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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?

#411

Post by [deleted] »

overfeed wrote: post #385
nomel wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I personally see it as: These companies subsidizing green energy expansion, because it's now the cheapest power to expand. These companies are going to help "correct" the widespread problem with utility monopolies, in the US. Datacenters are deploying their own power generation, partly because power cost no longer aligns with power generation costs . This mismatch is motivating research into local nuclear power gener…

> These companies subsidizing green energy expansion, because it's now the cheapest power to expand. Unless you consider natural gass green energy, it's quite the opposite for the moment. This is because the AI build-out is about speed, not cost-effectiveness. That is why xai's Colossus I & II were illegally running gas turbines, and Google recanted its pledge for data center renewables targets.

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

#412

Post by marcosdumay »

meowface wrote: post #348
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.

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).

The AGI that appeared mid 2023 and killed single every person in 8 months was neat!

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

#413

Post by elictronic »

ACCount37 wrote: post #359
truelson wrote: post #309

He is a bit more of a PR person rage-farming disguised as a futurist. He's not optimizing for correct predictions. That's really hard and not his incentive. Look at his incentives. It makes more sense.

There's a demand for loud and confident "AI tech will fail" and "big tech will fail", so it pays to peddle the goods. A lot of people desperately want AI to be a nothingburger. Thus, they will seek a second opinion that just so happens to line up with their existing one. Wishful thinking at its finest.

There are an even larger amount of people who have gotten tired of the NFT levels of pushiness AI has become from a financial perspective. It's become worse than crypto bros at this point.

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

#414

Post by [deleted] »

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…

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

#415

Post by 3ddds »

nl wrote: post #409
tensor wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

#416

Post by aesthesia »

torginus wrote: post #342

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-prediction…

Who are the people who know more about AI financing and can point out the sleight of hand? I'd be interested in reading them.

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

#417

Post by ElProlactin »

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…

> 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.

Except that the AI industry leaders actually have skin in the game/are in the trenches and competing in the market. Ed Zitron wants you to subscribe to a newsletter so that you can read doom and gloom and...?

If you invested based on his advice, you'd have missed huge gains and/or lost money.

And I say this as a person who thinks most of the "AI industry leaders" are ethically questionable, at best, and ethically bankrupt, at worst, and that the stock market should be approached with caution due to valuations.

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

#418

Post by 3ddds »

aka-rider wrote: post #402
tensor wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

#419

Post by nl »

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…

> multiple breathless press releases warning that the end of white collar work is "just 6 months away"

I'd like to see an example of this.

I think Altman and Amodei have been quite sober with their actual predictions. They've said things like "models can now do white collar work" but haven't yet said it is the end of white collar work.

The closest actual quote to this was in In March 2025, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei told a Council on Foreign Relations audience that AI would be writing 90 percent of code in three to six months, and essentially all of it within twelve months.

I think that he underestimated how long it takes for technology to get uptake but in terms of capabilities he was perhaps 6 months out. I'd say that Fable class models are definitely capable of writing essentially all software, and that was released June 2026.

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

#420

Post by tptacek »

pembrook wrote: post #410
tptacek wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The fact that you know Ed Zitron's name means that, regardless of his predictions being consistently wrong (which they are), his strategy for manipulating human attention has been correct. The question is whether he sincerely believes his own predictions or if he cynically is aware that you can create a career for yourself being a guy who says bombastic clickbait-worthy things people emotionally want to be true, inst…

I don't care whether he believes his own predictions, only that they're so frequently incoherent and false.
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