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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?

#891

Post by scared_together »

socalgal2 wrote: post #708
scared_together wrote: post #657

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You "asked"? Who (or more likely, what) did you ask? Dan Luu's analysis of Kurzweil is in this article: https://danluu.com/futurist-predictions/ In the "Appendix: detailed information on predictions" he lists the predictions, and their truth or lack thereof. He was using a list on Wikipedia: https://web.archive.org/web/20170225013846/https://en.wikipe... For example Kurzweil apparently predicted in 2019 that: > Blind…

Maybe we have different interpretations of whether or not a prediction is correct or not. If someone predicts in 1999 predicts self driving cars by 2020 and it happens in 2030. That seems different than predicting something we see no indication of ever happening. Like if they predicted 2020 and it happened in 2021 is that a fail. To me, no. The prediction is that the tech will exist at or around that date, not that t…

First of all thanks for actually replying with a full list.

> Claiming it's a fail for being 1 second late is not a rational position and not at all in the spirit the predictions were made.

I would keep to the level of precision the predictor themselves claimed. If the predictor said an event would occur at “23:59:59 UTC” it would be fair to criticize them for being a second late. If the predictor claimed an event would occur on a day, fair to criticize them for being a day late, and so on for all units of time.

If a predictor says an event will occur in 2019 but it occurs in 2020, yes that is incorrect, the predictor could have hedged by a year if they wanted to. Why is it the observer’s job to do the hedging rather than the predictor’s job?

> Someone says computers will be in everything. You can say "there's no computer's in fruit!, FAIL!"

While I disagree about the timing, I agree slightly that there is some nuance regarding phrases like “everything”, “everywhere”, “popular” and so on.

However there is a way out for the predictor: use a more specific phrase like “used by over 20% of the US population” instead of “popular”.

Once again (and this applies to the entire page of comments not just yours): why is it the observer’s job to do the hedging rather than the predictor?

On to the specific predictions…

> 2009 * Most books will be read on screens rather than paper. The charitable interpretation is that most reading happens on screens, not paper. This is true today.

I disagree with the charitable interpretation, there has been plenty of writing outside of books for decades and a person like Kurzweil getting their books published would know that. If the prediction says “books” instead of “writing” it should be judged for that choice.

> * Intelligent roads and driverless cars will be in use, mostly on highways. False in 2009, False in 2026 but directionally true.

Even if the prediction were true in 2026, 15 years is a long time to be off. A person who decided not to get a driving license thinking that driverless cars are right around the corner would be disappointed. That’s a silly way to behave mainly because when making a decision like that, people have other sources to turn to than Kurzweil.

And where are the “intelligent roads”?

> * Computers can recognize their owner's face from a picture or video.

> Face ID shipped in 2017. Is that to far off?

Compared to 2009? Yeah that’s absolutely too far.

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

#892

Post by meta_gunslinger »

johnfn wrote: post #299
sfblah wrote: post #99

I don't think Zitron is wrong, exactly. He's just early. There are a lot of analysts who have faced the same criticism over the past 10-15 years. IMO the issue is that they fail to understand the staggering size and scope of the government fiscal + monetary interventions across those years. Essentially, the government has jammed all the risk into the future to repeatedly rescue near-term results. I think something si…

Zitron is wrong, not "early", and the post has an extremely long list of examples.

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

#893

Post by aesthesia »

iLoveOncall wrote: post #778
minimaxir wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not defensible.

It absolutely is. What has improved isn't the models, it's the harnesses. Give GPT-3.5 a 1M context window and a modern harness, and you won't see any meaningful difference with Opus 5. It's a bit hard to try with such old models, but for example I use Opus 5 / Fable at work and Sonnet 4.5 at home (because it's free via Amazon Q), and there's absolutely 0 difference in performance. None. Obviously 4.5 is only a year…

Benchmarks are far from everything, but I would love to see the outcome of an experiment benchmarking GPT-4o (which is one of the earlier models with a >100k context window) against GPT-5.6 or Opus 5 in modern harnesses.

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

#894

Post by thoughtpeddler »

aurareturn wrote: post #722
drayfield wrote: post #721

I used to be a fan of Zitron after listening to an old podcast of his, and also subscribing to his newsletter. Something weird happened after Taylor Lorenz guested on his show; a week later I received a welcome email to Taylor's own newsletter. This was especially strange because I definitely hadn't signed up to hers, and use individual masked emails in Fastmail per different service so I was sure that this was the e…

Ed Zitron is a grifter. Period. I highly doubt he believes any of the stuff he writes himself. He plays a role in society which is the role that tells people AI is going to fail so those who don't participate in or benefit from AI feel better. They sign up to his subscriptions and pay him money to confirm their own bias. If you look at the sub reddit r/betteroffline where these people gather and worship Zitron, most…

Doesn't it say something about our society that (a) it's known (at least among smart people, however 'smart' is defined) that AI is going to take away jobs, and (b) the way its treated is that people gather to online discussion forums to worship someone saying the thing that will replace their jobs isn't going to do it (but in actuality, eventually will)? In other words, who's actually doing anything to help the people out who will lose their jobs??

