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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?

#991

Post by selfhoster1312 »

ainch wrote: post #989
selfhoster1312 wrote: post #984

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who's strongly anti-AI, i find Zitron to be absolutely too much pro-AI for my taste. He defends AI that's not LLMs. He barely touches on ecological impacts of AI, and barely mentions the enshittification of things. He's only really against the LLM craze, OpenAI/Anthropic over-evaluation (because Deepseek and local models will do the same for nearly free), and the crazy speculative bubble around datacenters…

Out of curiosity, what would you like to hear him saying about non-LLM AI?

There's plenty of arguments to be had. I guess there could be some useful applications of non-LLM AI (eg. translation tools), but quality output is still a concern. Environmental impact is also still a concern. If output is of sufficient quality, who reaps the benefits is a concern ; if not, who pays the price of shittier products is a concern.

Whether LLM or non-LLM tech, the question of surveillance capitalism and how models need to be fed swaths of privacy-invading data (eg. self-driving cars filming everything all the time) is also a concern.

Overall, i think the ecological concern is still the biggest one. We are at the start of a major climate crisis, and any self-preserving measures were already hard fought by industry. I fear that any form of AI investment will lead (because it's already leading) to destroying any hope of saving an inhabitable planet.

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

#992

Post by BoiledCabbage »

coldtea wrote: post #804
unsupp0rted wrote: post #791

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Predicting things 5 years too early is often as useless as not predicting anything. You can say "AI will be able to _____" and be right 99.9 times out of 100, but the question is when. You can say "The AI market will go to 0" and be at least directionally right eventually. But none of it matters if you get the timing wrong.

> Predicting things 5 years too early is often as useless as not predicting anything. It's not the predicting that's important to me, it's the assessing. I don't care if it will do X in 2 or 5 years. I do care if something IS "X", and we should correct course to not get the bad outcome associated with X (whenever it might come) or not.

> I don't care if it will do X in 2 or 5 years.

Yes, but for should care if it's 2 years vs 50 years. That's why timeline are important for predictions.

Anyone can predict lots of things that given enough time will eventually be true. "The sun will burn out", "humans as a species will no longer exist", "the US will collapse". That's useless. But those become meaningful if they will happen within the next three years.

It's the reason the saying "the market can be irrational longer than your can stay solvent" has such important meaning.

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

#993

Post by anthonyrstevens »

pocksuppet wrote: post #955
dash2 wrote: post #751

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Oh my goodness. Is this really a good-faith question?

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

#994

Post by anthonyrstevens »

solaire_oa wrote: post #405
bogzz wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Even if Zitron is hopelessly wrong and a complete fool, he's an engaging writer. Like the original article itself states, it's not about the numbers, it's about catharsis. The transparent absence of AI tells in his articles is refreshing, and just rampaging against the AI boosters who lack empathy and self-awareness (which so many of them absolutely do) is cathartic. Even if it's all bunk, fake, and stupid, it's nice…

"Truth can be complicated and difficult, so I like to listen to people who tell me comforting distortions."

This attitude is at the root of many of the world's problems, IMHO

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

#995

Post by Mentlo »

selfhoster1312 wrote: post #991
ainch wrote: post #989

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of curiosity, what would you like to hear him saying about non-LLM AI?

There's plenty of arguments to be had. I guess there could be some useful applications of non-LLM AI (eg. translation tools), but quality output is still a concern. Environmental impact is also still a concern. If output is of sufficient quality, who reaps the benefits is a concern ; if not, who pays the price of shittier products is a concern. Whether LLM or non-LLM tech, the question of surveillance capitalism and…

To play devil's advocate - unless you were to take the position of declaring bankruptcy on the possibility that a complex society of competing actors can agree on climate change - and therefore this being an unsolvable problem that you need AI to solve, as humans can't handle the complexity.

I find a lot of the debate on either climate change or AI collapses if you point out that "we shouldn't do this, we should ALL just do this" is an extremely unrealistic position in an international complex ecosystem of competing actors.

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

#996

Post by preg_match »

selfhoster1312 wrote: post #991
ainch wrote: post #989

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Out of curiosity, what would you like to hear him saying about non-LLM AI?

There's plenty of arguments to be had. I guess there could be some useful applications of non-LLM AI (eg. translation tools), but quality output is still a concern. Environmental impact is also still a concern. If output is of sufficient quality, who reaps the benefits is a concern ; if not, who pays the price of shittier products is a concern. Whether LLM or non-LLM tech, the question of surveillance capitalism and…

Really only large language models require huge swaths of training data and extremely expensive training/inference. Other “AI”, like basic neural networks or something like path finding, is basically free. It’s just an algorithm, a small one that runs on computers.

The term AI is very overloaded. When people say AI, they really mean LLMs. AI like old Siri has basically no cost. It’s not environmentally damaging, as it runs on device. It’s not privacy gore, because it runs on device.

Or take, for example, lane keep assist systems on vehicles. This doesn’t require a huge data center or anything, it’s basic computer vision and a small on-vehicle model.

Yes AI has a “cost”, but for virtually all non-LLM AI the ecological cost is the same as any other application or algorithm. Siri doesn’t burn more energy than instagram.

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

#997

Post by preg_match »

ashkankiani wrote: post #952
8note wrote: post #949

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 le…

I also agree but the autonomous part comes from coding. We build autonomous systems with code, so it AI is really good at writing code (it is), we increase automation. Not with the AI itself, but with what it produces.

Which is good, for many reasons:

- environmental costs go down. Algorithms are cheap, LLM inference and training is not.

- code is deterministic

- code can be read and understood by professionals

- code can be deployed trivially, whereas deploying an LLM costs huge infrastructure

So using an LLM to help write code is the best of both worlds. You get velocity increase from the LLM, with none of the hallucination or environmental downsides at deployment time.

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

#999

Post by pocksuppet »

adventured wrote: post #318
LogicFailsMe wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And that's when we pay off the national debt for pennies on the worthless dollar. The pro move would be to stop lending the US money, but that's not going to happen.

The US doesn't require that you lend it money, it possesses the global reserve currency. It'll take it from you via currency debasement. That's a world problem whether the world likes it or not. There is still no viable (realistic) alternative, and that includes the Euro, Yen, Yuan, gold, Bitcoin. There are no lenders outside or inside of the US for $20 trillion in new debt over the next decade. Monetization is the o…

The US possesses the global reserve currency because everyone lends it money. If they didn't, it wouldn't. The USD is the global reserve currency because it's the one with all the lending!
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