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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?

#951

Post by ashkankiani »

8note wrote: post #948
eloisant wrote: post #836

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?

#952

Post by CamperBob2 »

runarberg wrote: post #872
unreal37 wrote: post #857

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?

#953

Post by pocksuppet »

scared_together wrote: post #877
echoangle wrote: post #796

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?

#954

Post by pocksuppet »

dash2 wrote: post #751
rapnie wrote: post #741

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?

#955

Post by pocksuppet »

domador wrote: post #592
pocksuppet wrote: post #565

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?

#956

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?

#957

Post by tjoff »

reticulates wrote: post #945
VirusNewbie wrote: post #932

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]

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

#958

Post by majewsky »

chii wrote: post #736
agentultra wrote: post #586

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If many people hated their products, they wouldn't use them This might be true in a true, free market without monopolistic collusion and the abandonment of antitrust regulation and enforcement in the US. In many cases people don’t switch to something else because there isn’t an alternative. Or because they don’t know how to change the defaults that come installed on their computer. Or they get a big scary warning i…

> In many cases people don’t switch to something else because there isn’t an alternative. no, they have an alternative - abstinence. And yet, large majority overwhelmingly chooses not to abstain. Therefore, it does not matter what they say, because actions are the truth.

Try living without a Google or Apple account in a country where most bank accounts or other services (incl. in some cases government services) require a smartphone app only delivered through the monopolists' app stores and (in the case of Android, where installing degoogled Android images is technically possible) requiring Google Play Integrity to pass.

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

#959

Post by zahlman »

tccole wrote: post #867
zahlman wrote: post #726

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Ed Zitron is just one AI crash away from being known as the guy who saw this coming. Everything else he has said can be completely wrong, he just needs to be somewhat correct on a minor crash. That's the theory, but I feel like enough people have heard of him by now to be aware of the numbers game being played.

I don’t agree with your conclusion. It’s like Michael Burry, he’s gotten 10 of the last 2 economic crashes right.

How many people in the financial space recognized Burry's name before 2008?

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

#960

Post by pyrale »

scared_together wrote: post #923
pyrale wrote: post #795

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Predicting a specific quantity dropping to a specific level at a specific date is a lot more valuable than saying “those guys are cooked”. It's also way harder, and the added value isn't that great, if you're not interested in playing the stock market. As an example, explaining why the 2008 crisis was structurally bound to happen is probably more valuable to a policymaker than knowing whether it would start in augu…

The added value other than the stock market would be in making major life decisions. In the case of the 2008 crisis, specific knowledge of the timing could matter for buying or selling a house. In the case of technological predictions, specific knowledge of the timing could affect whether you want to take a university program in a given field or join a certain company. If a predictor can’t help with picking stocks or…

> If a predictor can’t help with picking stocks or making big decisions, then what are these predictions for, entertainment?

Not sure how you constructed that specific sentence from my message.

My point was that most big decisions aren't that sensitive to small timing changes, like stock market can be. Your examples highlight that point: few would change their university choices depending on the knowledge that a future event will happen one year earlier or later.

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