority of the compute? Compute will be distributed in a power law.

A power law probability distribution means one system absolutely can have a large majority of the compute. Player 1 gets 80% of the compute, player 2 gets 16% (80% of 20%), and so on. The scaling constant would have to be very weak indeed in order to avoid this fate. In fact, the wealth of those hedge fund billionaires probably fit a power law themselves. But to be fair, that power law does indeed to be (for now) weak enough that we don't have to worry about e.g. Jim Simons being richer than every other hedge fund manager put together. So there's a buried assumption in here that the power law scaling is weak, and that is something purely empirical.

>The smart regulation isn’t capping the FLOPS in training runs. That’s creating a powder keg. If the FLOPS are artificially restricted, and one person breaks the restriction, you could end up with a single dominant system.

The smart regulation is to use something like fine insured bounties [1] to give people a very strong incentive not to break the FLOPS cap, and to heavily financially reward people who turn in other people who are doing so. If such a mechanism didn't exist, then I would agree, the free market would be our next best bet to deharsh the power law.

[1]: [url-redacted] - I sketched out the mechanism a few years ago, but sadly it didn't generate much interest online. To be fair the atmosphere was a lot more anti-regulation back then.

1 comments

> The contra to this is some of them are billionaires, and therefore this strategy is working, but for just a few of them

I have no clue how hedge fund managers make their money, but I was under the assumption that it involved charging their clients hefty fees for managing the funds.

I do, and that's actually incorrect in a strict sense, but it's correct-enough for the average person to follow to Vanguard et al and have a generous nest egg without a lot of risk attached.

Your intuition however is correct in the sense that there is a principal-agent problem at play with all kinds of hedge funds, where if the hedge fund manager isn't the one investing his own money he is by default incentivized to do things besides just maximizing hedge fund profits. But there are indeed managers who have such an ability to generate edge that they do in fact invest their own money solely, usually money they generated while working for other hedge fund managers before striking out on their own, and these people are terrifying forces to watch in action indeed.

When I read George's thought on this immediately Alexander Gerko and XTX Markets came to my mind. They operate one of the worlds largest GPU clusters (10k A100) [0].

They aren't really a hedge fund but a prop trading firm, but they seem to be winning the game [1].

[0]: https://www.stateof.ai/compute [1]: https://financefeeds.com/xtx-markets-earns-1-095-billion-in-...