Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

danluu.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

531–540 of 1001 posts

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

#531

Post by jryle70 »

overfeed wrote: post #385
nomel wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I personally see it as: These companies subsidizing green energy expansion, because it's now the cheapest power to expand. These companies are going to help "correct" the widespread problem with utility monopolies, in the US. Datacenters are deploying their own power generation, partly because power cost no longer aligns with power generation costs . This mismatch is motivating research into local nuclear power gener…

> These companies subsidizing green energy expansion, because it's now the cheapest power to expand. Unless you consider natural gass green energy, it's quite the opposite for the moment. This is because the AI build-out is about speed, not cost-effectiveness. That is why xai's Colossus I & II were illegally running gas turbines, and Google recanted its pledge for data center renewables targets.

That's wrong. US battery energy is growing faster than ever, not in small part thanks to the push by data centers.

https://www.siliconvalley.com/2026/09/01/us-battery-installs...

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

#532

Post by arthurlockman »

I want to point out that Zitron is _just a guy_. He’s not a billionaire CEO. He’s not a politician. He’s allowed to say what he wants whether it’s right or wrong, and _he’s just a guy_. He’s not swinging stock values for a group of insiders by tweeting. He’s not using pension funds to pay for a jacked-up IPO. He’s blogging and making a podcast, neither of which is compulsory for you to read.

You don’t have to spend effort proving him wrong. Just don’t read it and move on with your life. Regardless of which “side” of AI you’re on it’s kinda ridiculous how much effort gets spent on screaming gotcha at this one commentator.

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

#533

Post by VirusNewbie »

arthurlockman wrote: post #532

I want to point out that Zitron is _just a guy_. He’s not a billionaire CEO. He’s not a politician. He’s allowed to say what he wants whether it’s right or wrong, and _he’s just a guy_. He’s not swinging stock values for a group of insiders by tweeting. He’s not using pension funds to pay for a jacked-up IPO. He’s blogging and making a podcast, neither of which is compulsory for you to read. You don’t have to spend e…

He charges people money for a newsletter that reinforces completely detached from reality viewpoints. If he's just making stuff up, that's called grifting, and it's good people call that out.

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

#534

Post by qsera »

semiquaver wrote: post #396
solid_fuel wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You may be living in a bubble. There are tons of developers still coding by hand, and many industries that don't trust machine generated code in general.

> 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…

>Why wouldn’t careful human code review and extensive test coverage suffice?

I have come to understand that LLM generated code, even when carefully reviewed, ends up being hard to review as time progress.

This is because when you are coding yourselves, you get a first hand sense of the complexity creeping in. Then you refactor some stuff to keep complexity in check. LLMs does not "feel" such friction, and will happily keep adding on complexity until meaningful reviews are impossible beyond a certain point.

At this point, you need an LLM to review the changes and at that point, all bets are off.

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

#535

Post by tensor »

nl wrote: post #409
tensor wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As far as I'm aware, aside from toy prototypes, all software is still built by humans coding, albeit with better auto-complete.

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.

> now there have been numerous projects posted on HN that are AI coded.

Yes, all of which are toy projects and get criticized every time they are posted. On actual serious projects, not someones pet home project, I've only seen "vibe coding" used in very low risk places like small UI components. And even then they are generally heavily tweaked after the fact.

My anecdotal personal experience seem to agree with the general sentiment I see here on HN. Some people or companies do it, but with generally heavy criticism.

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

#536

Post by arthurlockman »

VirusNewbie wrote: post #533
arthurlockman wrote: post #532

I want to point out that Zitron is _just a guy_. He’s not a billionaire CEO. He’s not a politician. He’s allowed to say what he wants whether it’s right or wrong, and _he’s just a guy_. He’s not swinging stock values for a group of insiders by tweeting. He’s not using pension funds to pay for a jacked-up IPO. He’s blogging and making a podcast, neither of which is compulsory for you to read. You don’t have to spend e…

He charges people money for a newsletter that reinforces completely detached from reality viewpoints. If he's just making stuff up, that's called grifting, and it's good people call that out.

> if he’s just making stuff up, that’s called grifting

So then we should be calling Dario out every time he opens his mouth, right?

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

#537

Post by jsrozner »

_diyar wrote: post #258
jsrozner wrote: post #216

Though the bubble has not popped, I don't see the following discussed in the post: Zitron would probably point out (as have others) that many of the hyperscalers are booking valuation increases in Anthropic, OpenAI as "Other Income", which is substantially increasing their reported revenue and earnings. It's roughly: - Hyperscalers like Goog, Meta, Msft invest cash in Anthropic, OpenAI, in exchange for equity - The o…

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.

The issue is simply that the posted article begins with a review of recent earnings/ revenues, but fails to discuss that a substantial part of those revenues are investment markups.

Whether it matters we don’t know yet, but it’s a fact worth noting. A better article might have tried to argue why it doesn’t matter

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

#538

Post by autaut »

I’m not really convinced by any of this, in fact it seems most of the predictions were pretty correct and that Meta and Alphabet are having big issues is a shared opinion by multiple observers and pretty much every employee they have.

If they were doing so well why the layoffs? Why the tightening both in salaries and perks and work life balance? Why so many choices disrupting morale for their employees?

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

#539

Post by george_max »

autaut wrote: post #538

I’m not really convinced by any of this, in fact it seems most of the predictions were pretty correct and that Meta and Alphabet are having big issues is a shared opinion by multiple observers and pretty much every employee they have. If they were doing so well why the layoffs? Why the tightening both in salaries and perks and work life balance? Why so many choices disrupting morale for their employees?

Help me understand where Meta and Alphabet's issues are. They seem to be doing quite well on paper -- nothing anomalous in terms of profitability or scaling recently. Layoffs are to be expected when AI can increase productivity.

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

#540

Post by roenxi »

scarmig wrote: post #460
nl wrote: post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Fair, sure. But it seems to be underselling how reasonable Kurzweil is.

We've got things like 2009 - "Computers can recognize their owner's face from a picture or video. No." And ok, sure, but that has happened by 2026 and we have more than 2000 years of recorded history of people making predictions.

I don't think that situation reflects at all badly on Kurzweil except that he doesn't explicitly say he has a 15 year error bar. Which, yes, technically inaccurate, but it seems quite likely nobody would be talking about him if he spent that much time exploring the minor caveats.

And hitting him for the "and genetic algorithms" is verging on pedantry. Ok so genetic algorithms aren't a civilisation-level success that appears to be reshaping the fate of the species in the same way neural nets are. He was right that learning systems were going to be huge and he was off on a detail.

Post reply on HN