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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?

#161

Post by DonsDiscountGas »

Consider two propositions:

P1. AI is useful powerful and (P1a) will continue to get more useful and powerful at the same rapid pace it's been improving

2. AI companies are very profitable, and (P2a) will be wildly profitable (eg $30T TAM) in the next few years

These are completely separate. But in practice people seem to be either proAI (both true) or anti AI (both false). P1 is clearly true and I find it hard to take anybody seriously who says otherwise. P1a... Who knows, gotta hit a wall sometime. P2 I'm way more uncertain about (especially P2a) but it seems like people like Zitron reason backwards from hating AI.

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

#162

Post by tavavex »

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. Others told us that NFTs were key to the future of art.

That's quite the conflation, and a very subtle way to tie a claim that's still unresolved to one that is to try and make the first one seem wrong with no evidence. Recessions are almost guaranteed in our system, they're a part of a cycle. Unless you think that the Great Recession was the last one in history, saying the next one is 'imminent' would be correct for any other viewpoint. We just don't know when it'll officially start.

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

#163

Post by hypfer »

minimaxir wrote: post #117

Over the past few years, I had helped Ed with some difficult nuances around the obscure technical aspects of serving LLMs (e.g. benchmarks and model caching); he has also shouted myself and Simon Willison out positively multiple times. I stopped assisting him because he repeatedly misused said advice to the most cynical interpretation ("how can this be interpreted to make AI boosters sound crazy?) and often made it m…

This reads slightly weird and more like a pledge of alignment than a statement from the heart.

But apart from that, I guess that's always the learning? Journalists (or people labeling themselves as such) often have their own story they want to tell, and usually do so by building it out of little blocks of reality stacked together to form the desired picture.

I would predict a similarly frustrating experience being equally probable even without the "clear anti-AI bias" attribute set.

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

#164

Post by mixmastamyk »

thegrim33 wrote: post #118
hypfer wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

S&P 500 - All time high DJIA - All time high Unemployment rate - Near all time low (for last 20 years) Number of US small businesses - All time high US GDP - All time high [Sources] https://www.bls.gov/charts/employment-situation/civilian-une... https://www.sellerscommerce.com/blog/small-business-statisti... https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GDP

They haven’t allowed a recession to happen since ~2009 when they massively inflated their way out of the worst of the last one. Learned to have the cake and eat it too.

The only problem is after a few rounds of this the currency becomes worthless, and we’re well on our way. Inflation is a major component of those numbers rising.

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

#165

Post by tovej »

dcre wrote: post #140
SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You're broadly right but I think you're dead wrong about the CFO statement — I think "July revenue alone exceeded all of Q2" is an extremely normal thing to say when revenue is going up at an insane rate. For example, if it was not true that June revenue exceeded March-May revenue, the point would be to show how their revenue growth has accelerated.

If he meant that he would've said July revenue, not ARR. ARR means it's multiplied by twelve.

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

#166

Post by watwut »

sfblah wrote: post #115
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?

I don't know about Chegg, but the fundamental problem with Duolingo is their product does nothing to teach people a foreign language. The nasty reality of that product is if you go through their entire learning tree in a language, you might be at a CEFR level A1 for that language. And, you spent 10x the time and 10x the money you would have spent via something like Lingoda to get the same outcome.

This claim is just not true. And gets tiresome. You roughly end up where those courses claim to be in reading and listening - depending on language it can be over B1. (No course finishes B2, some do have B2 content). I ended up being able to watch some (not all) netflix series in foreign langue and I was in early B1 section. I clearly learned.

You also dont have to pay.

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

#167

Post by q23lk »

Yeah well, why not focus on Zitron's Oracle predictions? Article from May 27, 2025, when ORCL was skyrocketing.

https://www.wheresyoured.at/measures/

Now ORCL is back to $140.

I found this in two minutes via a search engine, but the star blogger Dan Luu apparently cannot handle that. I'm not a regular Zitron reader, but incidentally this blog post that came up in the search is several levels above Luu's post.

Zitron gets the big picture right.

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

#168

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#169

Post by Patryk27 »

fallingbananna wrote: post #26
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…

I have the exact same feeling about him. He has built a following of people that want to hear his extra skeptical views. And even if he changed his mind about some things, he cannot admit it, as that is not what his followers want to hear from him. It's rare that people make the news and build a following by saying a very balanced, down to earth opinions... unfortunately.

> And even if he changed his mind about some things, he cannot admit it, as that is not what his followers want to hear from him.

I don't think that's true - over the years he's changed his mind from "LLMs are useless slop machines" to "LLMs can be useful when applied wisely".

For instance in "The AI Hater's Manifesto" he says:

> It just came to me — the problem that I have with most people using LLMs is the delineation between outsourcing work and outsourcing thought. Those using LLMs to write little scripts or BQL code on a Bloomberg Terminal are inoffensive. [...] A tool being used as a tool to do tool things — in many cases involving the LLM writing a little 30-line Python script! — is not a problem, though it’s also not a trillion-dollar industry that needed to steal everybody’s art and writing.

Similarly, in "The More You Buy, The More You Lose":

> Sidenote: The only truly useful use case I’ve found is on the Bloomberg Terminal’s ASKB feature, which takes natural language and turns it into BQL code to make requests of Bloomberg’s datasets. It’s genuinely useful!

You can perhaps say that he underestimates what the technology is capable of (or, conversely, that other people overestimate LLMs) - but that's a different kind of conversation.

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

#170

Post by psvv »

I don't really care what Zitron says or pay attention to him because it seems clear to me he has some kind of agenda.

But this article is not nearly as impartial as it claims to be. It interprets all Zitron's claims in a narrow and overly-literal way. Missing the point and refuting a technicality.

For example, looking at the last 3 year's revenue/profit growth. This tells us nothing without looking at a larger context. Has revenue growth slowed down? Have profit margins compressed? What makes up the income and has that changed? Etc.

I think anyone being intellectually honest understands that these tables alone don't refute Zitron's claims that big tech are "dying and thrashing around" which is something that could take many years and easily hide under these kind of top line / bottom line numbers. (Maybe further analysis would refute the claim, but that analysis is not present here.)

Or Zitron's claims that AI capabilities are "reaching the upper limits" back in 2024. I don't think even Zitron would disagree that AI capabilities have grown since then, but that doesn't refute his point. How long the "reaching" takes and how wide the "upper limits" are is completely up to a subjective interpretation, which this post makes no attempt to even explore.

By all means dunk on futurists. But at least steelman their positions or you look just as biased as them. (Although maybe I am off base and this bias is meant to be clear from the start by admitting to pro-AI predictions all the way back in 2015.)

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