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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?

#541

Post by baron816 »

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?

Alphabet hasn’t had any layoffs, tightening of salaries and perks, or impacts to work life balance. Morale is quite good, imo as an employee

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

#543

Post by RachelF »

ElProlactin wrote: post #417
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…

> 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. Except that the AI industry leaders actually have skin in the game/are in the trenches and competing in the market. Ed Zitron wants you to subscribe to a newsletter so that you can read doom and gloom and...? If you invested based on his advice, you'd have missed huge gains…

The fact is there is BullSh_t and hype on both sides.

Both Zitron and AI execs have good points, but both are trying to sell you something. The murky truth lies between the two extremes.

IMHO, having Zitron around is a counter to the AI leaders. Is he the best? No. Is he the loudest? Yes.

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

#544

Post by sanderjd »

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…

Yep I distinctly remember at the beginning of 2023 that folks were predicting that we were less than two years away from there being no jobs for software developers. Pretty soon we'll reach double that timeline.

And of course it really has changed everything! But that was not all that a lot of people were prognosticating.

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

#545

Post by asats »

arctic-true wrote: post #126
th0raway wrote: post #65

Being thorough and accurate might make you a lot of money in the stock market, but it's not a good way to get any media presence, because that demands being in front of people quite often, and basically nobody can be insightful and well researched in all topics of the day. Once you become a pundit, whether on politics or tech, and rely on eyeballs to feed you, you are going to be throwing stinkers. And at that point,…

This is exactly right. Now, that does mean something about Zitron: he’s a pundit, not an expert or a forecasting genius. You could point to any number of analogous booster types. Twitter/X somehow loves pushing these people onto my recommended feed. I remember reading breathless threads about how o3 was going to single-handedly end white collar work. There are just more of that sort of person, so none of them in part…

is this comment written by ai?

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

#547

Post by autaut »

qsera wrote: post #534
semiquaver wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 happil…

This is a very good point. So many times I would refactor entire parts of the code base just because it’s getting too complicated and an easier solution was possible. AI is do often just let’s drill down all these variables, whatever

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

#548

Post by dyarosla »

overfeed wrote: post #374
achompas wrote: post #334

One thing I’m observing in these comments is a willingness of folks to project their own predictions onto Ed’s statements when validating their plausibility. Eg. “I think he’s wrong about the timing but I do expect AI companies to go to zero.” You can do that, but then you’re no longer discussing his predictions. You’re discussing your predictions, and your own positioning. Those differ from Dan’s essay, which engage…

On the flip side, I also see many people taking this thread as an opportunity to shit on Zitron as a person, and not "discussing his prediction". Incompetent/ blow hard/ dishonest are ones I remember off the top of my head. AI by itself, is surprisingly polarized; Ed Zitron even more so.

Not sure why you see it as such;

Incompetent and dishonest are characteristics that follow from this professional work, adequately describing an individual who continues to make poor predictions, analyses and false statements refuted by past events.

Far from “shitting on” Zitron

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

#549

Post by Danox »

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…

The 5090 Nvidia card evidently is selling for five grand now! It’s just a question of when the bubble burst….

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

#550

Post by ahf8Aithaex7Nai »

woodruffw wrote: post #491
getnormality wrote: post #450

Earlier 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.

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…

> 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.

I can't really judge Zitron, but when it comes to Altman, I have absolutely no idea how you arrived at that assessment. In my view, he's clearly dishonest. I’ll remind you of his attempt to use government intervention to erect barriers to market entry for his competitors. Or his claims about AGI being just around the corner—claims that haven’t come true so far and were clearly aimed at investors. I’ve never heard a single statement from this man that struck me as honest.

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