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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?

#421

Post by tptacek »

pembrook wrote: post #411
tptacek wrote: post #338

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.

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

#422

Post by elictronic »

brikym wrote: post #184

Zitron sells anti-hype and AI-hate. AI is not good for a lot of people and he's telling them what they want to hear. He's great at talking and making entertaining facial expressions. That's actually a real skill I admire but it has nothing to do with predicting markets correctly. He's in the business of selling entertainment views not predicting markets. He even admits he doesn't short AI.

Zitron sells AI is in a huge bubble. Which basically everyone agrees with who isn't directly incentivized to say it looks perfectly normal.

Personally, I don't bet in rigged games, which is what all the circular financing is.

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

#423

Post by ACCount37 »

elictronic wrote: post #414
ACCount37 wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sometimes the thing being pushed as "the next big thing" is, in fact, the next big thing. Regardless of how annoying you find the push to be.

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

#424

Post by socalgal2 »

Danluu claims Ray Kurzweil's predictions are wrong. I asked

> list 50 predictions by Ray Kurzweil that he made before 2005, the date he made the prediction, and whether to not his prediction was correct. If it was correct, give some proof.

Of the 50 that were listed, 43 were correct, 7 incorrect.

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

#425

Post by solid_fuel »

semiquaver wrote: post #397
solid_fuel wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Which ones?

Any that value correctness over speed. Banking, safety critical embedded work, aerospace work, etc.

> Why wouldn’t careful human code review and extensive test coverage suffice?

Because anyone who has been in the industry for a while knows that code review is not a substitute for intentionality and understanding when writing the code. To properly validate a change you must fully understand the intention behind it and the design at play, and then check the changes made against the system design. That is best done by a human subject matter expert (this is the role which software developers have traditionally filled, for anyone new to the industry).

> 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).

That's called "being in a bubble".

> 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.

And I think it's foolish to let your coding and critical thinking skills atrophy like this, but you do you.

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

Not even worth a reply.

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

#426

Post by nl »

dinfinity wrote: post #394
tptacek wrote: post #338

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.

> 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.

Luu's piece linked his analysis! Kurzweil scores 7% accuracy.

If you scroll to the appendix he grades individual predictions.

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

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

#427

Post by marcosdumay »

tptacek wrote: post #214
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…

Luu is pretty specific about the predictions Zitron is making, has taken the time to pull them out and date them, and they're both risible and not rescuable with vibes. His point isn't that Google or Meta are doing well or have bright futures. Luu is generally critical of tech giant engineering and product culture. He's critical of Google in particular in this very article. But the point of the article is that it's n…

> Luu is pretty specific about the predictions Zitron is making

He is not, though. He precisely points to imprecise predictions, decontextualize them so he misses the point of the ones this thread is focused on, analyzes them with even less precise rationales that don't really rebut the prediction, and points suggestively (enough that you seem to have got that suggestion) that this rebuttal destroys the main prediction of every Zitron piece, while saying otherwise several times at the end of the rationale.

Zitron's predictions aren't all very good, but this article isn't either.

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

#428

Post by lz400 »

I've said this before in here but Zitron is completely captured by his audience at best and a grifter at worst. A couple of months ago he was tweeting that people were crazy talking about _agents_, that they didn't _exist_ and that people talking about them were shills or bots. The responses were full of incredulous software developers saying but but but I use them every day, they're so good they're scary actually...

Zitron is just, like Dan Luu says, wrong about everything and doesn't care anymore, he's in the business of extracting money from his engagement.

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

#429

Post by socalgal2 »

tptacek wrote: post #338
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…

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.

I'm going to need some evidence that Kurzweil was wrong. AFAICT he was right in 80%+ of his predictions with several more on track.

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

#430

Post by emp17344 »

mvdtnz wrote: post #408
emp17344 wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So does everyone else, including prominent AI enthusiasts and tech CEOs. And most of those predictions are wrong, because predictions are really hard.
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