David has made four bets that remain unresolved: $10k against Marcus Hutter and $10k against me that he can solve Navier-Stokes, $25k against Daniel Litt that he can solve Hodge, and $25k against Sridhar Ramesh that he can solve BSD.
I will also at my discretion add in any other similar bets I find out he's made on him solving famous mathematical problems, but only if they are $1000 or above, have reasonably unambiguous resolution criteria, and were made prior to March 2026. (And I'll be willing to resolve this early, and won't add in bets that occur after the market resolves.)
Will he pay out in full for every bet he loses within 2 months? (Legal-action-induced payments are allowed, but it has to happen within 2 months.) (For the Hutter bet, he lost at the beginning of this year since he didn't even submit the paper.)
Previous market: /IsaacKing/will-anybody-get-paid-by-david-budd
There will be no AI clarifications added to this market's description.
1,000Hmm, not sure how to handle this; I don't have insight into the exact reasons for this, but my guess would be that David de-facto threatened to not pay at all in order to strongarm his counterparties into accepting worse deals.
@IsaacKing hm, imho as long as there's mutual agreement between them, it doesn't count as non-payment for the purpose of this market (disclaimer I hold YES)
@retr0id Hmm, I mean if David offered me 8k in return for a statement that I considered the debt paid, I would still be pretty unhappy about it.
@IsaacKing where do you see that he used a threat of not paying? I only see Sridhar and Daniel letting him have more time, which seems like a gentlemanly thing to do - iff he asked nicely, without threats
@IsaacKing I’d suggest that people have to be paid in full. Obviously you’ll know in your case whether that’s happened or not. For the other bets, we’d just have to go on whatever is expressed publicly. If someone is strong-armed into making a public statement that they were paid in full when they actually weren’t in order to get anything, that’s unfortunate, but not really the kind of thing anyone other other than Budden and the recipient can know. However, if, say, Litt announces “I’ve accept 10k and consider the matter closed”, I think this market should resolve no.
@polymathematic so far the concessions I've seen are on the deadlines, not the amounts.
I agree with you that it shouldn't count as non-payment as long as they agreed, but only because we have no proof that their agreement was under duress
@DavidBudden after the funeral incident, you made tweet that sounded like you weren't planning to pay for the rest of your bets, if you lost. If you then started negotiating with Daniel and Sridhar about the timelines, without clearly re-committing to pay in full no matter what, then it might be reasonable to consider that tweet as a threat that unfairly improved your negotiating position
@DavidBudden You have the ability to prove me wrong at any point by paying people what you owe them!
The fact that you choose not to do this is relevant information about you, and rational agents will take it into account.
@IsaacKing that's fair. Maybe they'll also learn something about payout-spamming them on 3 different channels after they've just broadcast a loss in their family, and following up by further broadcasting the interpretation that everyone else's very-reasonable concessions were due to me "threatening" them.
Unless your claim is that we had an agreement on payout latency? In which case, I'm happy to be a rational agent, too, in addition to anything else we might have agreed on.
@AhronMaline "the funeral incident" lol. You've convinced me. I'll pay Isaac precisely what he's owed precisely when I'm required to. Enjoy the resolution.
@AhronMaline End of February. The original bet is a little unclear what the exact "resolution time" is, but given that David has explicitly acknowledged he's lost the bet, and has already paid Marcus, I think the ambiguity has been resolved.
@Lexer It is generally believed that Budden is wealthy due to his former position at DeepMind. But this is new - which president is he related to, and how?
