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Ed Zitron loses his mind annotating an AI doomer macro memo

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Re: Ed Zitron loses his mind annotating an AI doomer macro memo

#51

Post by danlitt »

hiddencost wrote: post #28
zero_shift wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cost, debt, difficulty forming a moat, gap between what the product promises and what it can do, and the difficulty actually raising capital required. His style is acerbic and (imo) excessive sometimes. But he's also one of a minority of journos actually looking at the numbers and adding them up. Which seems to be a rarity

Disagree. He's cherry picking an extremely limited subset of numbers, based on a weak understanding of the industry and a lack of access to a lot of private data, and taking advantage of vulnerable people.

>taking advantage of vulnerable people

What on earth do you mean by this? Who is getting taken advantage of?

Re: Ed Zitron loses his mind annotating an AI doomer macro memo

#52

Post by JanneVee »

simianwords wrote: post #19
zero_shift wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think so. His argument is not "this tech doesn't work", but rather "these businesses aren't economically viable" And that the smoke and mirrors accounting and perpetual thirst for more billions indicates just how unviable it is Whilst he does dunk on LLM capabilities, the framing is the business angle - can Anysphere etc. actually form a moat and make a profit?

>His argument has never been "this tech doesn't work", but rather "these businesses aren't economically viable" Why? because of cost?

Well from my point of view. When they talk about gigawatt datacenters, then yes it is economically nonviable. You just need to know the scale of a gigawatt to realize that we need to start building power plants and fortifying the power grid to ship a gigawatt of power to a single location. Until the build out which takes years mind you, it is competing with other consumers of power. Lets take another huge consumer of power like a large steel mills use 100 megawatt. So if that power becomes more expensive because of datacenters, then the price of steel will go up. And if the price of steel goes up it affects a lot of things in the economy.

We are facing a situation that the short term effects are on memory and storage prices going up and lack of jet engines. Long term we wont be able to build actual buildings and ships without financing it with even more debt than today and everyone in the economy is going to service that debt through the price.

Re: Ed Zitron loses his mind annotating an AI doomer macro memo

#53

Post by energy123 »

simianwords wrote: post #39
zero_shift wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think so. His argument is not "this tech doesn't work", but rather "these businesses aren't economically viable" And that the smoke and mirrors accounting and perpetual thirst for more billions indicates just how unviable it is Whilst he does dunk on LLM capabilities, the framing is the business angle - can Anysphere etc. actually form a moat and make a profit?

I don't think Ed doesn't comment about the actual tech. Here are some things he has said before and please tell me if these still hold in the spirit? > You cannot "fix" hallucinations (the times when a model authoritatively tells you something that isn't true, or creates a picture of something that isn't right), because these models are predicting things based off of tags in a dataset, which it might be able to do we…

This guy sounds like an uninformed jackass.

Look at Gemini 3.1 Pro on the AA-Omniscience Index, which measures hallucinations. It's 30, previous best was 11.

https://artificialanalysis.ai/evaluations/omniscience

With the amount of talent working on this problem, you would be unwise to bet against it being solved, for any reasonable definition of solved.

Re: Ed Zitron loses his mind annotating an AI doomer macro memo

#55

Post by coldtea »

Kye wrote: post #27
coldtea wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't work precisely because people are using claude. If it worked, there'd be no people using it.

Nobody goes there, it's too crowded.

"It's not revolutionary automation if every 'automator' has an operator attached" - doesn't take a Yogi to figure out...

Re: Ed Zitron loses his mind annotating an AI doomer macro memo

#56

Post by simianwords »

JanneVee wrote: post #52
simianwords wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>His argument has never been "this tech doesn't work", but rather "these businesses aren't economically viable" Why? because of cost?

Well from my point of view. When they talk about gigawatt datacenters, then yes it is economically nonviable. You just need to know the scale of a gigawatt to realize that we need to start building power plants and fortifying the power grid to ship a gigawatt of power to a single location. Until the build out which takes years mind you, it is competing with other consumers of power. Lets take another huge consumer of…

but the costs of inference have been going down 20x to 30x over the years. so how can you tell it is nonviable? unless you are saying they are not paying market rate for the inference

Re: Ed Zitron loses his mind annotating an AI doomer macro memo

#57

Post by vv_ »

hiddencost wrote: post #26

I've started to feel like Ed Zitron is actively hurting people I care about. I'm lucky to have worked in the field for a long time, and be able to spend a lot of tokens. In the last month it's become clear to me that the tech works. The science is done, and what's left is engineering. There are a lot of risks and mitigations and theory to build, but it's all solvable. The tech isn't mature, but neither was the Intern…

> They insist the tech will never work, and avoid learning about it, becoming progressively more paranoid and isolated.

They can always learn the technology later, when and if it proves itself to be useful :) I personally don't understand the hype, even after using Claude and other AI tools - but perhaps that will change in the future.

Re: Ed Zitron loses his mind annotating an AI doomer macro memo

#58

Post by JanneVee »

simianwords wrote: post #56
JanneVee wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well from my point of view. When they talk about gigawatt datacenters, then yes it is economically nonviable. You just need to know the scale of a gigawatt to realize that we need to start building power plants and fortifying the power grid to ship a gigawatt of power to a single location. Until the build out which takes years mind you, it is competing with other consumers of power. Lets take another huge consumer of…

but the costs of inference have been going down 20x to 30x over the years. so how can you tell it is nonviable? unless you are saying they are not paying market rate for the inference

So, they still booked up all the ram and ssd in the world and still going to use gigawatts of power. The price of energy production is not going to go down 20x and 30x it just means that they can cram in more inference on the same energy consumption if the cost goes down. But they aren't paying the market rate for inference because everything is subsidized with debt and investors money to scale as fast as possibly. They are flushed with money and that is why they can book up all silicon production.

Re: Ed Zitron loses his mind annotating an AI doomer macro memo

#59

Post by ubercore »

rwmj wrote: post #43
dash2 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re saying that AI is already good enough to replace 50% of developers. Sounds like you agree it will be very important.

He's saying the good half of developers have to deal with the increased slop output of the bad half. Probably will be overwhelmed by it, in the end.

It _can_ produce slop if people stop thinking. I've also seen it do just fine, when people know when, where and how to use it. That's the part that frightens me, not the code it makes itself.

Re: Ed Zitron loses his mind annotating an AI doomer macro memo

#60

Post by seanhunter »

It’s sort of disappointing to me how on both sides it seems hard to have any sort of rational perspective. I find both the Citrini memo (and the subsequent market reaction) and Ed Zitron’s critique of it to be wildly off-base.

I wish everyone would just calm down a bit.

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