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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?

#831

Post by mrhottakes »

tjoff wrote: post #815
reticulates wrote: post #807

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> Why do everyone assume they are subsidized?

It's not an assumption when the companies hosting the models publicly announce that they're subsidizing costs.

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

#833

Post by emp17344 »

randallsquared wrote: post #824
emp17344 wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So does everyone else, including prominent AI enthusiasts and tech CEOs. And most of those predictions are wrong, because predictions are really hard.

Predictions being hard is what makes them valuable as a check on insight and accuracy!

Ok, but it also means we shouldn’t immediately discredit people who make incorrect short-term predictions, because those are really hard and no individual person consistently gets them right. You can worship at the altar of short-term prediction if you really want, but if you want to be logically consistent, that entails never taking anybody seriously ever.

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

#834

Post by simonw »

mtrovo wrote: post #754
simonw wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As public companies, the megascalers publish pretty detailed financial reports.

This is the scary part as this is not entirely true if you care to look into it. https://youtu.be/HXlcMbxzz0U?is=XdvcNJKGJxEwlB7I

The thing about $1.65T being "hidden from the balance sheets" is overblown. How do we know about that money if it's hidden? Because it isn't - it's in other public SEC documents, which the $1.65T claim also slightly misinterprets.

https://finterm.ai/blog/big-tech-hidden-debt-fact-check.html is one good explainer on that.

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

#835

Post by eloisant »

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…

I feel like too many people have a binary vision of the world, i.e. you're either "pro AI" or "anti AI".

Ed Zitron doesn't say that AI doesn't work, that its impact on the world will not increase. He's basically saying that (1) the current data center investments are based on unrealistic revenue projections and (2) hyperscalers are using accounting tricks to move around "money" in a circular way to make it look like more money is already flowing to AI.

You can believe all of that and still believe that AI (as in "LLM based services") work, are useful and will probably see their usefulness grow even more. Just not in the magnitude necessary to make the current investments make sense.

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

#836

Post by emp17344 »

BeetleB wrote: post #275
mustaphah wrote: post #244

I don't like Ed, but it seems that Luu spends far more attention documenting failed predictions than checking other predictions that might have been correct.

Telling me that quite a few of Zitron's predictions turned out to be accurate, while many others were completely off base, means he's throwing darts on a dartboard. Why should I listen to him? I'm sure I can make a lot of accurate predictions. It doesn't mean I'm worth listening to, if people can't distinguish the accurate from the inaccurate in the moment. Reminds me of a tactic I've seen often amongst both critics…

Everyone is always throwing darts at a dartboard when making predictions. I don’t know why you think this is a critique that applies exclusively to Zitron.

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

#837

Post by 27183 »

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.

It never ceases to amaze the lengths people will go to avoid using grep

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

#838

Post by 129528754 »

unsupp0rted wrote: post #818
Zsfe510asG wrote: post #797

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Take a break from LLMs.

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

#839

Post by HWR_14 »

unsupp0rted wrote: post #790
coldtea wrote: post #776

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can do that, but then you’re no longer discussing his predictions. You’re discussing your predictions, and your own positioning. Depends if you care about the "prediction" part or if you care about the assessment of the situation (regardless of date). If someone in 2000 said "the subprime mortgages market is a bubble and will blow no later than 2003", they got the prediction wrong, but their assessment would be…

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.

> Predicting things 5 years too early is often as useless as not predicting anything.

It depends on what type of thing you are predicting and why. Even something as simple as "Enron will implode" in 1995 has very different levels of usefulness if you are planning to short a stock versus figuring out what stock to buy and hold in your retirement account.

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

#840

Post by emp17344 »

jacquesm wrote: post #314
irishcoffee wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looking at it from an objective/historical perspective, when he first got on his high horse agents weren’t a thing, MCP was in its infancy at best, and half the code generated didn’t compile from frontier models. From there everything split into two factions, which I’ll dub as believers and non-believers. From there, it has entirely been a cult following despite the evidence showing that models and agents have legs f…

I don't agree with the believers vs non-believers dichotomy. That makes this look like a religious war and it shouldn't have to be like that. To me AI is a very useful tool, no more no less, it isn't a 'make a wish' machine and it isn't a silver bullet for all of the issues that have plagued software so far. But when properly applied it's quite useful. "Non-believers" would have to be people that have yet to actually…

AI enthusiasts have turned this into a religious war, like it or not. Far too many people here have tied their entire sense of self and worth to the success of AI, and will attack anyone who challenges their narrative that AGI is imminent. They refuse to accept the mere presence of critics, as you can see in this thread. It’s deeply irrational and unreasonable.
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