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.
How accurate have Ed Zitron's AI skeptic predictions been?
401–410 of 1001 posts
Re: How accurate have Ed Zitron's AI skeptic predictions been?
#402Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I actually think you’ve got it backwards I think one of Zitron’s problems is that his moral righteousness has blinded him to how embarrassingly incorrect he is about the AI space. It’s similarly hubristic with the benefit of shielding from his adversarial framing.
I have watched many of his screeds; I think he undercuts his thesis with excess bile.
His core observation is that the unit economics of openAI and anthropic don't actually yield enough profit to pay off the huge debts that these two companies have incurred, and that as a result all the debt they've taken on will have to be written off which will trigger "the hyperscalers" to themselves suffer huge losses (likely wounding google and microsoft and destroying oracle).
He is rather more negative about the utility of LLMs than lots of other people (myself included); but his overall view of
1. they're not completely trustworthy
2. they're really expensive to train
3. it isn't obvious that anyone's willing to pay the full freight for the resulting product
4. lots of large orgs "that should know better" have gone far down the LLM "AI" road because they're looking for "the next big thing" when they should be pivoting to "mature, stable" companies instead of "hypergrowth" companies.
5. there's lots of debt and obligations and no obvious way for all of it to be paid off from revenues from openai / anthropic.
Elsewhere, people have pointed out that many of the "FAANG" companies have shed lots of people and driven lots of profits, largely on the back of internal use of LLM tools. That doesn't necessarily contradict the skepticism that anthropic and openAI will succeed, and given all their obligations, if they fail it'll be a big mess.
But again, big Z doesn't do himself any favors when he rants about "failsons" or whatever.
Re: How accurate have Ed Zitron's AI skeptic predictions been?
#403Earlier 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.
As far as I'm aware, aside from toy prototypes, all software is still built by humans coding, albeit with better auto-complete.
It is all very unevenly distributed. SaaS and general web is basically on auto mode.
A lot of infra is vibe coded nowadays too.
Even prototypes are contributing to the speed of software development. Many people vibe code throwaway dashboards around the main platform which gives a lot of insights.
Re: How accurate have Ed Zitron's AI skeptic predictions been?
#404Mo Bitar over on YouTube does the grumpy AI skeptic routine in a much more entertaining fashion.
His "Unethical guide to surviving AI layoffs" was solid gold: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JgVBqcqUGE0 > Now, if your CEO has never heard the phrase Ralph Loop, oh man, you are less than 30 days away from your next promotion. I'm not even exaggerating. Walk into his office, close the door, and say, hey chief, been experimenting with something. It's called Ralph Loops. And I think it could change literally everythi…
This is eerily similar to how a few people at work did some presentations about ralph loop and connecting agents to slack right when management was really pushing unrealistic AI productivity boosts. I was repeatedly asked to speed things up with AI while I was already heavily using AI to do work.
Re: How accurate have Ed Zitron's AI skeptic predictions been?
#405Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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. OK, but the first instance of a claim of diminishing returns was in February 2024, when GPT-4 was the best model available. Do you really think improvement since then has been minimal?
I personally think improvement has been minimal since ChatGPT was released actually.
That's not defensible.
Re: How accurate have Ed Zitron's AI skeptic predictions been?
#406> 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…
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Even if Zitron is hopelessly wrong and a complete fool, he's an engaging writer. Like the original article itself states, it's not about the numbers, it's about catharsis. The transparent absence of AI tells in his articles is refreshing, and just rampaging against the AI boosters who lack empathy and self-awareness (which so many of them absolutely do) is cathartic. Even if it's all bunk, fake, and stupid, it's nice to have a way to self-soothe and manifest how much some of us want AI to have a reckoning.
Does that make his readers suckers? Possibly. But personally I also think it's a very human trait to seek comfort.
Re: How accurate have Ed Zitron's AI skeptic predictions been?
#407Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I think one important distinction is at least they have some humility to admit they were wrong. I'd be amazed to see a source proving that statement. There's never been a retraction around the AGI claims for example as far as I'm aware.
I can't find a counter to every statement they have made and not sure about your specific AGI claim but. https://www.youtube.com/shorts/QMhtTO3u61A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_ueDUrkOlQ Examples of acknowledging he was wrong
I only watched the first one so far but you misunderstood what he says, he doesn't admit being wrong at all, in fact he doubles down on wrong claims.
Re: How accurate have Ed Zitron's AI skeptic predictions been?
#408One thing I’m observing in these comments is a willingness of folks to project their own predictions onto Ed’s statements when validating their plausibility. Eg. “I think he’s wrong about the timing but I do expect AI companies to go to zero.” You can do that, but then you’re no longer discussing his predictions. You’re discussing your predictions, and your own positioning. Those differ from Dan’s essay, which engage…
Why is Zitron’s repute evaluated entirely on the basis of failed predictions? Predictions are incredibly hard. AI enthusiasts and thought leaders have made so many demonstrably incorrect predictions it’s hard to keep track. Based on this metric, Altman and Amodei should never be taken seriously again.
Have you ever listened to Zitron speak? He's not exactly the type to hedge his predictions behind careful language about how hard predictions are. He makes every one of these predictions with absolute confidence and conviction.
Re: How accurate have Ed Zitron's AI skeptic predictions been?
#409Earlier 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.
I guess I don't exist...
I guess the GP is joking. But on the current climate, it's really hard to be sure.
Re: How accurate have Ed Zitron's AI skeptic predictions been?
#410Earlier 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.
As far as I'm aware, aside from toy prototypes, all software is still built by humans coding, albeit with better auto-complete.
This seems to be more a problem of your awareness than a lack of projects.
Apart from every software engineer I know building almost completely with AI now there have been numerous projects posted on HN that are AI coded.
There's also Claude desktop which is famously all AI built and very widely used.