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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?
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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…
This attitude is at the root of many of the world's problems, IMHO
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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…
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.
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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…
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.
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> 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…
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.
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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…
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Indeed. I’m baffled by the comments here. He predicted that a plateau had been reached multiple times in Spring 2024, and now more than two years have passed and capabilities have exploded since then. He wasn’t being imprecise, he wasn’t “correct in spirit”, he was DEAD WRONG.
Unfortunately, anti-AI sentiment on HN is for some people so ridiculously pronounced, that you can get them to say the most insane stuff. I had a couple of people the other day responding to a sarcastic comment, agreeing that being an alcoholic is cooler than using AI. Sad state of affairs. You cannot reason with these people.
But for sure it's a branding play