Well - there is a giant push to allow non-qualified investors to invest their 401k (and roth and whatever) into the private equities market - pre-IPO companies and such.

I can't shake the feeling of a grand fleecing incoming - and honestly, most big financial companies I know are against it because the blowback of inevitably bankrupting the firefighters&nurses pension fund will be congressional hearings and piercings of corporate veils.

Seems like the feds are pushing for it - for reasons I cannot fathom.

There is talk among the more conspiracy-minded folk that short exposure to companies that were supposed to go bankrupt, and then didn't, has been rolled into esoteric financial instruments that were sold to retirement funds. If these companies in particular weather a downturn, while everything else is bleedig profusely, it'll be like a double whammy; the short hedge turned into another knife.

A lot - and over the coming 2 years, even more. Utilization rates are under 50% across the board, and special and cheaper chips are coming out all the time for inference. And a truckload of research - TurboQuant, HC (deepseek), etc, etc..

Imagine an agent shadowing all your terminals, providing ideas and asking to run commands that will let it verify the hypotheses it comes up with, while at the same time doing research on vendor docs, etc...

Quite safe, and already a force multiplier - this would be a harness. Maybe have it be able to write to a shadow system with similar (ideally same) hardware to verify it's hypothesis on how the system works, etc...

Minor nit re[2]: for agentic workloads that are actually worth money - i.e., claude code and similar, things are either prefill-bound - which this does not help - or more importantly tps/user bound (at 150k+ context windows) - you want your big magic model to emit 200 tps/user. This is why Nvidia bought Groq (now LPU) and what Cerebras is trying to do, etc, etc. So for the stuff that makes money in the field - GPUs are not really compute bound once context lengths are large - but still memory transfer bound (may be KV-cache transfer, may be HBM->SRAM-on-chip, etc..)

> i.e., claude code and similar, things are either prefill-bound

When accounting for prefix caching, this greatly accelerates each turn. Barring large file reads, prefill still isn't the bottleneck vs. decoding reasoning tokens. Script-writing too.

This is especially true during exploration phases when traversing through directory trees and grepping files, you're talking about a few hundred tokens/turn.

Kindof yeah - predictivity is a question though for larger layers - when trying to scale this up. But yeah, this is a "95% predictor in latent space is a 7x improvement in speed if done right" approach.

Note that _passenger aviation_ is commercially non-competitive. The big 4 US airlines make money on credit cards, not airfare : they lose money on airfare. So, most people who are trying to make money will not use them as a model.

In general, safe businesses can only exist with government support or government prohibition of all other businesses globally - and that is a very hard bar to clear.

We are multiple orders of magnitude away from Landauer limits - so next big thing in matmul could be photonic multipliers - there’s a bunch of them coming up in the next 3? years. So that’s a 2-4 order of magnitude improvement. Sigmoid?

I think the one thing you are not taking into account is that the investors on average fundamentally don’t care. Scale arbitrage means that small companies are fundamentally about velocity - and if they get sued due to regulations that do not pierce the corporate veil, they just fold. And the ones that did not get sued make money for the vc. And figure out later how to be hipaa etc compliant. Basically, I’ve been seeing over the last 10 years VCs are not caring about insurance or corporate liability - sink rate is so high it is irrelevant.

For big corps - this is different. But modulo hipaa - this is why they are gung ho hi about binding arbitration - they are trying to match velocity to some degree - and mostly failing…

VCs and investors are a massive issue, which is ironic saying that here, but once you get into contracts with other businesses, it changes things for the business and the leadership within who do carry liability when things go wrong, especially when they have made attestations.

"who do carry liability when things go wrong" -> unless one pierces the corporate veil, it's just money. Not even their money. HIPAA - unless basically stealing data - will not generate personal liability. And even for SOX will only generate liability in limited amounts for limited people - and executives will go a long way towards avoiding the entire thing.

From what I have seen - most executives would rather shut down the business and quit than accept the possibility of personal liability - and just avoid the regions of the world in which they do have it.

I mean - I'd say electricity, agriculture, steam power, metallurgy, silicon computing (cmos), atomic power, the scientific method - these are _all_ very impressive - all lead to drastic changes for humanity. Not sure how I'd rank them.

I personally think AI will end up sitting in the top 3 of these - but that is an opinion. I do think it is obvious it is at least _somewhere_ in that list.

Absolutely agree

The EOD reconciliation (and corresponding inability to settle a position in milliseconds) is a feature - it allows "obvious erroneous trade" roll-back mechanisms, etc.

Very few people want the financial system to be a contractual suicide pact - they want it to be predictable, but when the unpredictable happens - they want the retail and institutional investor to be protected (the HFT players can go beat each other up - no one will really cry about them). And unpredictable can be anything from a power event taking out multiple exchanges in the NJ triangle (Sandy hurricane) to a cyber-attack (never happened yet) to a flash-crash driven by algorithms from multiple HFT driving each other nuts (happened at least once).

So, it is not EOD processes as such, but the ability to pause, assess the entire system holistically, and then correct it before it blows up the portfolios of everyone holding a 401k. So even though the exchanges _could_ got to 24/7 trading, I'd be surprised if we just went away from cyclical 24-hr based windows of settlement.

Right, but EOD also introduces credit risk on the clearing house/bilateral.

Also, I would say that probabilistic finality is one of the main issues that tradfi has with crypto (which also exists in the case of margined exchanges, for the reasons you mention). Market participants expect trades to be final, the idea that they can be rolled back is extremely unattractive.

The reason you don't need to stop the market in crypto is because you don't have EOD reconcliation. If everything settles immediately and the risk engine can keep up with the market then there is no credit risk (there have also been multiple solutions to this problem in crypto, none of them involved waiting until the end of the day to see what happens when they try to cross everyone). The reason they have market halts is to limit credit risk from the market moving in one direction and winners being unable to recover gains from the losers. It is fair to say crypto DEX haven't solved this with ADLs but they start from a better place and the higher level of competition means that innovation to invent new solutions is actually happening. The reason exchanges have shit tech is because there is no competition.

I feel like your comment is baiting because you surely know what happened at LME with trades getting cancelled because they would have caused LME insiders to lose money. Hunt Brothers caused massive issues for clearing house, HK government had to bail out clearing house...there are massive issues with the current system.

I kindof agree that it is unattractive - but the regulators are perfectly happy with "EOD also introduces credit risk on the clearing house/bilateral." if it allows them to protect retail and institutional investors. They'd rather bail out the clearing houses - which they can do - then have the retail investor lose faith in the markets for a generation or 2 - ala the great crash.

So, to your point - yep, it is not final. But it is unattractive _to the market making and prime brokers and similar players_ which the regulators do not care much about.

> they want the retail and institutional investor to be protected

That costs money, indirectly

But it does allow these investors to participate in the markets without losing their shirts - and the lack of such liquidity would impact the market more so than the cost of the risk mitigation - which as you completely correctly noted is not free - both in first and second order terms.