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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?

#481

Post by bandrami »

sroerick wrote: post #341
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…

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.

There are whole industries that still don't let LLM-generated code touch production

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

#482

Post by maxglute »

nl wrote: post #432
maxglute wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How? AFAIK, his arguments based around the economics remains the same, he just seems increasingly dramatic and exacerbated, which is understandable when you realize industry + ecosystem (politics/reporting) is tulip mania delulu and insists 1+1=100, or 30 trillion, or whatever. His position isn't based on AI progress - it's based on AI economics, at this point he can be an obnoxious rationalist slamming flat earthers…

> you realize industry + ecosystem (politics/reporting) is tulip mania It could be "tulip mania" or it could be "the internet". Luu analyzed the numbers instead of just reacting to hype. Specifically: >> Oct 2024: OpenAI's forecast of $3.7B revenue in 2024 and $11.6B in 2025 and $100B in 2029 are absurd, "a statement so egregious that I am surprised it's not some kind of financial crime to say it out loud" > Wrong (2…

On a spectrum between tulip wilting and fiber build out, we know deprecation cycle of DC hardware leans towards tulips i.e. The numbers being cited is ~100B is well within accounting/ledger maxxxing tricks relative to current pool of investment. Luu is not analyzing number's he's just listing and believing numbers, and analytically entirely avoids the core Zitron thesis... once you tap out of easy investor $$$, FAANG warchest, accounting tricks... where is the rest of the order magnitude more $$$ that justifies existing spent relative to time frame coming from?

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

#483

Post by notatoad »

getnormality wrote: post #450
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.

Altman and Zitron are like pro wrestlers. Their speech acts aren't for truth, they're for some spectacular effect on your feelings and your imagination that keeps you coming back for more. I encourage anyone interested in this to read On Bullshit by Harry Frankfurt, the best popular philosophy work in a long time.

Ed Zitrons wild claims might be for entertainment value, but Altman’s are for his own valuation. He’s bringing in hundreds of billions of dollars off those claims.

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

#484

Post by drdeca »

pembrook wrote: post #464
mbesto wrote: post #443

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Nothing in acknowledging those perverse incentives requires that one misleadingly use the word “correct” in place of “effective”.

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

#485

Post by nl »

solid_fuel wrote: post #470
nl wrote: post #466

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 dis…

Whoa, be careful, I think those goalposts just broke the speed of sound. > 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." He was wrong that AGI was "now simply an engineering problem". He was wrong that the path to AGI was "bas…

> He was wrong that AGI was "now simply an engineering problem".

> He was wrong that the path to AGI was "basically clear".

Why do you say that?

For context, Jensen Huang says:

> "For many tasks, we could say that we’ve already achieved AGI... I think of all of those milestones…they’re kind of senseless at this point.[1]

Even if you disagree with that, Altman's statement seems more about the idea that "more data + more compute + transformer based neural networks" will get us to something called AGI.

I think that statement is true. I guess you don't.

> if you want to play definition games and start waving your hands around and accept the claim "oh well actually we don't really know how to define AGI now", then he was wrong to claim that the path to AGI was "basically clear"!

No - because I think his and Jenson's definition means we have achieved AGI.

So it goes back to my point: this isn't falsifiable.

[1] https://mashable.com/tech/nvidia-ceo-jensen-huang-says-agi-a...

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

#486

Post by conductr »

getnormality wrote: post #450
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.

Altman and Zitron are like pro wrestlers. Their speech acts aren't for truth, they're for some spectacular effect on your feelings and your imagination that keeps you coming back for more. I encourage anyone interested in this to read On Bullshit by Harry Frankfurt, the best popular philosophy work in a long time.

I think it’s appropriate in this day that people have to really shout and lament on and on about their thing just to get a few people to listen and/or consider parts of their argument. Nobody listens if you’re just casually proselytizing your grift.

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

#487

Post by pcstl »

Pxtl wrote: post #457
pcstl wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really don't find it coherent to call someone who you keep consistently losing to stupid.

That's literally the meaning of the statement "the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent". Irrational means stupid. Stupid can win for a very long time, and in the end the "loss" is born mostly by bag-holders.

This isn't about people who just happened to make it big in a market rally, though. You're talking as if I'm speaking about people who just happened to buy some Bitcoin in 2012 rather than leaders of some of the most successful corporations on Earth.

They're not infallible, but modelling them as complete idiots that just happened to get lucky is also... Not really consistent with reality, as far as I can tell. These people might not be good people, but they're good at playing a certain kind of game.

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

#488

Post by pcstl »

colordrops wrote: post #232
pcstl wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really don't find it coherent to call someone who you keep consistently losing to stupid.

Because it's not a single data point, intelligence is a wide surface area where you can be smart in some areas and stupid in others. Furthermore whether you are being intelligent is relative to ideals and goals, and not everyone has the same ones.

"Capability to achieve goals" seems to be fairly independent of goals.

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

#489

Post by pcstl »

konmok wrote: post #365
pcstl wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is weakness in the long-term. It's pretty clear in how people talk about billionaires: They must somehow conclude that the people most successful within a system that rewards certain things are not competent because the things the system rewards are not what they think the system should reward (it is fine to believe the system rewards the wrong things, but people walk straight into denying that those people have s…

I wouldn't really call cruelty or dishonesty a "skill".

That's a choice, but the universe has no reason to respect it.

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

#490

Post by nl »

paodealho wrote: post #475
nl wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Have you ever considered: - that you don't know most people in the world - that some of the people you know are using these tools because they were forced ?

> that you don't know most people in the world

Of course.

To be clear, the claim was "all software is still built by humans coding"

I know this all software claim is false because I've seen it. Proof by example.

> that some of the people you know are using these tools because they were forced

Irrelevant to that claim.

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