Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

danluu.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

951–960 of 1001 posts

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

#951

Post by 8note »

eloisant wrote: post #838
yousif_123123 wrote: post #800

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?

#952

Post by DrewADesign »

Analemma_ wrote: post #927
DrewADesign wrote: post #914

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?

#953

Post by rsynnott »

> "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?

#954

Post by ashkankiani »

8note wrote: post #951
eloisant wrote: post #838

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.

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

#955

Post by CamperBob2 »

runarberg wrote: post #874
unreal37 wrote: post #859

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you ever listen to more than a couple of Zitron interviews, it's clear that he's not the "reasonable centrist" viewpoint on AI. He's the doom-and-gloom guy. Maybe there is someone out there positive on AI itself and calling out reasonable objections to some of the extreme things. But that's not Zitron.

The center is not always the reasonable viewpoint. And sometimes the doom-and-gloom guy is correct.

Not this time.

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

#956

Post by pocksuppet »

scared_together wrote: post #879
echoangle wrote: post #797

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> why should predictors be so coddled by their observers? Because prediction is hard and no one is so good at it that they won't make errors like that.

They’ll never get better if not held accountable.

They haven't got better when held accountable, but you dissuaded further predictions.

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

#957

Post by pocksuppet »

dash2 wrote: post #752
rapnie wrote: post #742

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nice saying. If in the prediction "given [intricate analysis] the whole [shebang] goes [bust] at [date]", only the [date] turns out to be wrong, I'd say it is still a valuable prediction however, though it was wrong.

Problem is even his “intricate analysis” was wrong: for example he was saying the models wouldn’t keep improving… in 2024.

Have they improved? Is there evidence of that? Got a task you were doing in 2024 and 2026 and the results of each?

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

#958

Post by pocksuppet »

domador wrote: post #593
pocksuppet wrote: post #566

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I have a billion trillion dollars but 20% of the population hates me, but I get to live in a giant solid gold mansion with an army of servants keeping the 20% away from me, have I really failed?

It'd depend on what specifically that 20% of the population hates that hypothetical you for. Maybe their hate in this scenario turns out to be an accurate signal that you are an awful human being. In that case, you'd be a very rich, awful human being. Have you really failed in this case? Not at making money and living a decadent, hedonistic life, if that was your goal, but yes at being a good human being, one who is…

Further suppose that, as a result of my awfulness, everyone who is alive 100 years later is my descendant of me (E.g. Genghis Khan). Have I failed?

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

#959

Post by oblio »

kristianp wrote: post #110
tolugenius wrote: post #14

I've been doubting him myself (his recent articles just hedge on data centers more than anything else) but then I want to ask, are there any valid critics of AI? Not a "code is bad but it'll get better" but actual criticism in the nature of the financing, politics, etc. I think separating AI as a tool and it's capabilities and AI as product that needs to make a profit is helpful, however most people are really hedgin…

The data center growth questions he raised have been where I found him interesting. I could never find any other articles to corroborate his predictions though. My question is when will the AI bubble burst? I didn't know he'd had a long history of mispredicting AI quality and growth of companies like Microsoft and Google.

> I didn't know he'd had a long history of mispredicting AI quality and growth of companies like Microsoft and Google.

After watching this space for a long time, I think the growth angle is... untested.

All the FAANGs were slowing down after Covid. They boomed as the money printer went brrrr, then they plateaued. They've also kind of covered a lot of their potential their main total addressable markets, with the big exception of clouds, which probably have at least 5 or 10 years of growth as workloads are still being moved away from on-premise. Maybe ads, too, since TV is still around and big and there are probably a bunch of other holdouts I'm forgetting.

Then, FAANGs started reaccelerating around 2024.

Part of it was due to internal reforms, basically, layoffs shaking some things up.

But I suspect the bigger part has been AI, driven by CapEx and all sorts of other things. The problem with the AI growth is that it's highly opaque. We don't really know who the actual clients are. It is > likely that for Oracle (OCI), Microsoft (Azure), Google (GCP), Amazon (AWS) their direct customers are just OpenAI and Anthropic. That's it. It's likely that 70% of the AI growth is just 2 companies. That can't be healthy, it's also likely extremely risky.

Just the fact that the new cloud growth is so opaque is worrisome.

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

#960

Post by tjoff »

reticulates wrote: post #948
VirusNewbie wrote: post #935

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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

[dead]
Post reply on HN