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

#895

Post by thoughtpeddler »

tolugenius wrote: post #112
dgellow wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cal Newport has been interesting on the topic. But it’s also possible to read Zitron and skip his personal opinions and just follow the discussion of financing, that’s what I personally do. I don’t understand why anyone would take the commentary of an internet pundit as a set of predictions to evaluate as gospel

I enjoy Newport myself, he's probably the most level-headed take I've come across. Everyone else has some agenda (or product) they're trying to get at and very much ruins the messaging (ex the agent 'civilization' piece is extremely overblown especially since..that's how multi agent systems coordinate already. Nothing happened that is unprecedented and isn't how the system is designed to work.

Newport does tend to be more level-headed, but honestly, the people that have gotten AI 'right' so far (in the true technical sense of how scaling laws held, etc) had their strong convictions set back in the mid-2010s, when Newport would've been far more skeptical. At least Newport's shown that he's capable of updating, but in general, he hasn't been someone I'd value for their predictive power.

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

#896

Post by george_max »

reticulates wrote: post #557
george_max wrote: post #539

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Help me understand where Meta and Alphabet's issues are. They seem to be doing quite well on paper -- nothing anomalous in terms of profitability or scaling recently. Layoffs are to be expected when AI can increase productivity.

Meta narrowly avoided disaster earlier this year: https://www.reuters.com/investigations/mark-zuckerberg-had-b... The problem with judging Alphabet and Meta on aggregate performance is that their advertising businesses print so much money that they can invest everything in a boondoggle and coast when it blows up. Zuckerberg burned $100,000,000,000 on the metaverse and it didn’t make a dent. That said, Alphabet and Me…

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

#898

Post by supern0va »

watwut wrote: post #63
jrflo wrote: post #17

Thanks for putting this together, his writing really aggravates me and it was nice to see all of his predictions put together in one spot. It's interesting how he has pivoted from denying that LLMs are useful to accusing frontier labs of Enron-scale fraud. I suppose it's the natural pivot you have to make when your whole business is an anti-AI newsletter that costs $7 per month.

He LITERALLY said it is not like Enron. And repeated it.

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

#899

Post by fyredge »

no-name-here wrote: post #553
fyredge wrote: post #465

Looking at the refutations of Zitrons predictions in TFA, it boils down to two categories: 1. Zitron claims model capability has peaked 2. Zitron claims AI lab growth (user and revenue) has stalled. In the first case, TFA refutes by claiming 'wrong' repeatedly, which does not convince me of anything. If anything, Zitron is probably right in this regard, since the majority of progress in recent LLM tech has been setti…

> 1. Zitron claims model capability has peaked … Zitron is probably right in this regard … Is there any objective measure that shows this? Would we use examples such as his Feb 2024 claim "I believe we're reaching the upper limits about what generative AI can do"? > 2. Zitron claims AI lab growth (user and revenue) has stalled.… I'm giving Zitron the benefit of the doubt … Is there some date by which you'd say it'd b…

I'll paste my response to your pre-edited questions:

I think atomic weapons peaked during the trinity test. The subsequent creation of bigger explosions by packing more fissile material does not meaningfully improve the technology.

Since LLMs are a generative technology, let's use a generative skill - painting. There are tons of brilliant painters, all with their own styles. What I think is consistent among master painters is their effortlessness in their craft. Honing a skill makes subsequent attempts less effortful.

To me, LLMs are more like atomic bombs than master artisans. To get better results, add neural nets. What would be meaningful to me, is to constrain models to a fixed amount of compute, run them on any of the copious amount of benchmarks, and see if they get the same scores at increasingly faster speeds. This, at least to me, signals mastery.

On the date for evaluation, I will set my own prediction instead, that AI labs will not become profitable, local models will drain their moat.

Taken on its own, I will concede that Zitron's predictions are wrong, but it is exactly why I bring up market irrationality. The multiple rounds of funding is propping up the unsustainable business model. Without it, user numbers and revenue can't grow.

I forsee real innovation in the AI space after the bubble pops.

Just this morning, I had to read through an LLM response about how a PC8-M5 fitting has a high flow rate because it connects to an 8mm tube, completely ignoring that the threaded M5 on the other end will only have space for a 2mm hole, so it still seems quite similar to the LLMs of 2020.

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

#900

Post by kshri24 »

WesolyKubeczek wrote: post #885
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 t…

I would partly agree with you in so far as Twitter not collapsing and working well. I'll go so far as to say it was the right move by Elon to downsize the company as you really don't need so many people to run a social media site. However, I don't think Twitter can be compared to the scale at which Alphabet/Amazon operate. Alphabet/Amazon run hundreds of businesses (on the scale of X) within their parent umbrella organization. So even if one collapses it won't affect the other as much as it should. But since they are removing workforce by the thousands, I am wondering how much of it will have an impact on their bottomline in the coming years. I mean... they will be under pressure by their own stakeholders to put their money where their mouth is and remove workforce if AI has reached levels where workforce can be replaced. If they don't do it then they are tacitly admitting that we haven't reached that technical breakthrough needed. The only way forward for these companies is to make it happen one way or the other. They are heavily invested in it and cannot back out now.
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