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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?

#621

Post by oofbey »

wmf wrote: post #614
oofbey wrote: post #576

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was Microsoft dying under Balmer? I think we’d say yes. Even if the SEC filings indicated otherwise.

https://danluu.com/ballmer/

Wow. Ballmer fans. Hot take - I like the novelty! And yeah, I never really thought about how Bing, Azure, and Office 365 are all actually stellar products. Somehow I missed that. Azure was particularly good in the early days when you could only run Windows servers, not Linux. That was also the Ballmer brilliance - cut off access to the alternatives and they’ll fade away to irrelevance. (Irrelevance is of course not the same as “dying”.) Along those lines, let’s not forget Windows Phone. Also underappreciated. Or Silverlight! Pure genius that one. So many gems from the Ballmer era.

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

#622

Post by psvv »

roywiggins wrote: post #598
psvv wrote: post #171

I don't really care what Zitron says or pay attention to him because it seems clear to me he has some kind of agenda. But this article is not nearly as impartial as it claims to be. It interprets all Zitron's claims in a narrow and overly-literal way. Missing the point and refuting a technicality. For example, looking at the last 3 year's revenue/profit growth. This tells us nothing without looking at a larger contex…

It seems to me that if they'd just about reached their upper limits in early 2024 agentic coding wouldn't be eating software development like it is now, and wasn't then.

LLMs are broader than just coding. The article states this particular Zitron claim was wrong, even at the time, because you can put an LLM on a loop until it generates code that compiles. Mitigating hallucinations (in the subset of applications with verifiable output) is not really the same as solving that category of problems outright. I could quibble about a number of things in this example alone, but that's not really my point.

I don't care if the claims are correct or incorrect. I just think the tone of the article is dishonest about its own impartiality and fairness, because it doesn't even attempt to interpret the claims in any way except the least favorable. If you want to be persuasive, you should refute a claim using the most favorable interpretation of that claim possible -- this does the opposite.

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

#623

Post by fulafel »

emp17344 wrote: post #378
achompas wrote: post #335

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…

Why is Zitron’s repute evaluated entirely on the basis of failed predictions? Predictions are incredibly hard. AI enthusiasts and thought leaders have made so many demonstrably incorrect predictions it’s hard to keep track. Based on this metric, Altman and Amodei should never be taken seriously again.

I thought in the post Ed was being evaluated based on all his predictions, and it turned out all of them were wrong.

Most people will read the post as going over all the falsifiable predictions and none of them panning out, since after the chronological prediction list it says "After this point, most further predictions that I saw were either non-falsifiable or resolve in the future".

If Dan is reading maybe he can clarify?

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

#624

Post by hypfer »

minimaxir wrote: post #270
hypfer wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This reads slightly weird and more like a pledge of alignment than a statement from the heart. But apart from that, I guess that's always the learning? Journalists (or people labeling themselves as such) often have their own story they want to tell, and usually do so by building it out of little blocks of reality stacked together to form the desired picture. I would predict a similarly frustrating experience being eq…

That's an unfair characterization of tech journalists in general. When BuzzFeed News was around, I worked closely with them on technical aspects and projects to ensure that everything was correct and accurate, and there were very receptive to it; it was not a "directionally correct" thing, the journalists wanted to avoid any unintentional. That was also one of the reasons I was open-minded to helping Ed even though w…

Not to dunk on your friends and all, but wasn't Buzzfeed the exact outlet at the forefront of dismantling the credibility of the word "journalism"?

Like.. they surely had valid pieces, but I remember them also being the ones smashing the system and trust to pieces by being very social-media-engagement-native (for the lack of a better term).

__

The LLM as this beautiful straight man default human simulator tells me that BuzzFeed News was some kind of investigative journalism daughter company of Buzzfeed the destroyer of worlds, and with that these would for sure be two unconnected entities, not to be judged like that.

And, for all legal intents and purposes, I am of course sure it is completely right. I could almost bet that this exact trick is why there even was a legit journalism daughter company with the same name in the first place.

