More takes on Citrini (I'm not the only one using scare quotes around "report")

 Yesterday we discussed this:

From CNN:

Fears of AI disruption continue to weigh on markets. Citrini Research on Sunday published a report on Substack laying out hypothetical scenarios for how developments in AI could disrupt certain parts of the economy. Stocks that were mentioned in the report tumbled on Monday.

American Express shares (AXP) sank 7.2% and had their worst day since April. Shares of DoorDash (DASH) and private equity firm KKR (KKR), two other companies named in the post, sank 6.6% and 8.89%, respectively.

 In a post with the somewhat overlong title:

 Traders who have ignored threats to Fed independence, erratic trade policy, and the deportation of much of the American labor force just panicked over a citation-free piece of fan fiction.

Now two of my favorite financial journalists have weighed in (both from newsletters so no links).

Allison Morrow of CNN: 

I put “report” in quotes because this 7,000-word screed amounted to little more than AI fan fiction — a dystopian thought experiment imagining a scenario in which AI is so successful it actually contracts economic growth and drives US unemployment rate to more than 10% by 2028. It went viral in a similar way as Matt Shumer’s similarly long-winded “Something Big Is Happening” blog post earlier this month, with people who are incentivized to make AI scary sharing it in “see I told you so” posts as if they were Prometheus bringing fire to the people. (I’ll get into this a bit more later this week, but suffice to say memos of this genre tend to have some blindspots, both substantive and stylistic). 

 

I could have spent my day debunking or otherwise making sense of the Citrini report but I — and I can’t stress this enough — did not want to. Instead, I’ll share some of the reactions from people much smarter than I am. 

 Matt Levine of Bloomberg:

I was writing specifically about a tiny company that had pivoted from karaoke to AI logistics and announced a disruptive AI logistics thing. (“I would probably be more inclined to be skeptical that this particular company is gonna be the one to disrupt the industry,” said an analyst, but added that someone probably will.) But of course you don’t even have to run the company that announces the disruptive thing. At this point, simply saying, publicly, “hey I think AI will disrupt _____,” for some company or industry or whatever, has a decent chance of driving down the price of _____. The market is really jumpy!

Obviously in all of these things it helps for your announcement to be well-written, well-reasoned and generally jazzy. But I have never seen a market where it has been so easy for an activist short to have a big impact. Like I feel like you could go on financial television today and say a company’s name, pause meaningfully, say “AI,” pause meaningfully, and walk off, and the company’s stock would drop 10%. Try it!  “DoorDash. AI. [grim nod].”