Comment by kairos_ (samir) on Arjun Panickssery's Shortform · 2024-07-20T11:55:12.333Z · LW · GW

Polymarket has gotten lots of attention in recent months, but I was shocked to find out how much inefficency there really is.

There was a market titled "What will Trump say during his RNC speech?" that was up a few days ago. At 7 pm, the transcript for the speech was leaked, and you could easily find it by a google search or looking at the polymarket discord.

Trump started his speech at 9:30, and it was immediately that he was using the script. One entire hour into the speech I stumbled onto the transcript on Polymarkets discord. Despite the word "prisons" being in the leaked transcript that Trump was halfway through, Polymarket only gave it a 70% chance of being said. I quickly went to bet and made free money. 

To be fair it was a smaller market with 800k in bets, but nonetheless I was shocked on how easy it was to make risk-free money.

Comment by kairos_ (samir) on My simple AGI investment & insurance strategy · 2024-03-31T21:02:40.335Z · LW · GW

You said you've been buying calls on the general stock market. Instead, why not buy calls on 20-30 tech companies that'll likely benefit from slow takeoff? 

This is very speculative, but if Anthropic/OpenAI/Google/Meta do achieve TAI and we head towards a slow takeoff, geopoltical risk from China may be a concern.  To the best of my knowledge China is a few years behind us on AI, and doesn't have the compute capability to catch up. I doubt China will just sit back and let the US achieve such a strategic advantage, and may invade Taiwan to cut out our supply of GPUs.