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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?

#461

Post by scarmig »

nl wrote: post #426
dinfinity wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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/

Reading through them, Luu's grades seem fair and accurate to me. Best defense of Kurzweil I can give is that if you give a grace period of a decade and scope them down substantially (to maybe a subset of well-off Americans in coastal cities), he looks much better, though still under 50%.

One of Kurzweil's close-but-no-cigar failed predictions was "neural nets and genetic algorithms," killed off by the conjunction and being a couple years too early (2009 for increasing interest, and 2019 for wide use).

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

#462

Post by asveikau »

I think it's a mistake to make concrete predictions about something like a stock market crash on a given timeline. As they say, the market can remain irrational for longer than you can remain solvent. However, Zitron is directionally correct about a lot.

I will say, the first part Mr. Luu says about big tech not being out of ideas is pure horse shit. Anyone who has worked in big tech knows that leadership at those companies can have no idea what they are doing and still be successful in earnings or the stock market. They are sometimes successful despite themselves.

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

#463

Post by pinkmuffinere »

pinkmuffinere wrote: post #13

> February 2025: "I will keep writing this stuff until I’m proven wrong." Wrong (Zitron continues to write despite repeatedly being proven wrong) Lol, I appreciate the sprinkling of well timed humor in an article that is mostly straightforward facts and analysis.

Upon further thought, I realized this should be counted as a correct prediction for Zitron! Zitron did indeed “keep writing this stuff until…proven wrong”. Zitron’s prediction says nothing about what happens after being proven wrong.

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

#464

Post by nl »

torginus wrote: post #296
ant_li0n wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(edited to remove snark) Your comment seems to miss the point that the article does not (necessarily) have a problem with Zitron being insufferable/annoying/smug. It's that his predictions are verifiably wrong. It's one thing to be annoying and right. Zitron is annoying, but not right.

Are they? These companies have been caught tweaking their numbers. One example, not sure if cited by Zitron, or others, is that they build data centers through holding companies, who have to absorb the costs and massive capex based financial liabilites, so that the brand-name big-tech companies get to keep their expenses off their books. There have been trillions of debt discovered this way. Another issue is the appa…

> These companies have been caught tweaking their numbers... they build data centers through holding companies, who have to absorb the costs and massive capex based financial liabilites, so that the brand-name big-tech companies get to keep their expenses off their books.

This is about as far from "tweaking their numbers" as you can get. It's a standard way infrastructure-heavy industries structure their investments and people would be asking questions if they didn't do this!

> hyperscalers opted to lengthen the depreciation timelines of their GPUs.

Yes and so they should! GPU depreciation timelines used to be 3 years!!

Google is famously still running 10 year old TPUs at 100% utilization, and 10 year old H100s are worth more now on the second hand market than they were when they were bought.

H100 spot prices have only dropped from $5 in May 24 to $3.20 now despite the release of the B200: https://semianalysis.com/gpu-pricing-index/

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

#465

Post by pembrook »

mbesto wrote: post #444
pembrook wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Because a sincere discussion of media (a fundamentally insincere medium with perverse incentives) is silly without addressing this.

Autistically pretending the world is rational and not factoring this in is just as false as Zitron’s predictions.

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

#466

Post by fyredge »

Looking at the refutations of Zitrons predictions in TFA, it boils down to two categories:

1. Zitron claims model capability has peaked 2. Zitron claims AI lab growth (user and revenue) has stalled.

In the first case, TFA refutes by claiming 'wrong' repeatedly, which does not convince me of anything. If anything, Zitron is probably right in this regard, since the majority of progress in recent LLM tech has been setting up of guardrails to cajole the models using 'agents'.

In the second case, numbers are given showing growth, directly refuting Zitron. However, I'm giving Zitron the benefit of the doubt, given the old saying - market can remain irrational far longer than you can remain solvent. As long as people can be convinced that the sky is falling, rational predictions rarely pan out.

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

#467

Post by nl »

solid_fuel wrote: post #439
nl wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

You could try checking the news. > In a remarkable interview with Y Combinator in November 2024, Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, shared a vision that could redefine the technological landscape as we know it. Altman confidently revealed that OpenAI has a clear roadmap for achieving AGI by 2025. https://www.tomsguide.com/ai/chatgpt/sam-altman-claims-agi-i... Now Altman is claiming it'll be this year for sure: https://www.ms…

What specifically was he wrong about in either of those? I.e, something that can be falsified.

> Altman claimed that AGI could be achieved in 2025 during an interview for Y Combinator, declaring that it is now simply an engineering problem. He said things were moving faster than expected and that the path to AGI was "basically clear."

"AGI" isn't a useful term because - as noted in the article you linked - people disagree about what it means. Also his actual claim here seems to have been that the path to AGI was "basically clear."

That isn't a prediction that can be falsified.

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

#468

Post by solid_fuel »

jimmis wrote: post #354
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…

To be fair, Zitron's career is as a commentator. To some extent, I expect CEOs of companies to make ridiculous claims. At the end of the day, when shareholders come knocking, what they care about is whether or not your company is growing. No such mechanism for social media personalities. You can be wrong 90% of the time, and your audience will still praise you for the 10% of the time you were right.

> To be fair, Zitron's career is as a commentator. To some extent, I expect CEOs of companies to make ridiculous claims.

This is not a comment directly at you, because I understand where you're coming from, but I think this attitude shows how far leadership and our expectations of the professional class in America have deteriorated.

My expectations are inverse to yours. I don't care if a commentator makes a claim that's wrong, if they keep being wrong people will stop listening. (In theory. Jim Cramer still has a job so who knows, really.) I certainly don't expect a commentator to have accurate internal information about a company.

CEOs on the other hand should be expected to be honest and accurate in their claims. The information a CEO shares should be accurate so that investors can make informed decisions. Instead, we seem to accept CEOs who act as salesmen first and leaders last.

If a CEO claims a product will be out later this year, and the stock goes up, then they announce actually things are delayed, and the stock still goes up, what is actually being rewarded here?

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

#469

Post by misswaterfairy »

tim333 wrote: post #305
onemoresoop wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fraud is there. Whether it surpasses Enron or not will be revealed in the future.

Patrick Boyle had a vid specifically on whether there was Enron style fraud. The conclusion was no, though he thinks things may be a bit bubbly https://youtu.be/NufJ7g63KSY

It's worth considering that it might not be 'Enron-style' fraud, because that's the best comparison have at the moment.

What event did people compare Enron to, before Enron became 'Enron'?

It's probable we're witnessing an entirely new fraud, we just don't have all of the details yet.

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

#470

Post by aarjaneiro »

aleph_minus_one wrote: post #62
toomuchtodo wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

gestures broadly at HN and the tech industry https://www.ycombinator.com/blog/ai-startupschool I am a realist, I understand the cult of personality, etc. Just like I wouldn't spend a moment trying to talk a Catholic out of their faith. I have no feelings on the topic, this can only last so long based on capital trajectories.

> gestures broadly at HN and the tech industry For me, HN ist rather some kind of counterweight/counterbubble where not everybody is insanely critical and cynical about Elon Musk and Sam Altman. :-)

> counterbubble

Gonna start using that one

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