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

I can see in the future in school or on the job. Oral testing is coming back. You’re gonna have to explain everything you are doing at some point to your teacher/boss or to a panel of your peers in detail.

Is there any objective measure that shows this?

Would we use examples such as his Feb 2024 claim "I believe we're reaching the upper limits about what generative AI can do"?

> 2. Zitron claims AI lab growth (user and revenue) has stalled.… I'm giving Zitron the benefit of the doubt …

Is there some date by which you'd say it'd be fair to evaluate whether Z’s claims are true (without the benefit of the doubt)?

You mentioned revenue - would we use claims such as his 2024 claim that the companies no longer knew how to grow? But that in 2024, 2025, and 2026 both the companies revenues and profits have grown at double-digit rates each period?

You also mentioned users - would we use claims that "Sundar Pichai wants Gemini to be 'used by 500 million people before the end of 2025, 'a number so unrealistic that someone at Google should have been fired, and that someone is Sundar Pichai", where Gemini then hit 750 M users?

Or by what measures should we evaluate whether Z's claims are true?

The problem with judging Alphabet and Meta on aggregate performance is that their advertising businesses print so much money that they can invest everything in a boondoggle and coast when it blows up. Zuckerberg burned $100,000,000,000 on the metaverse and it didn’t make a dent.

That said, Alphabet and Meta are borrowing against their future advertising profits to fund their AI boondoggles. If the advertising businesses keep growing then they’re somewhat insulated from their own missteps but the reliability of the advertising business depends on companies having money to spend on advertising.

The metaverse was mostly self-contained and the failure had zero consequence for the broader economy. AI on the other hand, every major fund is investing everything into AI companies. Every advertiser is using subsidized AI tools to generate hyper specific adverts. If this all goes south, who knows how advertising spend will be impacted.

Google specifically are backstopping billions in data centre build out costs. They’ve committed to spending, like, all of their cash to data centres. If the market gets nervous and funding disappears, Google are deep in the hole.

Anthropic “invested” $50bn in data centers to be built by Fluidstack who raised a billion dollars from Situational Awareness who used their Anthropic ownership to raise money to fund these investments. Google are backstopping much of the Fluidstack build out, i.e: if Fluidstack goes out of business then Google is on the hook for $10bn+ in costs. And Google’s Anthropic investment makes up like $100bn on the balance sheet. So, Anthropic fails to live up to expectations and fails to pay Fluidstack who can’t pay their suppliers which puts Google on the hook to hand over tens of billions in cash while at the same time their biggest investment is going down the pan.

The top line numbers don’t really do justice to the scale of the risk. You need to look at the long term commitments they’re making.