So that one could well-actually all the bad words away, by pointing at it and either saying "Hey it's a different thing!!!111" or "Hey but we're also doing good work in that branch!!!!1111". Always depending on which is more opportune. Association or disassociation.

__

Anyway. I do believe you that your friends were trying to do the right thing.

I just have doubts as to why the place they were in even existed in the first place.

Certainly to enable them to do great journalistic work, but maybe not because the corporate superstructure actually cared by heart about great journalistic work.

At least I do not see it around no more, which might indicate that it outlived its corporate usefulness as a moral shield.

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

#625

Post by simianwords »

dosisking wrote: post #607
achompas wrote: post #335

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…

AI companies will never go to zero because AI is part of the Military Industrial Complex now. All the money is coming from the military and government for surveillance and power and war.

Every conspiracy theory has an escape hatch

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

#626

Post by simianwords »

layoric wrote: post #563

This critique is leaning really hard on their interpretation of "dying". They take the literal company is going to fail type of dying where as I have always taken it the same way he has presented it in his "rot-economy" context. They can remain financially "successful", but more and more people hate their products, their products are getting worse, their products are "dying". Google Search is still a good example, th…

What?? Ed Zitron has repeatedly said OpenAi or Anthropic would literally die. This keeps happening - Ed makes a prediction. It gets falsified. And people say, “no actually he meant something else”.

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

#627

Post by jsnell »

nl wrote: post #464
torginus wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are they? These companies have been caught tweaking their numbers. One example, not sure if cited by Zitron, or others, is that they build data centers through holding companies, who have to absorb the costs and massive capex based financial liabilites, so that the brand-name big-tech companies get to keep their expenses off their books. There have been trillions of debt discovered this way. Another issue is the appa…

> These companies have been caught tweaking their numbers... they build data centers through holding companies, who have to absorb the costs and massive capex based financial liabilites, so that the brand-name big-tech companies get to keep their expenses off their books. This is about as far from "tweaking their numbers" as you can get. It's a standard way infrastructure-heavy industries structure their investments…

There are no ten year old H100s. The first production shipments happened exactly four years ago.

I'm pretty sure your claim about TPUs is similarly exaggerated, only a v1 (barely) qualifies and would have no utility today.

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

#628

Post by JacobAsmuth »

GlacierFox wrote: post #248
simonw wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They don't publish their AI spending, revenue, and profit - but they do tend to break out other non-AI segments of their companies which can demonstrate that at least part of their growth isn't relevant to AI. Page 24 of Amazon's 2025 report for example https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1018724/000101872426... separates AWS from the rest of the company. Or Google/Alphabet's 2025 report https://www.sec.gov/Archi…

[flagged]

Will someone flag this comment please.

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

#629

Post by simonw »

simonuv wrote: post #47
dgellow wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t understand the issue, cannot you ignore his commentary and just look at the numbers?

[flagged]

A shill for the AI industry wouldn't spend four solid years writing about how inherently insecure their products are. https://simonwillison.net/tags/prompt-injection/

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

#630

Post by physicles »

hypfer wrote: post #624
minimaxir wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's an unfair characterization of tech journalists in general. When BuzzFeed News was around, I worked closely with them on technical aspects and projects to ensure that everything was correct and accurate, and there were very receptive to it; it was not a "directionally correct" thing, the journalists wanted to avoid any unintentional. That was also one of the reasons I was open-minded to helping Ed even though w…

Not to dunk on your friends and all, but wasn't Buzzfeed the exact outlet at the forefront of dismantling the credibility of the word "journalism"? Like.. they surely had valid pieces, but I remember them also being the ones smashing the system and trust to pieces by being very social-media-engagement-native (for the lack of a better term). __ The LLM as this beautiful straight man default human simulator tells me th…

They really were separate. BuzzFeed News won a Pulitzer in 2021 (source: Wikipedia). It's unfortunate that they shared the same name.
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