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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?

#861

Post by piker »

piker wrote: post #859
toomuchtodo wrote: post #852

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A bit of a collective action problem, but if everyone leverages this services as hard as they can without cost concern, better capital decisions will eventually be made. Like the Federal Reserve draining the M2 money supply, AI users must drain the capital supply of subsidized tokens. This pulls forward the future of "Does this tech have value at actual unsubsidized costs?" If it does, tremendous, if it doesn't, also…

Yes, there are good examples of this working, anti-competitive as it may be. What if, in the DoorDash example, the pizza shop was itself venture backed and selling pizza at a loss to win customers and using this 20k revenue as a basis to raise money?

What if the same VCs were backing both and gearing up for an IPO?

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

#862

Post by square_usual »

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…

> Ed Zitron doesn't say that AI doesn't work, that its impact on the world will not increase

He's said variants of both of these things before! That's the point OP makes too, people say "He doesn't say that" or "But what about this" when he's said a million, sometimes contradictory things.

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

#863

Post by leesec »

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…

This reads to me as incredible cope. Maybe not both of these companies but certainly one of them will be enormously valuable, and there will always value in the frontier models even if much of the practical usage can be done locally

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

#864

Post by leesec »

reticulates wrote: post #808
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…

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…

theyre not being subsidized, and no ones using tokens just because.

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

#865

Post by square_usual »

leoc wrote: post #773
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…

In general I have about zero enthusiasm for trying to find defensible interpretations of things that Ed Zitron said, and I generally agree that the name of Zitron just largely needs to stop coming up in anti- and anti-anti-AI arguments since, it seems, he's just not a particularly insightful or reliable voice on the subject. That said, one or two of the specific assessments in Luu's article seem dubious as well, espe…

> and the thing that is continuing to scale well or pretty well is inference

No, the models are just more intelligent. GPT 5.6 Sol can do more in fewer output tokens than any model from late 2025. Test-time compute isn't the only lever the labs have for scaling. This is among the two major things Ed has gotten laughably wrong in his technical predictions (that TTC was the last resort to make models better, and that synthetic data wouldn't help)

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

#866

Post by rrrx3 »

I was a fan of his writing for a long time, but it's clear that the guy has fallen down the "build an audience that's only here for baying for blood on one particular topic" hole and won't be able to escape it.

He used to be really thoughtful and funny about the topics he took on. And I realize that's pretty standard for a critic. But now he just keeps digging deeper and deeper, getting more things wrong post after post. His posts have grown to probably 3x the frequency and 3x the length of when he was talking about stuff like Google tanking their Search business by bringing in the Ad guys.

He really used to be a "little extreme" with some really grounded viewpoints. Now it's more like he's performing the "angry british guy" in order to maintain his impression count and audience.

It reminds me a LOT of that Eli Schiff guy in the design world. A mediocre designer who couldn't get untangled from one specific design style, who figured out that anger drives clicks. Schiff became a "design critic" who eventually fell down the alt-right pathway and ended up becoming a pariah. I'm not saying Zitron is gonna turn into some right wing nutjob, but he's falling down the nutjob path right now in real time by consistently staking out the worst ungrounded takes and continually doubling down on them.

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

#867

Post by tccole »

zahlman wrote: post #726
mrweasel wrote: post #645

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Years back John C. Dvorak talked about predictions. He's was being ridiculed for his comment that there was "no evidence that computer users would want to use a mouse" (which was sort of true at the time). One of his point was that he had made a crazy amount of predictions on various topics, some came true, many didn't. People just remember the one you got right, and the ones you got horribly wrong. Ed Zitron is just…

> Ed Zitron is just one AI crash away from being known as the guy who saw this coming. Everything else he has said can be completely wrong, he just needs to be somewhat correct on a minor crash. That's the theory, but I feel like enough people have heard of him by now to be aware of the numbers game being played.

I don’t agree with your conclusion. It’s like Michael Burry, he’s gotten 10 of the last 2 economic crashes right.

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

#868

Post by tccole »

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…

You maybe right, but why don’t you put your prediction in Metacalculus or a prediction market. Thats what they are for.

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

#869

Post by infecto »

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…

To be fair he is nothing more than a talking head who historically has had some pretty negative AI pieces. Sure nothing is binary but more than ever it feels like there are talking heads on both sides that have some pretty extreme views.

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

#870

Post by retsibsi »

emp17344 wrote: post #377
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…

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.

Isn't that pretty much his whole thing, confidently telling us what will happen? Of course his reputation should suffer if his predictions are wrong, as should those of the others whose correctness : confidence ratio is too low. (But if their reputation/power/relevance mainly comes from things other than their punditry, we can't really stop 'taking them seriously' altogether.)
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