Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

danluu.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 1001 posts

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

#101

Post by dgellow »

quickthrowman wrote: post #72
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…

Ed Zitron’s job is to convince people to pay him money to read what he writes, of course he’s going to preach to the choir, they’re paying him to do that and he knows it. This is why I always consider the agenda of an author, Ed Zitron’s agenda is to make money from subscribers who read his writing.

That’s level 0 analysis, you’re supposed to go to the next steps and not stop here…

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

#102

Post by tootie »

watwut wrote: post #63
jrflo wrote: post #17

Thanks for putting this together, his writing really aggravates me and it was nice to see all of his predictions put together in one spot. It's interesting how he has pivoted from denying that LLMs are useful to accusing frontier labs of Enron-scale fraud. I suppose it's the natural pivot you have to make when your whole business is an anti-AI newsletter that costs $7 per month.

He LITERALLY said it is not like Enron. And repeated it.

I haven't read every word but I don't recall him saying AI is bad or useless ever either. His refrain is that they cannot keep up with their endless spending on training and they're not reaching new markets.

I look at the rapid rise and decline of OpenClaw and get the impression AI has not really found any foothold among average people.

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

#103

Post by Grombobulous »

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

The thing about bubbles is that everyone who thinks they’re going to pop look crazy until they pop.

And to be clear, a bubble popping doesn’t mean that AI goes away forever.

What it does mean is that we’ll see some kind of economic crash or recession, and we’ll probably see at least one big company fail or go bankrupt/restructure.

OpenAI is the company in most obvious peril.

I happen to think that Nvidia is in a more perilous position than they appear. Their hardware advancement pace is relatively weak and they’re in a crypto-like hardware bubble where they’re one technology breakthrough away from a complete collapse in demand for their AI data center solutions. They’re also doing a lot of sketchy hardware financing schemes.

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

#104

Post by gryfft »

hypfer wrote: post #87
th0raway wrote: post #65

Being thorough and accurate might make you a lot of money in the stock market, but it's not a good way to get any media presence, because that demands being in front of people quite often, and basically nobody can be insightful and well researched in all topics of the day. Once you become a pundit, whether on politics or tech, and rely on eyeballs to feed you, you are going to be throwing stinkers. And at that point,…

> We have people telling us the next recession being imminent all the time. Yeah uhm so I'm not sure if you've like seen the world recently, but uh. Yea

I believe the saying goes:

  Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.

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

#105

Post by rowanG077 »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #88
rowanG077 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

HN has a fairly complex user footprint, it's not everyone of course and I do not mean to paint too broadly, but there is a strong contingent of those pro in a cluster. https://hackernewstrends.com/?q=Musk&q=Altman&from=151234560...

I don't see any sentiment in that data.

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

#106

Post by [deleted] »

simonw wrote: post #91
swiftcoder wrote: post #74

> Given how fast these companies are growing (in terms of revenue and profit), it doesn't seem that AI is, as Zitron implied, some kind of desperation move they're reaching for because "they don't know how to grow" and are all out of ideas Growth isn't a valid rebuttal, unless we can also sus out how much of that growth is tied up in circular financing of AI projects. We have a pretty good idea how much of Nvidia's v…

As public companies, the megascalers publish pretty detailed financial reports.

[deleted]

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

#107

Post by flyinglizard »

Zitron is providing a service: he's running the train for those who want to believe, or sincerely believe, AI is a bubble. His interviews are apocalyptical one sided rants that confuse what is with what Zitron thinks should be. I'm not sure he's wrong, by the way. As LLM performance is becoming more and more commoditized I fail to see how spend catches up to expectations to keep running this market as it does, but that's beside the point.

One annoying side effect is that YouTube's algorithms will always try to force feed you more of the things you last searched, to amplify your biases and send you down the doomscroll rabbit hole. So if you search for Zitron, next time you visit you'll be flooded senselessly with naysayers, contrarians and skeptics from all courses of life.

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

#108

Post by iNerdier »

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…

Didn’t the FT both vet his numbers and also publish on the same leak?

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

#109

Post by dgellow »

simonw wrote: post #91
swiftcoder wrote: post #74

> Given how fast these companies are growing (in terms of revenue and profit), it doesn't seem that AI is, as Zitron implied, some kind of desperation move they're reaching for because "they don't know how to grow" and are all out of ideas Growth isn't a valid rebuttal, unless we can also sus out how much of that growth is tied up in circular financing of AI projects. We have a pretty good idea how much of Nvidia's v…

As public companies, the megascalers publish pretty detailed financial reports.

They actually do not, they do not share details on their AI revenue and investments

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

#110

Post by kristianp »

tolugenius wrote: post #14

I've been doubting him myself (his recent articles just hedge on data centers more than anything else) but then I want to ask, are there any valid critics of AI? Not a "code is bad but it'll get better" but actual criticism in the nature of the financing, politics, etc. I think separating AI as a tool and it's capabilities and AI as product that needs to make a profit is helpful, however most people are really hedgin…

The data center growth questions he raised have been where I found him interesting. I could never find any other articles to corroborate his predictions though. My question is when will the AI bubble burst?

I didn't know he'd had a long history of mispredicting AI quality and growth of companies like Microsoft and Google.

Post reply on HN