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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?

#841

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.

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

#842

Post by QwenGlazer9000 »

eloisant wrote: post #836
yousif_123123 wrote: post #799

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…

After looking at some of his recent interviews, he's acknowledged his previous predictions that 1. He was naive enough to think the investment won't keep coming despite lack of profitability and 2. He acknowledges that AI in it's current form is a billion dollar industry, not a trillion dollar one, but also not zero.

Definitely less extreme than he used to be.

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

#843

Post by aetch »

tjoff wrote: post #816
reticulates wrote: post #808

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?

You can compare the subscription cost to the API per token cost for similar queries.

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

#844

Post by velox_neb »

johnbarron wrote: post #721
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…

>> Those differ from Dan’s essay, which engages with the literal text of Ed’s numerous predictions during 2024 and 2025 which are demonstrably invalidated by their measurable outcomes. Dan Luu did not engage on anything more, than a disorganized wall of text, ranted like a teenager using toxic personal attacks, while obsessing over calendar errors and a placeholder in a spreadsheet. If this is what passes here for a…

> the naive logic that because LLM execution speeds or benchmarks marginally improved over the last 24 months, (...)

"Marginally improved"? Are you really going to sit there tell me that an appropriate way to sum up the difference between the AI we had access to in Sep 2024 and the AI we have access to now, is "the benchmarks marginally improved"?

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

#845

Post by j2kun »

Zetaphor wrote: post #618
j2kun wrote: post #581

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You must not talk to a lot of retired people, for whom every tech product is a bewildering nightmare.

They're the ones who are dying. Gen Z grew up on the cloud

They're also the ones making up all the MAUs of Facebook. /shrug

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

#846

Post by HWR_14 »

RandomLensman wrote: post #788
coldtea wrote: post #777

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…

The subprime market changed quite a bit in size and how much was securitized in the run up to 2007, so not sure a prediction in 2000 for a 2003 event would have been easily transferred to what happened later. Would really come down to what specifically the prediction was based on for it to be a bubble in 2000.

Excellent point. We can look at the reasons for the prediction as well as the result in assessing its value. It seems hard to do in practice unless you are evaluated by someone who makes better predictions, but it would be interesting.

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

#847

Post by NeutralCrane »

notatoad wrote: post #483
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.

Ed Zitrons wild claims might be for entertainment value, but Altman’s are for his own valuation. He’s bringing in hundreds of billions of dollars off those claims.

Ed Zitron is also making money off of his claims. It may be orders of magnitude less than Altman, but it’s still his income source

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

#848

Post by tjoff »

mrhottakes wrote: post #832
tjoff wrote: post #816

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Depends on whether the costs they have are inflated ten-fold due to hardware shortages.

Ignoring current state of shortages, the interesting part (for me at least) is how much a SOTA token costs on current hardware if you exclude the costs for paying for current TSMC shortage and without factoring in the cost of new datacenters being rushed and renting hardware from your competitors (who are also supply limited).

The "actual" cost is of course also relevant and interesting but it is another thing entirely.

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

#849

Post by mawadev »

GaryBluto wrote: post #431

I've come to see Ed Zitron's dramatic predictions as reminiscent of a trend I noticed on YouTube a while back; Whenever you'd look up anything pertaining to China's future, you'd inevitably find your screen plastered wall to wall with thumbnails of a photoshopped Xi Jinping, tears streaming down his face, next to large impact font text reading "CHINA WILL COLLAPSE IN X DAYS", with X varying from 1 to 30. Much like Ed…

Exactly, he is monetizing the dramaslop. A sack of rice falls over and suddenly the world is on the brink of collapse. A fun exercise to see how lunatic this pattern of fear is, you can look for an echo chamber you know nothing about, maybe games or music or DIY or kitchens or whatever on youtube and suddenly you will see the same patterns play out. It is quite sad to see people do this for a living, but it is what it is. The kitchens are funny to me, because apparently there is a grand conspiracy of kitchen companies forming a monopoly funded by whoever and basically thats why you will never be able to cook like you used to be able to back in the day and basically its over. Just typing this out made me smile.

IMO Ed is entertaining and I don't believe much in LLMs, but I personally don't really care what happens next with it or what happens at all, the world will continue to spin.

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

#850

Post by sebzim4500 »

datsci_est_2015 wrote: post #815
bigDinosaur wrote: post #698

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Very clever but if your definition of a dying company includes companies that make more revenue and profit year after year then your definition is pointless. Words mean things.
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