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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?

#171

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.)

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

#172

Post by tavavex »

I think he's constantly trying to time the peak (of AI improvement, of compute capabilities, of profitability) and keeps having to readjust his predictions every time it's proven wrong. Timing the peak is a fool's errand unless you have extremely hard and unavoidable data that everyone will have to face by a deadline. But contrary to what AI boosters often imply in response to skeptics being wrong, failing to time the peak doesn't mean the peak doesn't exist. So far it has existed for every new technology.

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

#173

Post by maxglute »

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…

How? AFAIK, his arguments based around the economics remains the same, he just seems increasingly dramatic and exacerbated, which is understandable when you realize industry + ecosystem (politics/reporting) is tulip mania delulu and insists 1+1=100, or 30 trillion, or whatever. His position isn't based on AI progress - it's based on AI economics, at this point he can be an obnoxious rationalist slamming flat earthers - just because he's annoying/smug doesn't mean he's less right on fundamentals which if anything is more clear now.

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

#174

Post by hydrolox »

q23lk wrote: post #168

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…

From the blog:

> Although Zitron's past predictions have generally been wrong, maybe he'll be right about something in the future. Perhaps some of these companies will have valuations decline for some reason. But, even if there's some kind of massive AI crash and OpenAI and Anthropic go to zero, in terms of the societal impact, if on top of that, some other event occurs that prevents further progress in models beyond whatever AI labs have internally right now, that's still going to result in a fair amount of change. Which companies are successful will change who gets rich, but particular companies failing won't stop changes that fall out of current or next generation model capabilities from happening; it just moves around who benefits the most.

> If Zitron ends up being right about some company or other collapsing, that's pretty uninteresting to me compared to how capabilities have developed and will develop, where he's been wrong to date. It also happens that he's been wrong about the financial predictions he's made to date, but that doesn't really interest me, though I included a number of financial predictions for completeness.

Not sure how you can "get the big picture right" while having many egregiously wrong predictions.

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

#175

Post by fc417fc802 »

cyanydeez wrote: post #48
fallingbananna wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

right, and look at current American politics. One side tried to tailor normal, routine and rational POVs. The other... EDIT: I do find it amusing when I write these types of comment, then suddenly realize the irrational man childs of the far right nationalist republic ethnostatists think they're the rational ones.

There are plenty of people on the far right whose positions are rational provided that you agree with their views. Conversely, there are plenty of people on the far left whose positions remain irrational despite that you might agree with their views. It is a serious cognitive error both to fail to see the irrationality of those you agree with as well as to fail to see the rationality of those you disagree with.

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

#176

Post by LogicFailsMe »

mixmastamyk wrote: post #165
thegrim33 wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And that's when we pay off the national debt for pennies on the worthless dollar. The pro move would be to stop lending the US money, but that's not going to happen.

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

#177

Post by mossTechnician »

kristianp wrote: post #110
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.

I ended up on this comment after looking through the linked article and realizing the words "data center" never come up in it.

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

#178

Post by NateEag »

astrange wrote: post #150
Borealid wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the three valid criticisms you listed are valid, but there are other quite a few other IMO-valid criticisms of AI. Here are a few as I see them: - AI centralizes power in the hands of capital, rendering those who can afford compute hardware vastly more capable than those who cannot and thus increasing social stratification - AI is generally trained on the creative output of humanity without those who train it…

> - AI centralizes power in the hands of capital, rendering those who can afford compute hardware vastly more capable than those who cannot and thus increasing social stratification Looks to me like I can run Claude Code without being able to afford my own datacenter. > - AI produces large amounts of mid-tier content, making it harder to discover exceptional human-created creative content produced after AI started to…

> Looks to me like I can run Claude Code without being able to afford my own datacenter.

Until Anthropic bans you from using their data centers, at which point you cannot run Claude Code at all. Welcome to being a have-not (at least in a world where only genAI-assisted coding is acceptable).

He who controls the GPUs controls the world.

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

#180

Post by iwontberude »

fc417fc802 wrote: post #175
cyanydeez wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

right, and look at current American politics. One side tried to tailor normal, routine and rational POVs. The other... EDIT: I do find it amusing when I write these types of comment, then suddenly realize the irrational man childs of the far right nationalist republic ethnostatists think they're the rational ones.

There are plenty of people on the far right whose positions are rational provided that you agree with their views . Conversely, there are plenty of people on the far left whose positions remain irrational despite that you might agree with their views . It is a serious cognitive error both to fail to see the irrationality of those you agree with as well as to fail to see the rationality of those you disagree with.

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