How accurate have Ed Zitron's AI skeptic predictions been? • Hacker News Board

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

#281

Post by iLoveOncall » Tue, Sep 01, 2026, 10:33 PM UTC

Easy to claim things as wrong without prodiving any facts.

Can I try?

> But when people bring him up, they're of course not generally citing his anger

Wrong.

> Google has been increasing the relative priority of revenue over the user experience over time

Wrong.

> I'm curious what people do after being on the wrong side

Wrong.

Some of the claims categorized as "wrong" are also completely true, such as training hitting diminishing returns. New models are barely an improvement and most people I know stuck on Opus 4.6 over any newer one for example.

Exact same thing for the claim "the fact we're running out of high quality training data and we're hitting the walls of scaling laws, in the training paradigm, these models aren't getting better. What we're seeing today is pretty much what they're always gonna be like".

If anything, model performance has regressed in actual use (i.e. not benchmarks) for the past half a year.

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

#282

Post by wmf » Tue, Sep 01, 2026, 10:33 PM UTC

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,…

...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

What? Zitron is getting a lot of media attention by repeating the same takes hundreds of times. He's not a general pundit.

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

#283

Post by hydrolox » Tue, Sep 01, 2026, 10:33 PM UTC

aksj5Hg wrote: post #180

hydrolox wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

[flagged]

I've literally never heard of this guy until today, they're not my guru. I am just showing where in the post the criticism was covered

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

#284

Post by mxschumacher » Tue, Sep 01, 2026, 10:33 PM UTC

_diyar wrote: post #258

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.

valuation gains on investments are one-offs, not signs of sustained improvements in profitability that would warrant higher market caps

when those valuation gains are in turn the result of circular financing schemes (a bakery giving out money so that people buy bread from it), we're getting to a dangerous situation

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

#285

Post by mapontosevenths » Tue, Sep 01, 2026, 10:33 PM UTC

sapphicsnail wrote: post #160

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 think the worst thing that happened to him was AI skepticism becoming a political position. It is a political issue in the sense that the discussion around AI can't avoid material and cultural issues. Ed Zitron definitely has an ax to grind and I'm personally turned off by his hyperbole, but I don't think something being a political issue means it's not worth discussing. I've also noticed the pro-AI crowd pivot t…

> It is a political issue in the sense that the discussion around AI can't avoid material and cultural issues.

I'm not even sure it's political. I think it might be a religion now. He doesn't think that AI is bad, he believes that AI is bad.

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

#286

Post by adventured » Tue, Sep 01, 2026, 10:34 PM UTC

Zigurd wrote: post #265

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…

After looking at Nvidia's orderbook, it's a reasonable conclusion that nothing bad will happen for at least another year. In which case Ed Zitron is off by at least a year. But there are enough signs of trouble that could happen soon: Oracle debt is junk. OpenAI might not be on a viable trajectory to IPO. One or both of those could collapse the lower quality data center companies. Zitron is probably overconfident abo…

Oracle fits in Nvidia's pocket at this point: $67b sales, $22b op income.

Vs of course Nvidia: $302b sales, $197b op income.

Oracle was never as big of a deal as that brief market cap run implied. The herd pushed it up for no reason.

The comparison to Apple, Microsoft, Google and Amazon are pretty similar. Oracle fits in their pockets too. Who cares if their debt is junk. Ellison has nearly wrecked that ship on numerous occasions over the decades. He went on an elaborate acquisition binge in the previous epoch, buying his way to the next stage (preventing Oracle from being market-eliminated, or acquired), and that was an incredible mess that took a long time to sort. He's doing the same move now, trying to spend to stay on the board as the world rapidly changes under his feet.

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

#287

Post by dofm » Tue, Sep 01, 2026, 10:34 PM UTC

inferniac wrote: post #137

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…

No, hes been extremely wrong multiple times, he should not be treated seriously Its silly to say hes just early, when his predictions give specific timelines that don't work at all - "so egregious that I am surprised it's not some kind of financial crime to say it out loud" — on OpenAI forecasting $11.6B for 2025 ( https://www.wheresyoured.at/exclusive-openai-financials/ ) actual: $13.07B. source is his own scoop ( h…

If you're saying that OpenAI forecast something and you're saying it's validation that the numbers match the forecast, I don't think you're really paying attention to the problems (with annualised run rate bullshit when these are proper companies who could be publishing proper numbers), with unclear financials that are designed to look good, etc.

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

#288

Post by dofm » Tue, Sep 01, 2026, 10:35 PM UTC

Zigurd wrote: post #265

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…

After looking at Nvidia's orderbook, it's a reasonable conclusion that nothing bad will happen for at least another year. In which case Ed Zitron is off by at least a year. But there are enough signs of trouble that could happen soon: Oracle debt is junk. OpenAI might not be on a viable trajectory to IPO. One or both of those could collapse the lower quality data center companies. Zitron is probably overconfident abo…

> After looking at Nvidia's orderbook, it's a reasonable conclusion that nothing bad will happen for at least another year. In which case Ed Zitron is off by at least a year.

Zitron is fairly clear that nothing is going to happen for a year or so — he says himself that he thinks there's another round of funding possible for both OpenAI and Anthropic.

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

#289

Post by achompas » Tue, Sep 01, 2026, 10:35 PM UTC

Zigurd wrote: post #274

joshcsimmons wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Early" works for an open-ended bubble thesis. It does not rescue dated claims that already failed. Google's 500 million Gemini-user goal had an end-of-2025 deadline. Zitron called it so unrealistic that Sundar Pichai should be fired. Google reported more than 650 million monthly users by October. "AI had already peaked" is also a claim about the state of the technology at that time. Agent and coding benchmarks moved…

Some numbers have a lot of squish to them. Gemini can't be called a failure. But Copilot is a flop and yet Microsoft can probably show you similar numbers to what Gemini has.

But we’re talking about Gemini, which is one of Dan’s point: the surface area is so large that any prediction is almost laughable. Zitron’s prediction here is laughable in fact because he claims both (1) Pichai is jamming AI everywhere and (2) the 500M number is impossible. Those statements are immediately contradictory to anyone who understands the scale of Google’s products.

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

#290

Post by jongjong » Tue, Sep 01, 2026, 10:35 PM UTC

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 recall a time when Google was struggling to monetize ads and then something changed and they started becoming profitable. The narrative was about improved targeting.

I think it might have helped a little but I never fully bought this argument. I don't think I've ever bought a product which was advertised to me online and I was using some of these platforms for years. I'm probably a liability to them; using up compute but not clicking on ads or buying anything.

Also when I ran social media ads many years back, I never got any users out of it. It literally seemed like mostly bot traffic back then; I can't imagine how bad the situation would be now with LLMs.