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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?

#441

Post by marcosdumay »

KaiserPro wrote: post #85
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…

Audience capture is a terrible thing. I'm not sure I have the force of will to not succumb to it. I think the only way to avoid it is to be so sure of the thing you are doing that the audience reaction is not the key metric by which you measure your success.

"Popular topic-expert" is a really cursed career to exist.

Ideally we would reward expert opinions on track-record, instead of how they make us feel. But we don't. Also ideally, the expert's conclusion wouldn't impact their ability to pay the rent (as long as it's correct), but again, that's not the world we live in.

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

#442

Post by [deleted] »

iLoveOncall wrote: post #407
sarjann wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

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

#443

Post by insane_dreamer »

Not about Zitron specifically -- I don't read his study, but I don't know that making some statements in interviews or blog posts is the same as making a "prediction" (into which one would put much more though)

also statements can be interpreted many ways:

"Meta is dying" was countered by "Meta's revenue has increased since Zitron said that". OK, but 1) revenue/profit is only one measure of "not dying"; 2) what's the time scale? Nokia and Xerox were highly profitable companies that dominated their industries, and any prediction that they would go out of business at their height would have been laughed at, and yet, it wasn't too much later that they pretty much did.

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

#444

Post by mbesto »

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…

> his strategy for manipulating human attention has been correct.

"Correct" is not the word you're looking for here. More like "very effective". His strategy for manipulating human attention is very effective, but the correctness of his strategy isn't relevant here, so I'm not sure why you're bringing that up.

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

#445

Post by Terr_ »

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.

I'm convinced all of Kurzweil's predictions through the years can be simplified as (and originate from) "whatever least-implausible dream scenario allows a man of Ray Kurzweil's exact age and health to barely avoid the hitherto-universal icy grip of mortality."

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

#446

Post by wesammikhail »

iknowSFR wrote: post #370
supermdguy wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait are the hyperscalers booking unrealized gains as income? Or are they selling their positions?

A recent Zitron claim is that they’re booking unrealized gains tied to these private labs. Google’s net revenues being a recent example.

It's not a "Zitron claim". it's literally in the filings...

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

#447

Post by marcosdumay »

ben_w wrote: post #348
conception wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ban…

All those people were born rich, with no chance of losing their money.

Instead, the smarter rich people stay out of the press. And the only reason we hear about them is because they were always very stupid.

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

#448

Post by krcz »

iLoveOncall wrote: post #407
sarjann wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Interesting; he is clearly saying that they were ("as a field") "confident and wrong" to believe that "the economy would have been completely upended" by the appearance of a model as strong as GPT4. What seems to be missing, from your point of view, to consider it an admission of being wrong?

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

#449

Post by semiquaver »

solid_fuel wrote: post #425
semiquaver wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

  > That's called "being in a bubble".
I’m perfectly willing to consider the possibility that you may be right, but “a bubble” implies something massive outside of it which constitutes a large majority of the whole, and that’s simply not the case here. I just don’t believe there are more than a small handful of companies like you describe. It’s not like these things aren’t extensively studied, and all the industry surveys I’ve seen point in the direction of more and more LLM-assistance in coding worldwide.

I have connections in most of the industries you named and I can promise you that they are no different. I don’t particularly care whether you believe me, but I encourage you to self-examine to understand whether what you are saying is what you would like to be true (I do too!) or whether it actually is.

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