Live data from Hacker News

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

danluu.com

231–240 of 1001 posts

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

#231
post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>one's chosen enemies must be simultaneously terrifyingly powerful and incompetent dunces I've got some bad news for you.

I really don't find it coherent to call someone who you keep consistently losing to stupid.

Stupidity has always been terrifyingly powerful.

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

#232
post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>one's chosen enemies must be simultaneously terrifyingly powerful and incompetent dunces I've got some bad news for you.

I really don't find it coherent to call someone who you keep consistently losing to stupid.

you're likely working under an assumption of meritocracy/overvaluing of kinds of intelligence

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

#233
post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>one's chosen enemies must be simultaneously terrifyingly powerful and incompetent dunces I've got some bad news for you.

I really don't find it coherent to call someone who you keep consistently losing to stupid.

Because it's not a single data point, intelligence is a wide surface area where you can be smart in some areas and stupid in others. Furthermore whether you are being intelligent is relative to ideals and goals, and not everyone has the same ones.

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

#234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes? What happened to FAANG in last 3 years, they cut a fuck load of jobs, the raised rent/prices, then inflation, then experience surge in new category AI. 1 + 2, i.e. squeezing rock has limits. 3 is fundamentally not sustainable, i.e. AI revenue gap order of magnitude relative to spend. This like debt crisis, there's lot of levers to burn to maximize extraction and make ledger look good short term, but is fundament…

Ah I understand what you're saying. Yes I agree that if you pull back to, "We're in a bubble," then you can say that Zitron is correct, at least fundamentally, despite being wildly inaccurate in almost every other prediction he makes. But Zitron isn't just blogging about how we're in a bubble. The assertions he makes are not minutiae, he basically continuously says that all the big SW firms are walking corpses. He's…

[deleted]

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

#235
post #99

I don't think Zitron is wrong, exactly. He's just early. There are a lot of analysts who have faced the same criticism over the past 10-15 years. IMO the issue is that they fail to understand the staggering size and scope of the government fiscal + monetary interventions across those years. Essentially, the government has jammed all the risk into the future to repeatedly rescue near-term results. I think something si…

Did you read the post? The author cited very clearly a plethora of very specific predictions made by Zitron that were verifiably and factually wrong. False. Incorrect. Not “early”.

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

#236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes? What happened to FAANG in last 3 years, they cut a fuck load of jobs, the raised rent/prices, then inflation, then experience surge in new category AI. 1 + 2, i.e. squeezing rock has limits. 3 is fundamentally not sustainable, i.e. AI revenue gap order of magnitude relative to spend. This like debt crisis, there's lot of levers to burn to maximize extraction and make ledger look good short term, but is fundament…

Luu is pretty specific about the predictions Zitron is making, has taken the time to pull them out and date them, and they're both risible and not rescuable with vibes. His point isn't that Google or Meta are doing well or have bright futures. Luu is generally critical of tech giant engineering and product culture. He's critical of Google in particular in this very article. But the point of the article is that it's n…

Thank you, I have attempted to modify my original reply with one a little less dickish.

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

#240
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…

he makes a shit ton of money off this - in this attention economy we are doomed, people of every side find that going all in on something, no matter how intellectually dishonest, is much more profitable. Extreme AI bros or Extreme AI doomers seem dishonest. AI is an amazing technology - it is simultaneously not going to replace us in the next 3 years and it's not total garbage - the truth lies in the middle.
Post reply on HN