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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?

#251

Post by simonw »

GlacierFox wrote: post #247
simonw wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They don't publish their AI spending, revenue, and profit - but they do tend to break out other non-AI segments of their companies which can demonstrate that at least part of their growth isn't relevant to AI. Page 24 of Amazon's 2025 report for example https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1018724/000101872426... separates AWS from the rest of the company. Or Google/Alphabet's 2025 report https://www.sec.gov/Archi…

[flagged]

Consider this original comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49526069#49527546

I'll expand the section of the article that it quotes:

> Although this wouldn't be in the spirit of Zitron's statement, one could argue that Meta is actually dying, it just hasn't died yet. However, the reasoning in Zitron's argument is incorrect here—the Meta, Google, and Microsoft ecosystems are not dying. 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.

So the argument here is that Ed says those companies are dying, but Dan Luu points out that their economic figures show that they are not.

The counter-argument is "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"

My point is that the public reports of these companies, while not helping us unwind the circular financing, do at least show us that their non-AI businesses are growing at a healthy pace. Which supports Dan's argument that these companies are not dying.

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

#252

Post by nomel »

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…

> however most people are really hedging in one camp or the other in their takes.

As with most things, most people are somewhere in the middle, as the silent majority. You only see the comments of the strongly aligned, which are also the most emotionally motivated to comment.

The internet is not real life.

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

#254

Post by enraged_camel »

bogzz wrote: post #208
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…

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If you find derision and extreme cynicism "soothing", the problem may be with you, rather than those who are optimistic about AI.

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

#255

Post by enraged_camel »

mustaphah wrote: post #244

I don't like Ed, but it seems that Luu spends far more attention documenting failed predictions than checking other predictions that might have been correct.

What predictions have Ed made that were correct? And how do they weigh against the incorrect ones, in terms of both quantity and quality?

That's relevant because if you make a thousand predictions, a few of them might turn out to be true. That doesn't mean you're good at making accurate predictions.

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

#256

Post by gizajob »

matherial wrote: post #215
sfblah wrote: 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…

> I don't think Zitron is wrong, exactly. He's just early. By that metric, so was Nostradamus. The apocalypse is coming for sure, we're just quibbling about the timeline. Realistically, timing is everything. You don't need to get it precisely right, but you also don't get a pass if you, for example, keep predicting an imminent recession through a decade of unprecedented growth.

"Being right at the wrong time is indistinguishable from being wrong” - Howard Marks.

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

#258

Post by _diyar »

jsrozner wrote: post #216

Though the bubble has not popped, I don't see the following discussed in the post: Zitron would probably point out (as have others) that many of the hyperscalers are booking valuation increases in Anthropic, OpenAI as "Other Income", which is substantially increasing their reported revenue and earnings. It's roughly: - Hyperscalers like Goog, Meta, Msft invest cash in Anthropic, OpenAI, in exchange for equity - The o…

Sorry what is the punch-line here supposed to be? These investments obviously increase correlation coeffs., but these are highly correlated stocks to begin with.

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

#259

Post by torginus »

maxglute wrote: post #200
ant_li0n wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(edited to remove snark) Your comment seems to miss the point that the article does not (necessarily) have a problem with Zitron being insufferable/annoying/smug. It's that his predictions are verifiably wrong. It's one thing to be annoying and right. Zitron is annoying, but not right.

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…

Hasn't AI been horrible for FAANG fundamentally?

- They've all been compelled to build the same horribly expensive AI infra, to serve similar models that have no ability to lock-in customers

- Google Search has to compete with LLMs

- Meta hasn't demonstrated a credible argument on how they're planning to use AI. AI 'friends' would kill their business model. Their saving grace ironically is that people absolutely hate interacting with AIs. Same goes for other AI assistants.

- Hyperscalers have to compete for the same hardware as AI companies, driving their costs up

- AI turned out to be excellent at both porting software to more optimized stacks and deleting the 'prestige' of building these ultra-inefficient microservice containerized stuff. I haven't read a single article about somebody bragging about this stuff. When it comes to tech (which is not AI), usually its about Zig, Rust and going native.

- So if customers really start feeling the heat of rising costs, they have a realistic path of optimizing their compute usage by using AI to rewrite the worst-offending components. I think one of the few things in which AI has demonstrated measurable economic value is rewriting software in Rust to be more efficient

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