Ed Zitron sells subscriptions to his blog. Whether he’s right or wrong is irrelevant.
Why would any rational person want to pay to read falsehoods?
How accurate have Ed Zitron's AI skeptic predictions been?
521–530 of 1001 posts
Re: How accurate have Ed Zitron's AI skeptic predictions been?
#522Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sorry what is the punch-line here supposed to be? These investments obviously increase correlation coeffs., but these are highly correlated stocks to begin with.
valuation gains on investments are one-offs, not signs of sustained improvements in profitability that would warrant higher market caps when those valuation gains are in turn the result of circular financing schemes (a bakery giving out money so that people buy bread from it), we're getting to a dangerous situation
Demand for compute is far outstripping what was projected in the initial rounds in which we pearl clutched over 'circular financing' - which is hardly distinguishable even from the classical bill of exchange, the core phenomenon of the money market in Bagehot's day, in which I provide you inputs and you give me a share. I keep reading people saying what amounts to: the primitive bill of exchange was circular!!; if the seller of inputs has reason to lend, so does everyone else etc etc. In fact if the projections about final sales are correct, it is plain all these deals will be fine.
Re: How accurate have Ed Zitron's AI skeptic predictions been?
#523Earlier quoted context omitted.
You are confusing Capex and revenue. The predictions were predictions of revenue. Circular financing of AI projects does not create revenue for OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, or Google. Only Nvidia benefits from it. Predicting revenue growth will stall and it does not was wrong.
Circular financing absolutely creates revenue. A startup raises $50 million from OpenAI and Anthropic to finance API calls to OpenAI and Anthropic that they are using at a loss who in turn spend that money on compute with Microsoft and Google who in turn invest in Anthropic and OpenAI who then invest the startup using the startup’s revenue to value it… the cycle repeats. There are multi-billion dollar valued startups…
The vast majority of startups are not funded by OpenAI or Anthropic. They are not a significant source of venture capital. Meanwhile, OpenAI is pulling in $40B+ per year and Anthropic $65B+ per year.
You are mixing up valuations with liquid cash and you're also making sweeping statements about how those startups are spending their cash. A majority of a raise is not spent on AI compute.
Situational Awareness blew up because they used leverage to invest, and leverage is a great way to blow up any fund even if they were directionally correct about AI.
Re: How accurate have Ed Zitron's AI skeptic predictions been?
#524Ed Zitron has the economics of AI basically right. Most technologies arrive by digging an enormous financial crater, followed by a contraction period in which everyone insists the crater is actually a revolutionary new business model, before the survivors eventually buy up whatever remains.
What likely resonates is AI really does feel like a science experiment. There is clearly real value here. The problem is that the economic value has yet to catch up with the technological value. And yet the claims coming from AI companies have the unmistakable energy of a state-fair entrepreneur standing beside a suspicious knife yelling, “You have never seen anything like this before, it slices it dices...!”
I think Ed goes too far when he compares LLMs to garbage. He’s tried them, had a handful of bad experiences, and apparently decided the entire technology belongs in the round file. But much of what humans do is essentially trial and error with better PR: apply some logic, see what happens, adjust, try again, and continue until you eventually solve the problem.
If you can get an LLM to reliably do that, you can solve certain classes of problems dramatically faster.
Re: How accurate have Ed Zitron's AI skeptic predictions been?
#525Earlier quoted context omitted.
Without reference to either person, I think this is essentially a misunderstanding of Frankfurt’s analysis: On Bullshit is about expressing sentiments without caring about their truth value, i.e. the concept of a “bull session.” Both Altman and Zitron are the opposite of Frankfurt’s bullshitter, because they both appear to evince genuine care for the truth value of their position. (Frankfurt is very subtle about this…
Bullshitting is where you don't care about whether what you say is true. Your goal is to influence a certain way of thinking or feeling, and you just say stuff that you think will cause that in other people. Appearing to care about truth is not opposed to that, it's part of it.
I don’t think these mental states are in evidence for either of them. I think they’re both credibly earnest in their views.
(Frankfurt’s characterization of the bullshitter rests on not just the truth value being absent, but also on the bullshitter’s misrepresentation of what he’s “up to.” I don’t feel that either Zitron or Altman is misrepresenting what they’re getting up to.)
Re: How accurate have Ed Zitron's AI skeptic predictions been?
#526Earlier quoted context omitted.
Would you say the 2012 apocalypse doomsayers were correct but just "early"? After all the sun exploding in a billion years will ultimately prove them correct.
What? No, they were correct; the world ended in 2012.
The world actually ended when harambe got shot in may 2016.
Re: How accurate have Ed Zitron's AI skeptic predictions been?
#527Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Talking one's own book is a grand and ancient American tradition!
Re: How accurate have Ed Zitron's AI skeptic predictions been?
#528Earlier 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.
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."
I was awed by the future he promised, especially https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Respirocyte
Looking back, he’s great at selling a future of possibility as long as you don’t track all the errors.
Re: How accurate have Ed Zitron's AI skeptic predictions been?
#529Earlier 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/
Kurzweil predicted in the late 90s that we will have AGI by 2029. And ASI by 2045. Seems very likely to me.
Re: How accurate have Ed Zitron's AI skeptic predictions been?
#530Earlier quoted context omitted.
Dario Amodei and Eric Schmidt seem fairly well-calibrated, although a bit early. Elon Musk is constantly way, way overoptimistic (perhaps to the point of willful fraud). Zitron is hopelessly and ridiculously incompetent (and there are allegations he is willfully lying, too, but who knows).
The AGI that appeared mid 2023 and killed single every person in 8 months was neat!
Live long enough and all these apocalypses start to smell the same.