Hacker News front pageJun 22, 2026, 08:45 UTC+8

The Doom Justifies the Valuation: George Hotz Calls Out AI Safety Culture and Anthropic

The Doom Justifies the Valuation

George Hotz blasts Berkeley's AI safety scene as a cult that needs doom to justify its life choices. He calls out Anthropic's blog as pure hype—not technical writing—because current tech can't justify the valuation. He quotes a schizoposting piece arguing the AI apocalypse narrative is optimized to anchor valuations on hypothetical future value. Hotz also notes Goldman Sachs' CEO is already calling BS on mass AI unemployment fears, and asks how much longer this bubble lasts.

Why it matters: George Hotz drops a combative post contrasting GLM-5.2's technical blog with Anthropic's PR narrative, arguing AI doom justifies valuations. Sharp take with concrete examples, but it's ultimately a personal commentary without new verifiable facts, so it lands at 78, the featur...

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Take

This post lands because Hotz welds two things together: the culture of Berkeley's AI safety scene and Anthropic's valuation story. He calls the first a cult of people who need doom to be true to justify their life choices. The second, he argues, is the commercial mirror of that same narrative—when the actual tech can't carry the number, you get blog posts about exponential growth and recursive self-improvement instead of honest technical writing. He points to the GLM-5.2 blog as what normal progress looks like: slow improvement, plainly explained.

I'd discount this a bit—it's a personal blog, heavy on vibe, not an investigation. But the schizoposting quote he pulls hits something real: if a company's public narrative lives in hypothetical future catastrophe rather than current product, the valuation is anchored to panic, not revenue. The Goldman Sachs CEO is already calling BS on mass AI unemployment fears. Hotz doesn't answer how long the bubble lasts, but his question—how do we enforce consequences on the people who did this next time—is the one that sticks.

Source: Hacker News front page · geohot.github.io
Published: Jun 22, 2026, 08:45 UTC+8 · Jun 22, 2026