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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?

#911

Post by JumpCrisscross »

ModernMech wrote: post #786
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #684

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> These tech giants need AI to continue to grow This is unfalsifiable. AI is juicing the tech majors’ growth. And in the modern economy, it may be necessary for them. But did Disney need the internet to grow in the 1990s? No, probably not. Did streaming give it all kinds of new growth victors? Yes. And would ignoring the internet for that last three decades have probably killed it? Also yes.

How much did Disney invest in backbone Internet technologies in the 1990s?

> How much did Disney invest in backbone Internet technologies in the 1990s?

Disney invested billions in dot-com nonsense.

Starwave [1]. The Go.com debacle [2]. (Pets.com [3]!)

I think they even built a data center in Orlando.

[1] https://archive.seattletimes.com/archive/19980501/2748296/di...

[2] https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/disney-to-sh...

[3] https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/go-com-shapes-allian...

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

#912

Post by DrewADesign »

rrrx3 wrote: post #874
square_usual wrote: post #862

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Ed's whole cornerstone thesis is that "AI doesn't work." Like, if I had to sum him up in a short sentence, that's what it'd be that or "Angry but doesn't know much"

No, the cornerstones of his thesis are:

- LLM’s potential and capability are dramatically overstated

- Business leaders are either driven by the Emperor’s New Clothes effect, or the legitimate fear of stock price or valuation drops, to admit it.

- The amount of money being dumped into this industry will never pay off.

He’s snide and condescending, to the detriment of his message. I can completely understand why people aren’t interested in listening to him. However, straw-manning his stances by oversimplifying or flat-out making uninformed assumptions about them isn’t a useful response to what he’s saying.

Frankly, this industry squirts out enough bullshit to smother an active volcano every single day. If you think Ed isn’t credible, I sure hope you dismiss the industry leaders just as readily.

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

#913

Post by JumpCrisscross »

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…

> You can believe all of that

You can believe all of that (I do) and see that Zitron is a liar and an influencer.

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

#914

Post by JumpCrisscross »

DrewADesign wrote: post #912
rrrx3 wrote: post #874

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ed's whole cornerstone thesis is that "AI doesn't work." Like, if I had to sum him up in a short sentence, that's what it'd be that or "Angry but doesn't know much"

No, the cornerstones of his thesis are: - LLM’s potential and capability are dramatically overstated - Business leaders are either driven by the Emperor’s New Clothes effect, or the legitimate fear of stock price or valuation drops, to admit it. - The amount of money being dumped into this industry will never pay off. He’s snide and condescending, to the detriment of his message. I can completely understand why peopl…

Zitron’s superpower is to get reasonable people like you to turn his bullshit into prose.

He’s a scam artist. So is Altman. The correct answer is to not listen to either one, at least not on a regular basis and certainly not as a source of truth.

> straw-manning his stances by oversimplifying

He literally lies about numbers. The spreadsheet errors the article describes are either gross negligence or simple evidence of lying.

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

#915

Post by fyredge »

SilverBirch wrote: post #800
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…

This is kind of a "I'm not here to tell you about Jesus he either lives in your heart or he doesn't". I am an engineer, I have about 15 years of experience. I have been using AI in my job since mid 2025. Over that time it has gone from being an interesting toy that could kind of help but would often hinder, to being an absolutely explosively powerful tool. Just from personal experience it is the thing that has improv…

Don't worry about Jesus, he's fine.

I'm the same as you sans 10 years of working experience, with similar experiences using LLMs. The distinction I would like to make is that it's not the models that are improving, but rather the infrastructure around them. It started with prompt engineering, then chain-of-thought, then mixture-of-experts, now harness engineering etc. These, I think are what's driving LLM complexity, not the model.

To bring back to your electric car analogy, the electric motor peaked early on, but was not quite useful as a car until advancements in battery density, charging technology, regenerative braking were made. These are all the infrastructure needed to improve the viability of owning electric cars, just like the infrastructure was needed to make the models useful.

To be honest, I'm much more excited to see development of infrastructure around local models than seeing the arms race between AI labs. At least the former benefits the end user in a transparent way.

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

#916

Post by tjoff »

aetch wrote: post #843
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?

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

That tells you that subscription is cheaper than tokens. Which ought to be a given.

But it does not tell you what and how much either is subsidized...

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

#917

Post by asveikau »

sfblah wrote: post #655
asveikau wrote: post #510

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not government stimulus driving this. It's that when you start with a "successful" company, the financial consequences of bad decisions or bad leadership can take a long time to have a negative effect, if at all, because financial success has a momentum to it. I left Microsoft during the windows 8 cycle in large part because I could tell nobody knew what the hell they were doing, which is an objectively true sta…

I'll let you in on something. The "inexplicable" success is Fed interest-rate policy plus deficit spending.

This is a ridiculous statement. I think it's more like: they have tons of sales sustaining the business.

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

#918

Post by projproj »

I had an interesting experience after I stopped reading HN comments for two weeks. I think it had to do with not reading the doom and gloom on here, which I tend to agree with. But after two weeks of reading neither the hype nor the doom about LLMs, I realized how amazing (though not perfect) this tool is. My point isn't whether LLMs are good or bad, but just how I didn't realize how much my consumption of other people's opinions infected my own outlook. It was like the opposite of rose-colored glasses.

BTW, the tool I used to block HN is called Foqos, which, of course, I heard about right here on HN. Based on my screen time reports, I got back about 2 hours per day average after blocking all my favorite sites.

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

#919

Post by ModernMech »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #911
ModernMech wrote: post #786

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much did Disney invest in backbone Internet technologies in the 1990s?

> How much did Disney invest in backbone Internet technologies in the 1990s? Disney invested billions in dot-com nonsense. Starwave [1]. The Go.com debacle [2]. (Pets.com [3]!) I think they even built a data center in Orlando. [1] https://archive.seattletimes.com/archive/19980501/2748296/di... [2] https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/disney-to-sh... [3] https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/go-com-shapes…

I said backbone internet technologies on purpose. I don’t think those things qualify.

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

#920

Post by scared_together »

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 post is titled “How accurate have Ed Zitron's AI skeptic predictions been?” not “How accurate will Ed Zitron’s AI skeptic predictions be in the future?” or “Is the entire AI industry build out justified?”

If Patrick Boyle, Aswath Damodaran, and Daron Acemoglu have more accurate reporting and predictions about the upcoming decline of the AI industry, maybe those are voices who should be elevated over Zitron.

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