From $45B to Ruin: The Overfitting Story of an AI Hedge Fund

What's the scariest part about doing experiments? It's spending half a year tuning parameters, achieving state-of-the-art results on the training set, only to have everything crash when you switch to the test set. Even worse than model collapse is having to write a paper explaining why. Aschenbrenner's story sounds like an academic version of an overfitting nightmare, except his training set was "the future," his test set was "reality," and the cost was $45 billion.