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

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

#941

Post by mancerayder » Wed, Sep 02, 2026, 7:14 PM UTC

sfblah wrote: post #158

arctic-true wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly right. Now, that does mean something about Zitron: he’s a pundit, not an expert or a forecasting genius. You could point to any number of analogous booster types. Twitter/X somehow loves pushing these people onto my recommended feed. I remember reading breathless threads about how o3 was going to single-handedly end white collar work. There are just more of that sort of person, so none of them in part…

In my experience, people who make fun of AI's ability to eliminate white-collar work are exactly the same people who are white-knuckling it, hoping they can make another $300k next year to buy that Rivian. People who don't need a salary look at the situation more objectively and, in general, can see that a lot of white-collar work is in peril.

>In my experience, people who make fun of AI's ability to eliminate white-collar work are exactly the same people who are white-knuckling it, hoping they can make another $300k next year to buy that Rivian.

In my experience, people who believe that some white collar industry can easily be automated with AI usually don't work that same role or even that industry, and suffer from Dunning-Kruger bias. In my line of work, I'm desperate for Claude to actually do a better job at not producing a big mess, and it's failing terribly.

I don't work in law, but I feel like I barely need a lawyer if I can ask an LLM to interpret a contract for me. I don't work as a physician, but why can't I just cut and paste an MRI report and ask Claude what to do. I'm no plumber, but it I take a picture of some fixtures I am thinking about replacing, Claude will give me some items to add to the shopping cart from a plumbing supply store.

In all cases Claude was super confident and it wrote what felt really rational.

But in my experience it gets things right, in some amazing ways, but it gets things wrong, in shocking ways.

Everyone thinks it's someone else's job that it'll automate.

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

#942

Post by sroerick » Wed, Sep 02, 2026, 7:16 PM UTC

rapind wrote: post #498

sroerick wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Everyone who started using claude clode when it came out in early 2025, knew it was coming (not quite yet). That felt more like reporting than prophesying.

That may be true - but I hadn't used Claude Code and I was still in the "its impossible to vibecode successfully" mindset

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

#943

Post by sroerick » Wed, Sep 02, 2026, 7:19 PM UTC

solid_fuel wrote: post #358

sroerick wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You may be living in a bubble. There are tons of developers still coding by hand, and many industries that don't trust machine generated code in general.

I don't know people or talk to people so I'm happy to hear otherwise. Which industries?

I definitely look for libraries which are handcoded and I consider them to generally be of a much higher quality, but it increasingly seems like high performance / critical infra is going to move to formal proofs rather than hand coding

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

#944

Post by reticulates » Wed, Sep 02, 2026, 7:36 PM UTC

VirusNewbie wrote: post #931

reticulates wrote: post #821

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anthropic admitted last year to losing money on inference, it had negative margins. The margins have improved and are now positive but there’s still a significant cost. If plans aren’t being subsidized it would mean that the margin on inference is ~99%+ which would mean OpenAI and Anthropic should be wildly profitable but both are still losing money. So, it’s mathematically impossible that they’re not subsidizing pla…

>Anthropic admitted last year to losing money on inference, it had negative margins. No they did not. Dario has repeatedly stated if they stopped training new models, they would be very profitable.

When?

“The majority of the cost is inference, not necessarily the training of the model.”

https://youtu.be/7xij6SoCClI

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

#945

Post by qnpnpmqppnp » Wed, Sep 02, 2026, 7:45 PM UTC

coldtea wrote: post #776

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…

> 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…

> 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 right.

It doesn't make sense to split it though. Their assessment is that it's a bubble AND that it will blow no later than 2003. It's a single statement.

And it matters, because if all you're doing is saying there's an AI bubble then it's harder to prove you wrong but you also don't stand out and won't get a lot of credit for it. A very large number of people are saying the same thing as you, so who cares.

People like Zitron stand out because they go further than others and make detailed statements. Which happen to be wrong.

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

#946

Post by streb-lo » Wed, Sep 02, 2026, 8:02 PM UTC

yousif_123123 wrote: post #909

streb-lo wrote: post #884

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

LLMs are a national security issue? Why is China releasing their models then? The question is not whether you should have datacenters, or the most advanced chips, or the ability to build the most capacity. But do we need all this now? Will there be enough demand? People want to make profits form this thing, and what's being pointed out is that maybe there won't be enough demand to generate profits for all this invest…

I would guess there is probably a capability ceiling beyond which China will not open source their weights. Maybe there is a scenario where they do so or threaten to do so if the US is so far ahead or something as a deterrent.

>But do we need all this now?

Did people want to make profits from the nuclear arms race? I'm sure some did, but it was not really a requirement.

The bottom line is there is a theoretical capability of AI which is effectively a super weapon that can be deployed against your competitor. If you think that is a possibility, even with a low probability, you should probably have a giant AI-related build if you are the US or China.

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

#947

Post by 8note » Wed, Sep 02, 2026, 8:03 PM UTC

eloisant wrote: post #835

yousif_123123 wrote: post #798

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

Ive seen him say it does work pretty consistently? He also talks about other things that are more interesting, but he still says it doesnt work

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

#948

Post by DrewADesign » Wed, Sep 02, 2026, 8:07 PM UTC

Analemma_ wrote: post #923

DrewADesign wrote: post #911

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> No, the cornerstones of his thesis are: [...] The amount of money being dumped into this industry will never pay off. That has only been a cornerstone of his thesis for the last 10 months or so, once Claude Code and Codex began making gobs of revenue. Before that the cornerstone of his thesis was "nobody will ever pay for AI" and then he silently pivoted, without acknowledging any error, once it was clear that was…

Do you know anyone whose understanding of the LLM business has remained static for the past 10 months? Would it be a positive trait?

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

#949

Post by rsynnott » Wed, Sep 02, 2026, 8:37 PM UTC

> "Sam Altman deputizing Orion from GPT-5 to GPT-4.5 suggests that OpenAI has hit a wall with making its next model, requiring him to lower expectations" > Wrong (GPT-5 was a substantial improvement over GPT-4.5)

… I mean, this feels slightly irrelevant? Orion _does_ seem to have been demoted from 5 to 4.5; that they later released something they felt they could reasonably call gpt5 feels slightly beside the point there.

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

#950

Post by ashkankiani » Wed, Sep 02, 2026, 8:55 PM UTC

8note wrote: post #947

eloisant wrote: post #835

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Ive seen him say it does work pretty consistently? He also talks about other things that are more interesting, but he still says it doesnt work

If you watch his latest interviews you can see him talking about how he finds it useful for simple cases like in the Bloomberg terminal for generating code for queries, but it still has fundamental limitations for doing anything autonomously.

As someone who has used LLMs heavily at work and at home in various serious experiments, I agree. It still requires heavy babysitting and a lot of its limitations wrt context length are fundamental, not something that’s going to be easy to overcome.