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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?

#341

Post by minimaxir »

torginus wrote: post #260
maxglute wrote: post #201

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…

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…

> 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

Emphasis added, since having a horribly expensive AI infra allows offering enterprise contracts, which is a form of lock-in and has been pretty lucrative for GCP/Azure/AWS.

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

#342

Post by sroerick »

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…

Man, as a former extreme skeptic, I watched a video from Eric Schmidt in early 2025 where he said that by the end of the year nobody would be coding, and that one was dead frickin on.

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

#343

Post by torginus »

I find it ironic, that one of the most memorable articles Dan Luu has written imo is about how futurists faked 'exponential scaling' about semiconductors, and we ran out of the 'good kind' of scaling, Dennard scaling a while ago, and people interested in maintaining the narrative have been making up marketing numbers, which are believable to outsiders, but not to those who know:

https://danluu.com/futurist-predictions/

Yet, in this case, he takes the marketing numbers at face value, not being an expert in AI financing, while those who know more, can spot the sleight of hand, just like he can when it comes to semiconductors.

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

#344

Post by GlacierFox »

BeetleB wrote: post #271
bogzz wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

One of the best heuristics I've seen on whether there will be a fruitful outcome in taking someone seriously is how often they invoke labels (name calling, etc). Hasn't failed - both in real life and online.

[flagged]

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

#345

Post by weakfish »

sroerick wrote: post #342
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…

Man, as a former extreme skeptic, I watched a video from Eric Schmidt in early 2025 where he said that by the end of the year nobody would be coding, and that one was dead frickin on.

I mean, I code?

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

#346

Post by torben-friis »

sroerick wrote: post #342
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…

Man, as a former extreme skeptic, I watched a video from Eric Schmidt in early 2025 where he said that by the end of the year nobody would be coding, and that one was dead frickin on.

I guess I don't exist...

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

#347

Post by GlacierFox »

simonw wrote: post #239
GlacierFox wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

I don't follow.

You said "Right, you're very much his target audience."

I read that as a bit of a snarky jibe.

You implied you weren't his target audience so asked if you're on the other side of it - deep in AI psychosis.

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

#348

Post by ben_w »

conception wrote: post #231
pcstl wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Stupidity has always been terrifyingly powerful.

Not really.

Things can look stupid when we don't understand them, but there has to be some intelligence somewhere at some point even if the arrival of wealth then suffocates it with sycophants. If Musk or Trump or GWB were all *merely* the idiots they're often mocked as being, chances are we'd never have even heard of them. They almost certainly weren't even "merely average".

Now, stupidity that arrives after the bank balance reads a billion dollars, that's terrifyingly powerful.

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

#349

Post by meowface »

sroerick wrote: post #342
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…

Man, as a former extreme skeptic, I watched a video from Eric Schmidt in early 2025 where he said that by the end of the year nobody would be coding, and that one was dead frickin on.

Dario Amodei and Eric Schmidt seem fairly well-calibrated, although a bit early. Elon Musk is constantly way, way overoptimistic (perhaps to the point of willful fraud). Zitron is hopelessly and ridiculously incompetent (and there are allegations he is willfully lying, too, but who knows).

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

#350

Post by tptacek »

maxglute wrote: post #173
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…

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…

When you predict a company is going to fail and instead it sets revenue records you're not "dramatic and exacerbated". You're refuted.

Luu's post includes a (long!) list of specific predictions that aren't "exacerbated"; they're simply wrong.

Luu's point isn't that AI is going to succeed or that the "AI bubble" will never pop. It's that these predictions are all wrong. If you agree "directionally" with Zitron, all that means is that you're skeptical of AI. That's a totally reasonable position to have, but it has nothing to do with whether Zitron's predictions are good or bad.

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