How accurate have Ed Zitron's AI skeptic predictions been? • Hacker News Board

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

#881

Post by theptip » Wed, Sep 02, 2026, 2:40 PM UTC

sroerick wrote: post #341

solid_fuel wrote: post #280

I would be interested in seeing a similar list of predictions from Altman, Amodei, etc with annotations about how many have come true. Ed Zitron is a blow hard and frequently overstates things to the point where it is hard to take seriously, but so are the AI industry leaders. I have heard multiple breathless press releases warning that the end of white collar work is "just 6 months away" and that people not using th…

Man, as a former extreme skeptic, I watched a video from Eric Schmidt in early 2025 where he said that by the end of the year nobody would be coding, and that one was dead frickin on.

Two problems. One, people mean different things by “coding”. Two, it’s diffused slower than folks predicted.

But the core prediction was not crazy for “coding as typing code”, which at most big tech companies is at roughly 100% automation now.

If by “coding” you mean the full SDLC then we are not automated yet.

I think failing to account for the diffusion delay was an actual prediction error, since that is a property of every technology in history.

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

#882

Post by retsibsi » Wed, Sep 02, 2026, 2:41 PM UTC

Veedrac wrote: post #495

nl wrote: post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Luu's piece linked his analysis! Kurzweil scores 7% accuracy. If you scroll to the appendix he grades individual predictions. https://danluu.com/futurist-predictions/

If you grade what was linked by whether it is "approximately achievable today", and not some less interesting metric like being predicted for the correct year or if it was outcompeted by some other thing, he's closer to 70-90% depending on how close you're willing to grade. It's very easy to say 'person X made a highly specific testable prediction, while respectable people said nothing like it would ever happen, and…

> while respectable people said nothing like it would ever happen

Can you give some examples of predictions he got roughly right where this applies?

(Not a gotcha, I'm genuinely interested, because this is the key for me when thinking about whether to give credit for 'close' or 'right but early' predictions. If you're predicting things that most others have dismissed as impossible, or nobody has even thought of, then it's pretty impressive and interesting when you turn out be even roughly correct. (I'll still ding your credibility if you are overconfident about dates and details, but I'll do that while paying plenty of attention to what you say next.) If you're predicting things that are already suspected to be possible, though, and what makes you stand out is your confidence and your timelines, then I'm not going to be very interested when some of your predictions turn out to be fairly close to the truth.)

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

#883

Post by coldtea » Wed, Sep 02, 2026, 2:42 PM UTC

unsupp0rted wrote: post #819

Zsfe510asG wrote: post #798

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.

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

So a win-win. Market multipliers rarely end up well, bubbles or not.

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

It's more like cutting steroids from all men, and letting them build strengh naturally over time by training.

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

#884

Post by datsci_est_2015 » Wed, Sep 02, 2026, 2:43 PM UTC

sebzim4500 wrote: post #850

datsci_est_2015 wrote: post #815

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[dead]

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

#885

Post by streb-lo » Wed, Sep 02, 2026, 2:45 PM UTC

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…

None of this actually matters if this is a nuclear weapons-style arms race.

The data center build out will become a matter of national security, and will be backstopped by governments.

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

#886

Post by chipdale » Wed, Sep 02, 2026, 2:47 PM UTC

simianwords wrote: post #625

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…

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”.

Ed is in public relations. He did not amateurishly claim OpenAI and Anthropic would literally die. Like any PR savvy person, he qualified his predictions by making them conditional on whether OpenAI/Anthropic could raise more money, achieve a technical breakthrough, unlock new lucrative markets, etc.

So far, OpenAI and Anthropic have raised more money. You might even be able to argue they've achieved some breakthroughs and unlocked some markets.

Regarding his predictions: The jury is still out because Ed isn't actually making the falsifiable time-bounded predictions you think he's making. He's good at making his readers think he's putting his neck out, but he's really not.

When you remove all his rhetoric and veneer, his conditional predictions are actually somewhere between bearish and cautious.

It's mostly theatre.

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

#887

Post by gradus_ad » Wed, Sep 02, 2026, 3:00 PM UTC

If we look at the demand side:

1. Conversational AI - this is ubiquitous now, but not sure it's increasing at any significant rate. At least my personal usage has leveled off. Also probably not a significant driver of per token demand relative to code gen. More a driver of subscription revenue.

2. Code Generation - this is the big killer app, which I suspect has driven most if not all of the last year's revenue growth for Anthropic and to a lesser extent OpenAI. Now, I doubt we can extrapolate that growth given 1) how quickly and completely CC has been adopted by the industry and developers and 2) how corps are reigning in spend

3. Image and Video Generation - this honestly strikes me as more of a trifle/novelty than anything else. Granted I'm not a visual artist but I don't see it being a killer app anywhere to the extent of code generation.

4. Physical AI - this is the wildcard for me, but also beyond my ability to conceptualize its effects on demand. I suspect a proliferation of self driving and autonomous robotics would be a huge driver of compute demand but who knows how close we are to proliferation?

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

#888

Post by WesolyKubeczek » Wed, Sep 02, 2026, 3:01 PM UTC

kshri24 wrote: post #569

Cannot take profits of these companies seriously when they have been laying off employees by the droves the past couple of years. Obviously profits will increase when workforce expenses have reduced. I'll only take it seriously after a couple more years and see how the company has held up with massively reduced workforce (powered by AI™). Another point would be to see how these incumbents get challenged by new startu…

Don't you think those companies are mostly correcting for their massive covid overhiring + zero rate bonanza coming to its end?

Also, back when elon had bought twitter and had been firing people left and right, it was prophesied that with such inept management the company was going to collapse very soon. I thought it was obvious it would collapse. But that has not happened (yet, but it's been quite some years), and the service seems to be holding up after some initial shakiness.

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

#889

Post by locallost » Wed, Sep 02, 2026, 3:01 PM UTC

Grombobulous wrote: post #103

reducesuffering wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The bubble is here Zitron implied 2 years ago that OpenAI would collapse by now. How's that bubble popping going? All NVDA+memory co+frontier lab numbers are accelerating

The thing about bubbles is that everyone who thinks they’re going to pop look crazy until they pop. And to be clear, a bubble popping doesn’t mean that AI goes away forever. What it does mean is that we’ll see some kind of economic crash or recession, and we’ll probably see at least one big company fail or go bankrupt/restructure. OpenAI is the company in most obvious peril. I happen to think that Nvidia is in a more…

The thing with bubbles is that this is a near permanent state. I heard as far as 2017 that there is a bubble and, well if the bubble popped now the economy would tank to a level a lot higher than it was 2017.

The more interesting thing is the needle and if the bubble will run into one.

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

#890

Post by scrollaway » Wed, Sep 02, 2026, 3:02 PM UTC

p-e-w wrote: post #774

adroitboss wrote: post #753

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imprecise and incorrect are the same thing when it comes to an exact science. His predictions include dates and that makes them binary. You can only be right or wrong. Being close is still incorrect, and he's not even close.

Indeed. I’m baffled by the comments here. He predicted that a plateau had been reached multiple times in Spring 2024, and now more than two years have passed and capabilities have exploded since then. He wasn’t being imprecise, he wasn’t “correct in spirit”, he was DEAD WRONG.

Unfortunately, anti-AI sentiment on HN is for some people so ridiculously pronounced, that you can get them to say the most insane stuff. I had a couple of people the other day responding to a sarcastic comment, agreeing that being an alcoholic is cooler than using AI.

Sad state of affairs. You cannot reason with these people.