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

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

#811

Post by datsci_est_2015 »

ben_w wrote: post #791
ModernMech wrote: post #785

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much did Disney invest in backbone Internet technologies in the 1990s?

Irrelevant. If AI turns out to be a short-lived fad, a bubble that pops and we all laugh at in a few year's time, Google's investments in AI were simply wasted, it does not follow that Google itself will die from having made the investment. Same for Meta, whose current name is due to a previous bad investment we laugh at. The popping of the investment bubble of AI, that might kill Tesla and SpaceX, perhaps also Anthr…

> If AI turns out to be a short-lived fad, a bubble that pops and we all laugh at in a few year's time

I think you can be even more precise here, because “AI” can be a wild success, and the Anthropic and OpenAI product strategy can blow up at the same time. Transformers, LLMs, and harnesses are all technologies with amazing utility like many machine learning methods before them. But there may be no moat that justify the current investments in “AI” - I would reckon if there is no proper moat for OpenAI and Anthropic they may be 100x (give or take an order of magnitude) overleveraged. That’s still a pretty catastrophic bubble given the figures we’re discussing.

VR still has a path to utility / viability. Meta (Zuck) just made an absolutely terrible product strategy around it. That can’t be overstated. Just atrocious judgement on display.

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

#812

Post by retr0rocket »

reticulates wrote: post #807
yousif_123123 wrote: post #798

Things in general I think he's right about: 1. Revenue if anthropic and openai is unlikely to grow to the high levels they need to pay for their commitments. Many of their heavy users (coding) will eventually offset a lot of usage to more efficient and cheaper open weight models. I know of people in a company I was at that spend thousands of dollars a month on tokens. I am sure that what they're using it for can be s…

re: substituting with cheaper models. I think some people here are oblivious to how much of Anthropic and OpenAI’s usage is artificial. Take this one example of a user with 15 Codex subscriptions ($3k) generating $60k in API-equivalent usage per month: https://hraness.com/writing/my-girlfriend-asked-me-why-i-hav... “there’s a once in a lifetime discount happening at the OpenAI Intelligence Depot, and I brought 15 sho…

[dead]

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

#813

Post by piker »

reticulates wrote: post #807
yousif_123123 wrote: post #798

Things in general I think he's right about: 1. Revenue if anthropic and openai is unlikely to grow to the high levels they need to pay for their commitments. Many of their heavy users (coding) will eventually offset a lot of usage to more efficient and cheaper open weight models. I know of people in a company I was at that spend thousands of dollars a month on tokens. I am sure that what they're using it for can be s…

re: substituting with cheaper models. I think some people here are oblivious to how much of Anthropic and OpenAI’s usage is artificial. Take this one example of a user with 15 Codex subscriptions ($3k) generating $60k in API-equivalent usage per month: https://hraness.com/writing/my-girlfriend-asked-me-why-i-hav... “there’s a once in a lifetime discount happening at the OpenAI Intelligence Depot, and I brought 15 sho…

It goes a layer up, too. Harvey (legal AI) recently tweeted that a single user query cost that firm 26k USD. This, while they have thousands of users and reportedly whole law firms paying zero. That difference is being subsidized by billions of VC dollars.

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

#814

Post by datsci_est_2015 »

bigDinosaur wrote: post #698
layoric wrote: post #562

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…

You can define any word to be whatever you want and thus have linguistically correct predictions that are functionally useless.

This cuts both ways: you can interpret any word to be whatever you want and thus have linguistically correct criticisms for predictions that are functionally useless.

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

#815

Post by tjoff »

reticulates wrote: post #807
yousif_123123 wrote: post #798

Things in general I think he's right about: 1. Revenue if anthropic and openai is unlikely to grow to the high levels they need to pay for their commitments. Many of their heavy users (coding) will eventually offset a lot of usage to more efficient and cheaper open weight models. I know of people in a company I was at that spend thousands of dollars a month on tokens. I am sure that what they're using it for can be s…

re: substituting with cheaper models. I think some people here are oblivious to how much of Anthropic and OpenAI’s usage is artificial. Take this one example of a user with 15 Codex subscriptions ($3k) generating $60k in API-equivalent usage per month: https://hraness.com/writing/my-girlfriend-asked-me-why-i-hav... “there’s a once in a lifetime discount happening at the OpenAI Intelligence Depot, and I brought 15 sho…

Why do everyone assume they are subsidized? When we seemingly have no idea what it costs? Maybe average subscription is breaking even and token spend is pretty much pure profit?

Case in point, claude code seems hell bent on increasing usage at all cost. Which makes sense in the growing phase (get people hooked) but it does not make sense given the hardware shortage. So, which is it?

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

#816

Post by dominotw »

gorbachev wrote: post #806
avisser wrote: post #805

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I am sure that what they're using it for can be substituted in large part by way cheaper models. I saw a commit in the repo at work that edited a few config files and a dictionary.txt file. "co-authored by Fable"

I have colleagues who have replaced ctrl-f on a (long) document they already have open with prompting an LLM to find things for them.

thats me

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

#817

Post by eqqn »

It is nice to see an attempt of sorts to discredit, and indeed Ed is not always right. But the bigger picture is debt fueled AI buildout frenzy, regulatory capture, monopolising and gating models, tokens/compute is still losing money compared to observable revenues from customers. Otherwise we would not need inventive accounting practices, SPV's, theatrics on distillation, stopping frontier development and so on.

But taking claims from Sundar about 750M gemini users in 2025 at face value is disingenuous. This basically includes everyone who owns an android phone and opened a Gmail and Google search, translate. Congrats, you are gemini user now. Every product has received AI "feature", like your android assistant offering to listen to you while the screen is still locked by default. Dan's only sources are press releases of the AI companies. As I'm reading this, he dedicates at least 3 paraghraphs showing how Ed is wrong. And keeps coming back to it again and again. Okay so we are both refuted and proven wrong, but is that really the extent of AI use? Is this the revolution? Replacing existing function with inaccurate AI sourced from reddit posts?

I've read a number of both blogs. I'm not gonna watch Diary of CEO video. Yes, models have gotten crazy good in 2 years. Still the same failure modes. Dan's writing here comes across as same type of gish gash he rails against, minus the entertainment value.

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

#818

Post by unsupp0rted »

Zsfe510asG wrote: post #797
unsupp0rted wrote: post #790

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Predicting things 5 years too early is often as useless as not predicting anything. You can say "AI will be able to _____" and be right 99.9 times out of 100, but the question is when. You can say "The AI market will go to 0" and be at least directionally right eventually. But none of it matters if you get the timing wrong.

It would matter if we had politicians who acted before bubbles collapse instead of bailing out the perpetrators after the fact.

That will successfully prevent 200% of market multipliers: bubbles and just plain sudden rapid value creation.

It's like cutting out the prostate from all men at age 30 to prevent nearly 100% of prostate cancer.

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

#820

Post by randallsquared »

rapnie wrote: post #741
threatripper wrote: post #665

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being early is the same as being wrong. Being lucky is the same as being right.

Nice saying. If in the prediction "given [intricate analysis] the whole [shebang] goes [bust] at [date]", only the [date] turns out to be wrong, I'd say it is still a valuable prediction however, though it was wrong.

Since almost everything eventually goes bust, I wouldn't agree that this was particularly valuable, unless the analysis proved out in other ways. It's like the saying that some economists have predicted 10 of the last 4 recessions. The analysis that leads to that prediction may or may not be valuable, but is only valuable if it predicts something, because otherwise how can you know it has any accuracy at all?
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