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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?

#391

Post by DenisM »

tim333 wrote: post #220
toomuchtodo wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone else mentioned, ignore Ed’s personality and look solely at the balance sheets and capital analysis. Regardless of delivery, the math doesn’t math. It's wild to me how much Ed is criticized while pathological liars like Musk and Altman are glossed over. (Disclosure: I pay for Zitron's publication for the capital figures and exclusives he gets his hands on, I do not pay attention to his interviews, we are fa…

As someone with a bit of understanding of accounts and finance I don't think Ed's analysis is very good. He's not someone who would pass a finance exam.

Is the source material good, in your opinion?

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

#392

Post by sobellian »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #41
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…

As someone else mentioned, ignore Ed’s personality and look solely at the balance sheets and capital analysis. Regardless of delivery, the math doesn’t math. It's wild to me how much Ed is criticized while pathological liars like Musk and Altman are glossed over. (Disclosure: I pay for Zitron's publication for the capital figures and exclusives he gets his hands on, I do not pay attention to his interviews, we are fa…

This was mentioned in the article.

> For example, when Timothy B. Lee looked at a spreadsheet that Zitron used to create a projection of Anthropic's revenue, he found, "He doesn't count February 1-10, counts March 1-10 twice, counts August 21-October 21 as one month instead of two, and doesn't count October 21-November 1. [another commenter notes that his spreadsheet also contains February 30] ... Ed claims he tried to compute Anthropic's revenue for 2025 and came up with $3.6 billion, suggesting some funny business [but the numbers work out once you fix the errors]"

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

#393

Post by dinfinity »

tptacek wrote: post #337
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…

Dan Luu's piece talks about this! He gives the example of Ray Kurzweil, who is similarly catastrophically wrong about everything, just in the opposite direction as Zitron. Luu's point isn't that anti-AI analysis is bad; it's that Zitron is bad. Zitron is bad in this analysis no matter what Altman says. It could be the case that Altman is also bad.

> He gives the example of Ray Kurzweil, who is similarly catastrophically wrong about everything

Is he, though? It seems to me that a lot of his predictions were surprisingly close to the mark, especially given how long ago they were made.

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

#394

Post by tensor »

sroerick wrote: post #341
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…

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.

As far as I'm aware, aside from toy prototypes, all software is still built by humans coding, albeit with better auto-complete.

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

#395

Post by minimaltom »

dofm wrote: post #379
minimaltom wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Idk about that. A bunch of his wrong predictions were predicated on things turning sour sooner than a "year or so" than now.

Right, but you know the thing. The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent. Predicting the medium future is hardest. Markets don't just pre-plan their behaviour three years earlier and act it out lock-step. Other circumstances can change. By now, the world's financial press has covered some of the scariest aspects of this, and the situation has evolved. There are other moves (the OpenAI/Blackrock…

I agree he is directionally correct, or at least is a vessel to raise important points and valid criticisms.

But predictions need to be specific and falsifable. If not, its just rag-chewing over a beer (luv that shit, but i aint predicting on taco tuesday). If they arent falsifable, then its not a prediction.

I think a lot of the HN comments generally can be described as one camp which cares about and enforces the rigor of predictions and trying to direct limited ear-time to voices which tend to get predictions right, vs the other camp that puts more weight towards directional accuracy.

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

#396

Post by semiquaver »

solid_fuel wrote: post #358
sroerick wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You may be living in a bubble. There are tons of developers still coding by hand, and many industries that don't trust machine generated code in general.

  > many industries that don't trust machine generated code in general.
Which ones? Why wouldn’t careful human code review and extensive test coverage suffice? I work in one of the most conservative and highly regulated industries in the country. My company and every single one of my peer companies I have knowledge of has transitioned to almost exclusively 100% LLM-generated code (with plenty of human review).

I don’t live on a coast and I have a large and broad social network. I don’t know anyone who still mostly codes by hand except the small amount needed to preserve some aspect of their skills. I’m sorry to say that if I did I’d consider them foolish. Even a very restrictive workflow where you used an LLM to specify granular edits you intend to make is vastly faster than doing it by hand. And the level of test coverage and depth you can achieve now is simply life-changing.

It’s much more likely that you are not a professional, or you are the one in a bubble.

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

#397

Post by scarmig »

Patryk27 wrote: post #169
fallingbananna wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have the exact same feeling about him. He has built a following of people that want to hear his extra skeptical views. And even if he changed his mind about some things, he cannot admit it, as that is not what his followers want to hear from him. It's rare that people make the news and build a following by saying a very balanced, down to earth opinions... unfortunately.

> And even if he changed his mind about some things, he cannot admit it, as that is not what his followers want to hear from him. I don't think that's true - over the years he's changed his mind from "LLMs are useless slop machines" to "LLMs can be useful when applied wisely". For instance in "The AI Hater's Manifesto" he says: > It just came to me — the problem that I have with most people using LLMs is the delineat…

But even those concessions have been a shift: at every point, he's been as bearish as possible on LLMs, often past credibility.

And if you take it as a given that AI will never be any better than ~~now~~ a year ago, and that anyone who disagrees is an idiot or a liar, then that pretty much demands that the entire AI economy must be as fraudulent as he imagines. Which, while it serves his purpose of serving up AI-skeptic invective slop well, doesn't actually model what's going on, which is speculative investments that have the potential to generate extraordinary returns.

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

#398

Post by strange_quark »

q23lk wrote: post #167

Yeah well, why not focus on Zitron's Oracle predictions? Article from May 27, 2025, when ORCL was skyrocketing . https://www.wheresyoured.at/measures/ Now ORCL is back to $140. I found this in two minutes via a search engine, but the star blogger Dan Luu apparently cannot handle that. I'm not a regular Zitron reader, but incidentally this blog post that came up in the search is several levels above Luu's post. Zitron…

Agree. Even Zitron's predictions about AI peaking are arguably correct if you step outside the silicon valley bubble. People I know who don't work in tech who use AI at work are doing the same stuff they were a couple years ago: they use it to summarize emails, generate an occasional slide deck, and mostly just send workslop to their coworkers.

And for personal use, I can count on a single hand people I know who pay for an AI subscription, and of those people nobody pays for more than the $20/month plan. And they all just use it as search or maybe to vibecode some one-off party game they use once and then throw away.

I don't know a single person who has done something like run Openclaw or leaves coding agents running on their laptop open all day.

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

#399

Post by Jtarii »

sfblah wrote: post #146
inferniac wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think it's fair to call his specific predictions "early." I'm saying his timelines are too short. Like almost all bearish market commentators, he doesn't understand the scope of the government stimulus. This is a systemic problem in market commentary. But, don't kid yourself. If the US stops massive deficit spending, a lot of what Zitron's saying moves forward on the timeline.

Would you say the 2012 apocalypse doomsayers were correct but just "early"? After all the sun exploding in a billion years will ultimately prove them correct.

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

#400

Post by nowittyusername »

Not very. I like to always watch both sides of this issue, the people who are optimistic, pessimistic, doomers, etc... He is someone who in my opinion misunderstands the bigger picture. He often downplays the capabilities of these systems, doesnt think they will be more powerful in the very near future and also more importantly makes a fatal misunderstanding that we live in a rational world with rational actors.
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