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

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

#511

Post by asveikau »

sfblah wrote: post #147
inferniac wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, hes been extremely wrong multiple times, he should not be treated seriously Its silly to say hes just early, when his predictions give specific timelines that don't work at all - "so egregious that I am surprised it's not some kind of financial crime to say it out loud" — on OpenAI forecasting $11.6B for 2025 ( https://www.wheresyoured.at/exclusive-openai-financials/ ) actual: $13.07B. source is his own scoop ( h…

I think it's fair to call his specific predictions "early." I'm saying his timelines are too short. Like almost all bearish market commentators, he doesn't understand the scope of the government stimulus. This is a systemic problem in market commentary. But, don't kid yourself. If the US stops massive deficit spending, a lot of what Zitron's saying moves forward on the timeline.

It's not government stimulus driving this. It's that when you start with a "successful" company, the financial consequences of bad decisions or bad leadership can take a long time to have a negative effect, if at all, because financial success has a momentum to it.

I left Microsoft during the windows 8 cycle in large part because I could tell nobody knew what the hell they were doing, which is an objectively true statement about the time and place. My dad happened to buy Microsoft stock at that same time and did very well with it.

That's the paradoxical problem that I think all big tech has. Poor decisions by incompetent people, met with inexplicable financial success.

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

#512

Post by goatlover »

blitzar wrote: post #187
sfblah wrote: post #99

I don't think Zitron is wrong, exactly. He's just early. There are a lot of analysts who have faced the same criticism over the past 10-15 years. IMO the issue is that they fail to understand the staggering size and scope of the government fiscal + monetary interventions across those years. Essentially, the government has jammed all the risk into the future to repeatedly rescue near-term results. I think something si…

Being early is being wrong.

Being wrong about when a financial bubble will burst is different than being wrong that there is a financial bubble. That's the question, because if AI is driving a bubble, then it will burst at some point.

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

#513

Post by goatlover »

thegrim33 wrote: post #118
hypfer wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We have people telling us the next recession being imminent all the time. Yeah uhm so I'm not sure if you've like seen the world recently, but uh. Yea

S&P 500 - All time high DJIA - All time high Unemployment rate - Near all time low (for last 20 years) Number of US small businesses - All time high US GDP - All time high [Sources] https://www.bls.gov/charts/employment-situation/civilian-une... https://www.sellerscommerce.com/blog/small-business-statisti... https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GDP

And yet with all that, Democrats are likely to retake the US Congress because a majority of Americans are experiencing an affordability crisis.

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

#515

Post by maxglute »

nl wrote: post #506
maxglute wrote: post #483

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> we know deprecation cycle of DC hardware leans towards tulips i.e. [1] is a reasonable discussion of DC cost models, which calculates depreciation as part of the annual cost. > here is the rest of the order magnitude more $$$ that justifies existing spent relative to time frame coming from? That money comes from long term debt (ie bonds by public companies[3]) and new investment into neo-cloud companies (ie, IPOs l…

This narrow focus, of course some intermediaries in industrial chain is going to make $$$ selling/renting shovels - there is stupendous amount of $$$ being moved around, there will be some very phat winners, but even more losers in aggregate on broad ecosystem level. [1] is actually illustrative, there's a reason why opex low - capex premium is ridiculous right now, with almost everyone along compute industrial chain capturing 50%+ margins. Investors are burning $$$ and companies and pillaging warchests, intermediaries are raking in $$$, but that doesn't mean investors or companies doing all the spending will make more than they spend, i.e. the net ecosystem business model is not sustainable precisely because intermediaries are capturing crazy rent relative to actual monetization to sustain.

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

#516

Post by ALittleLight »

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…

The big difference is that Altman et al aren't just, or even mainly, pundits or prognosticators. Zitron's whole thing is commentary and predictions about AI and his predictions are almost all wrong.

Altman and friends are mainly actually making and delivering AI. If they also hype their timelines/valuations, they also seem to make directional progress on the goals.

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

#517

Post by jibal »

socalgal2 wrote: post #429
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.

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.

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

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

#518

Post by m4rtink »

anonuser123 wrote: post #304
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…

My bet is that Amodei's claims about the dangers of AI are the most likely to come true – I'm predicticing amodei/anthropic will become the evil it was against.

I predict they go bankrupt.

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

#519

Post by MaybiusStrip »

solid_fuel wrote: post #471
nl wrote: post #467

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…

All in all, it's clearly the AI skeptics that have egg on their faces. Sam Altman is very flawed and you could make a strong argument for why that's why he blew an enormous lead to Anthropic. Dario's predictions in general haven't been that far off. The general public is becoming increasingly aware of AI as a big deal (and something about 60% hates). Our jobs, regardless of where on the adoption curve we are, have undeniably changed a lot.

Zitron and a whole lot of people on HN were trying to claim this was a nothingburger or at least no more important than the invention of IDEs up until Dec 2025, and then all of a sudden everyone quietly shifted what the "reasonable" opinion was. If I were those people, I'd spend more time taking a look at what was wrong with my priors than look outward.

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

#520

Post by usef- »

nl wrote: post #420
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…

> 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…

Note that no one ever quotes the end of Dario's line, either, where he said programmers would still be needed in that 12 months. People think the prediction was more extreme than it really was because all the clips didn't include the latter part.

> .... and in 12 months, we might be in a world where the ai is writing essentially all of the code. But the programmer still needs to specify what are the conditions of what you're doing; What is the overall app you're trying to make; What is the overall design decision; How we collaborate with other code that has been written; How do we have some common sense with whether this is a secure design or an insecure design. So as long as there are these small pieces that a programmer has to do, then I think human productivity will actually be enhanced

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