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

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

#291

Post by jongjong »

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.

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

#293

Post by polski-g »

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…

He made a blog post, literally last month, and it said that AIs have no use outside of coding.

It just shows he's done zero research on the things he talks about all day. Radiologists are using them, ad firms, artists, translators, law firms, auditors... It's hard to think of a white collar firm not using them.

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

#294

Post by dofm »

adventured wrote: post #287
Zigurd wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 numer…

> Who cares if their debt is junk.

Non-rhetorical answer to your rhetorical question, but:

The near future of the political right wing of the USA is dependent on the Ellisons staying afloat to create an impervious right-wing media sphere that would survive the end of Fox.

The Paramount-Skydance/Warner merger is now delayed until 2027. Trump/the GOP needs that merger to go ahead, but if Larry's debt position worsens it really might not.

So you can expect the executive branch to push for the USA to backstop Oracle's debt in some way, whether directly or indirectly (taking some sort of stake in OpenAI to allow it to guarantee Oracle gets most of its money, for example — anything to get the credit rating back up).

It will be the first stage of this becoming a problem for the American taxpayer.

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

#295

Post by sarjann »

I've always been suprised with the amount people take him seriously. I think he's someone who makes people who dislike AI "feel good". I don't blame someone who doesn't understand AI or have read what he's written.

But for the bloombergs and other podcasts I would have expected them to do a bit of research. I honestly think with the amount of doubling down he's been doing that he's a grifter.

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

#296

Post by torginus »

ant_li0n wrote: post #189
maxglute wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

(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.

Are they? These companies have been caught tweaking their numbers. One example, not sure if cited by Zitron, or others, is that they build data centers through holding companies, who have to absorb the costs and massive capex based financial liabilites, so that the brand-name big-tech companies get to keep their expenses off their books. There have been trillions of debt discovered this way. Another issue is the apparently relentless progress of the hardware industry, needed to justify their super-high P/E ratios, measured against the fact, that to lessen the effect of HW amortization, hyperscalers opted to lengthen the depreciation timelines of their GPUs. So there is an apparent contradiction that new hardware needs to be both substantially better, and substantially the same, to make both stories true. I'm not a finance guy, and a lot of it is over my head, but even finance people keep asking the 'who's gonna pay for this' question. We're way past the belief that this is going to produce reasonable returns (as in a value for money kind of way), and hoping we can financially engineer ourselves out of this situation without having to feel the pain.

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

#297

Post by dofm »

joshcsimmons wrote: post #228
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…

"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…

> The bubble may still burst. That would validate the bubble thesis. It would not retroactively fix the prediction record.

If it does not burst it will be because specific efforts have been taken to deflate it in the face of concerns like those he is raising.

The bubble may not burst for example if the securitization of AI debt really happens. Then when it happens it won't be an "AI bubble" that bursts, it will be a full-on collapse of the US economy. Like when 2008 happened it wasn't really about mortgages anymore.

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

#298

Post by sarjann »

solid_fuel wrote: post #281

I would be interested in seeing a similar list of predictions from Altman, Amodei, etc with annotations about how many have come true. Ed Zitron is a blow hard and frequently overstates things to the point where it is hard to take seriously, but so are the AI industry leaders. I have heard multiple breathless press releases warning that the end of white collar work is "just 6 months away" and that people not using th…

I think one important distinction is at least they have some humility to admit they were wrong. I think Ed Zitron has rarely, if ever acknowledged he was wrong.

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

#299

Post by matthewdgreen »

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…

Audience capture is a bastard.

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

#300

Post by johnfn »

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…

Zitron is wrong, not "early", and the post has an extremely long list of examples.
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