191–200 of 370 posts
You’ll note that Mr. Zitron’s analysis is based on unfounded assertions (API prices are the ‘real costs’ of tokens, and model providers are margin negative on subscriptions) and outdated figures (OpenAI negative profit in 2025, ignoring at least Anthropic’s recent turn to profitability.) Just more wishful thinking from our favorite AI skeptic
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Ya, there are already three pure ad hominem comments here with no examples. Zitron isn't even anti-AI per se. He clearly talks out his ass at times (like AI doesn't work for developers... which he's not saying so much anymore, I don't think) but his main talking points are around numbers and profitability.
> Ya, there are already three pure ad hominem comments here with no examples. You should probably understand Thomas' comment in part as a reaction to Zitron attacking Thomas in a pretty low-brow fashion, essentially for saying "hey folks, AI coding works and you should be using it": https://www.wheresyoured.at/how-to-argue-with-an-ai-booster/ The bottom line is that Ed Zitron, like Gary Marcus, built their entire bra…
Sure, but an ad hominem is still an ad hominem regardless of one's personal feelings (it took me a good minute to figure out who "Thomas" is).
Otherwise, I agree, and I try not to cite extremists or bullies on either side. I don't even really care that much about defending Zitron, but I do put him on in the background because he does so many podcasts as I find it soothing to listen to someone rant and rave against the tech bro overlords, even if some of the shit he says annoys me. But he does show his work sometimes and wanted to point that out.
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"The biggest thing we’ve learned from the large language model generation is how many people are excited to replace human beings, and how many people just don’t understand labour of any kind" Really? I think we've heard C-suite blabbermouths and borderline nontechnical tech CEOs being amplified by social media making these assertions, but boy did the weakly efficient market deliver a relatively swift correction to th…
> But in a world where AI is a fad like cabbage patch kids and beanie babies AI will almost certainly not be a fad for software developers, or at the very least for web developers, but it's certainly possible that other industries will look back on "experimental AI days" and chuckle. Even if there is a financial bubble (that pops), the technology is still not going away. As for what's next, I dunno. I've heard people…
But I think AI is here to stay and it has already proven useful. And sure, we will look back on today's models like we look back upon Gordon Gekko and his giant early cell phone. And I cannot fathom how one can not separate AI the science and technology from AI tech bros and CEOs. I agree the latter are going to go through some things as the AGI fails to arrive on their schedule, but IMO there's no turning back on the technology nor should there be.
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I don’t have numbers, but I would like to point out that he's missing a crucial number as well. The fact that maxing out a subscription's limit makes a user generate an amount of tokens that costs much more than the subscription itslef isn't enough to back his claim. What we need to know, is the average use of subscriptions. Think about Gyms. My gut feeling is that, if we run the numbers, we see that by maxing out a…
You do really need to see the useage numbers for this. Movie pass famously thought they could price movie tickets like gym memberships - I assume they looked at how often the average person watched movies in theaters at the start - but then found out having a subscription to see movies for free / cheap any time you want changed that rate substantially and they ran out of vc money. Having a subscription might make peo…
User's getting bored will also spell trouble for the subscription model. I don't think we'll see a world where the average normie is going to be running agents in a loop overnight to make software. They'll get bored use it to cheat on their homework and as a Google replacement, generate silly images for a week then get bored of that, and then realize the have no actual reason to be spending $100/month and drop down to a lower tier or just cancel all together and live within the free-tier limits.
So if that happens, the labs are now left only with power users that can actually generate asymmetric cost. The market will bifurcate into free-tier users and "get their money's worth" users. So the risk isn't that the top 5% of users use more tokens than the subscription has any right to give you, it's that everyone else cancels their plans and only those top 5% of users remain.
The labs will have to put stricter rate limiting and token limits on the subscription plans to avoid MoviePass style burn.
Gyms get away with it because most don't let you cancel easily. You pay monthly, but are locked in for 6 months or a 1 year at a time (Adobe subscription style). Maybe the labs will start to do the same? Let you pay $20/month, but you are forced into an annual commitment?
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At this point I have yet to hear a solid argument against his arguments that use half as much evidence as he does. That isn’t to say that he’s right, that’s just to say that while he gets creative in his phrasing numbers don’t lie and I haven’t seen anyone else present competing numbers that make sense. If anyone has them to the degree with which he provides them then please, by all means, I’m interested.
Ya, there are already three pure ad hominem comments here with no examples. Zitron isn't even anti-AI per se. He clearly talks out his ass at times (like AI doesn't work for developers... which he's not saying so much anymore, I don't think) but his main talking points are around numbers and profitability.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ya, there are already three pure ad hominem comments here with no examples. Zitron isn't even anti-AI per se. He clearly talks out his ass at times (like AI doesn't work for developers... which he's not saying so much anymore, I don't think) but his main talking points are around numbers and profitability.
> Ya, there are already three pure ad hominem comments here with no examples. You should probably understand Thomas' comment in part as a reaction to Zitron attacking Thomas in a pretty low-brow fashion, essentially for saying "hey folks, AI coding works and you should be using it": https://www.wheresyoured.at/how-to-argue-with-an-ai-booster/ The bottom line is that Ed Zitron, like Gary Marcus, built their entire bra…
They can only subsidize you so far, because they may not be even be covering their variable cost at this point.
There's no software multiplier (build once — pay the cost once — sell many times).
Traditional SaaS is in a middle ground, there are operational costs associated with providing services, but per request they're usually negligible.
AI? I don't know, but it's not looking great from where I sit, unless there's a significant breakthrough in inference efficiency.
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I thought Ed Zitrons argument was just corroborated by Nikkei last Friday with the new report that 1.6 Trillion in SPVs accounts for off-books debt, on top of the $1.4 Trillion of on-books debt that's in these AI companies? The main argument of Ed Zitron is just that. Huge huge amounts of debt that's due "soonish". Every SPV is different but we are fast approaching the point where this all starts to become real. Now…
If that's all Zitron wrote, I don't think he'd be as polarizing (or as dunked on). But he goes way, way past that.
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You're biasing for quantity of argument vs. quality of argument. That's Zitron's MO: writing 10k word rambles that cover 20 topics, ostensibly with tons of links to sourcing, but with most of the sources not actually saying what Zitron implies they do. Nobody has the patience to read a comprehensive point by point rebuttal to any of it, it's just too tedious. You say "numbers don't lie". But they do, when the numbers…
So I’ve heard this argument before but I’ve not even seen someone demonstrate HOW the numbers are “adversarial”. This is the crux of my argument: Zitron provides numbers and he provides a lot of them sourced from reliable and trustworthy sources. He provides counterarguments to numbers-sparse arguments by using even more actual, real numbers with a logical theory formed from them. This should make it rather easy to d…
Just this article has a dozen instances of numbers being used to prop up the argument. They're mostly irrelevant to whatever argument Zitron is trying to make at the time. Some others are straight up misrepresentations. HN really is not a good forum for point by point rebuttals for that many cases. Do you think there's a particularly high impact use of numbers in this article?
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Yeah, tokenmaxxing was obviously stupid. Setting a limit is what happens when the adults in the room stop being stupid.
Not sure about that. As I replied elsewhere, it's a forcing function: > People misunderstand the point of the tokenmaxxing time period, it was to force people to use AI so as to not have them stuck in their way, as some people are, and then to evaluate how it can help the company. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49047448#49047826
The obvious second effect is that if you have a leaderboard people will compete to top it, by running dumb loops or whatever.
That impacts how much you can learn, and costs you more money than you wanted to spend.