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How accurate have Ed Zitron's AI skeptic predictions been?

danluu.com

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Re: How accurate have Ed Zitron's AI skeptic predictions been?

#51

Post by toomuchtodo »

aleph_minus_one wrote: post #49
toomuchtodo wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone else mentioned, ignore Ed’s personality and look solely at the balance sheets and capital analysis. Regardless of delivery, the math doesn’t math. It's wild to me how much Ed is criticized while pathological liars like Musk and Altman are glossed over. (Disclosure: I pay for Zitron's publication for the capital figures and exclusives he gets his hands on, I do not pay attention to his interviews, we are fa…

> while pathological liars like Musk and Altman are glossed over. You seem to live in a bubble where these people are worshipped ... :-(

gestures broadly at HN and the tech industry

https://www.ycombinator.com/blog/ai-startupschool

I am a realist, I understand the cult of personality, etc. Just like I wouldn't spend a moment trying to talk a Catholic out of their faith. I have no feelings on the topic, this can only last so long based on capital trajectories.

Re: How accurate have Ed Zitron's AI skeptic predictions been?

#52

Post by rowanG077 »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #41
simonw wrote: post #3

> For any of his posts that I read, while there are numbers thrown around, the numbers don't actually connect to a coherent argument. In many cases, as we saw above, the numbers don't even really support his argument (such as an MAU decline in Facebook causing Meta financial problems which would then cause Meta to spuriously insert AI in places it doesn't belong). I suspect he's relying on people's eyes glazing over…

As someone else mentioned, ignore Ed’s personality and look solely at the balance sheets and capital analysis. Regardless of delivery, the math doesn’t math. It's wild to me how much Ed is criticized while pathological liars like Musk and Altman are glossed over. (Disclosure: I pay for Zitron's publication for the capital figures and exclusives he gets his hands on, I do not pay attention to his interviews, we are fa…

Are we living in the same universe? Musk and Altman are glossed over and not criticized?

Re: How accurate have Ed Zitron's AI skeptic predictions been?

#53

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

dgellow wrote: post #27
simonw wrote: post #3

> For any of his posts that I read, while there are numbers thrown around, the numbers don't actually connect to a coherent argument. In many cases, as we saw above, the numbers don't even really support his argument (such as an MAU decline in Facebook causing Meta financial problems which would then cause Meta to spuriously insert AI in places it doesn't belong). I suspect he's relying on people's eyes glazing over…

I don’t understand the issue, cannot you ignore his commentary and just look at the numbers?

The problem is that some numbers genuinely require a critical eye. If a source tells you that the OpenAI CFO told employees July ARR exceeded the Q2 total, there are a number of serious questions to be raised on how these numbers were calculated and what the point of such a confusing comparison is supposed to be. (I think the answer has to be that ChatGPT wrote the CFO’s script, no human financial expert would think to compare an annualized figure to the sum of three specific months.) But it’s hard to analyze the facts appropriately when they’re relayed by a guy who tells you that it’s all a giant scam and infers the worst possible answer to all the questions.

Re: How accurate have Ed Zitron's AI skeptic predictions been?

#55

Post by senderista »

pcstl wrote: post #5

Zitron has become the distorted reflection of the very AI boosters he criticizes and mocks. I think the worst thing that happened to him was AI skepticism becoming a political position . This gave him a captive audience - as long as he says what they want to hear , which means that he can never ever concede that he might have been wrong or that AI might actually be progressing or having successes. This is not conduci…

"audience capture"

Re: How accurate have Ed Zitron's AI skeptic predictions been?

#56

Post by karmakurtisaani »

reducesuffering wrote: post #29
baggachipz wrote: post #20

Hate on him all you want (he's gotten very repetitive for the sake of subscribers and reads), but the basic premise that the modern AI industry is a circular-dealing, point-of-diminishing-returns grift still holds. The bubble is here and the longer it inflates, the worse the pop will be. Sure the goalposts have moved, but the basic numbers don't math.

> The bubble is here Zitron implied 2 years ago that OpenAI would collapse by now. How's that bubble popping going? All NVDA+memory co+frontier lab numbers are accelerating

Comparing to other bubbles in the past, this one could still have something like 2 years left. Patrick Boyle has a video on the topic, in which he's also very careful to point out he could easily be wrong.

Re: How accurate have Ed Zitron's AI skeptic predictions been?

#57

Post by simonuv »

amazingamazing wrote: post #19

The simplest argument against AI is the fact no public company appears to be making money on it, minus revenue that contributes to AI infrastructure . Would love to see broken down counter example of public company. So far Chegg and Duolingo have been devastated. Surely they could cut costs drastically with AI?

[dead]

Re: How accurate have Ed Zitron's AI skeptic predictions been?

#58

Post by dgellow »

aleph_minus_one wrote: post #49
toomuchtodo wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone else mentioned, ignore Ed’s personality and look solely at the balance sheets and capital analysis. Regardless of delivery, the math doesn’t math. It's wild to me how much Ed is criticized while pathological liars like Musk and Altman are glossed over. (Disclosure: I pay for Zitron's publication for the capital figures and exclusives he gets his hands on, I do not pay attention to his interviews, we are fa…

> while pathological liars like Musk and Altman are glossed over. You seem to live in a bubble where these people are worshipped ... :-(

The bubble you’re talking about exists, it is SF and the rest of the tech industry. It’s literally where the AI leaders are located, where they overhype each others

Re: How accurate have Ed Zitron's AI skeptic predictions been?

#59

Post by jrflo »

dgellow wrote: post #50
jrflo wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no evidence of fraud that I have seen beyond complete speculation from the likes of Zitron. He basically just says "Look how big the numbers are! It's so big it must be fraud!"

Zitron himself doesn’t call it fraud and doesn’t compare it to Enron (he said no, with his reasoning when asked in interviews, multiple times)

I was thinking of this article where he compares OpenAI to enron: https://www.wheresyoured.at/what-happens-if-openai-dies/

Re: How accurate have Ed Zitron's AI skeptic predictions been?

#60

Post by 12sag15 »

As always, shooting down commentary asking for more and more evidence is very simple.

Zitron has a somewhat ranting style. Luu's passage on Google search for example just nitpicks on the person that Zitron allegedly named as responsible for the decline of Google search.

The real issue of course is that search quality clearly has gone down. What does Luu want? A "study"? Everyone can see that. The person is not the issue.

This is a highly selective analysis of Zitron's writings that focuses on a couple of mistakes. People need to understand that any normie will understand the difference between rants, numbers and speculation in Zitron's essays. They are not written for autists who talk of "priors" and "evidence".

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