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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?

#301

Post by sarjann »

mxschumacher wrote: post #284
_diyar wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Circular financing is an issue if the wealth accumulation stays in the chip -> model provider ecosystem. However it seems like the labs are making quite a lot of revenue from the chips (customers).

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

#302

Post by bawolff »

I feel like just saying "wrong" to some of these feels a bit unconvincing.

e.g.

>April 2025: "It also, at this point, is pretty obvious that generative AI isn't going to do much more than it does today." >>Wrong

Is generative AI really doing much more today relative to 1.5 years ago? Sure there have been sone improvements, but i feel like nothing fundamental has shifted in that time period. Nor would i really expect it to even if the statement was false, but it seems too early to tell.

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

#303

Post by anonuser123 »

solid_fuel wrote: post #280

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…

My bet is that Amodei's claims about the dangers of AI are the most likely to come true – I'm predicticing amodei/anthropic will become the evil it was against.

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

#304

Post by tim333 »

onemoresoop wrote: post #28
jrflo wrote: post #17

Thanks for putting this together, his writing really aggravates me and it was nice to see all of his predictions put together in one spot. It's interesting how he has pivoted from denying that LLMs are useful to accusing frontier labs of Enron-scale fraud. I suppose it's the natural pivot you have to make when your whole business is an anti-AI newsletter that costs $7 per month.

The fraud is there. Whether it surpasses Enron or not will be revealed in the future.

Patrick Boyle had a vid specifically on whether there was Enron style fraud. The conclusion was no, though he thinks things may be a bit bubbly https://youtu.be/NufJ7g63KSY

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

#305

Post by supermdguy »

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…

Wait are the hyperscalers booking unrealized gains as income? Or are they selling their positions?

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

#306

Post by aspir »

> In terms of the style of reasoning, of the futurists reviewed, he's probably closest to Kurzweil, in that he uses numbers to give a kind of aura of credibility, but if you know something about the topic he's discussing or look at the numbers, the reasoning falls apart.

In one of his posts a few months ago, he went on a weird tangent about the CEO of ServiceNow talking about sales planning and whether his teams are "on plan" or not. For people who haven't spent time in or around sales, this is an extremely common shorthand for quota tracking.

Ed's rant about how impossibly weird and inhuman the framing was revealed how little he knows, and cares to know, about the mechanics of the businesses he claims to profile. Yes, something like "on plan" is jargon, but a shred of reasonable journalistic curiosity (a Google search) would explain what it means and how it's a normal statement for a career-sales CEO.

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

#307

Post by sarjann »

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…

Not sure about being early when it comes to points about models reaching the peak of their capability. Honestly, I don't understand how he's qualified (in terms of knowledge) to make such claims.

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

#308

Post by tadfisher »

solid_fuel wrote: post #280

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…

No, you see, they were right all along, they just "didn't anticipate the public outcry against data center expansion", thus the obviously inevitable AI takeover of the economy is being slowed by NIMBY curmudgeons who should be ignored and punished.

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

#310

Post by mark_l_watson »

This article cherry picks:

Ed Zitron mostly covers the costs of data centers, circular spending, and predictions of large the market for AI has to be to justify the data center expenditures.

I was disappointed this article didn’t really cover Zitron’s main arguments.

Maybe a paid article placement? I don’t know, but I was dissapointed: I read Zitron’s material and I wanted to see good counter arguments to his rants about costs of data centers, circular spending, and predictions of large the market for AI has to be to justify the data center expenditures arguments.

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