I've started to feel like Ed Zitron is actively hurting people I care about. I'm lucky to have worked in the field for a long time, and be able to spend a lot of tokens. In the last month it's become clear to me that the tech works. The science is done, and what's left is engineering. There are a lot of risks and mitigations and theory to build, but it's all solvable. The tech isn't mature, but neither was the Intern…
> I've started to feel like Ed Zitron is actively hurting people I care about.
Did you actually read the articles he made going through the finances of these companies? He definitely has a bone to pick, but his numbers don't lie. The amount of return these AIs need to give due to the amount of spend is so ridiculous that unless they really do automate most jobs, they're screwed. There's a reason these companies only post AI revenue now, not profit.
Bubble doomerism is nothing novel. As is always the case, he's right vertically and wrong horizontally. Serious people in serious publications still speculated that the internet was a fad and would be over soon as late as 2008. OpenAI will collapse, almost certainly. Anthropic might get by if they can make it to IPO before it all comes tumbling down. Google will buy up all the datacenters in a fire sale like they did…
I don't think Zitron has ever claimed AI to be a fad, at this point there's a cottage industry of people misrepresenting Ed Zitron to feel better about their own precarious financial predictions
Bubble doomerism is nothing novel. As is always the case, he's right vertically and wrong horizontally. Serious people in serious publications still speculated that the internet was a fad and would be over soon as late as 2008. OpenAI will collapse, almost certainly. Anthropic might get by if they can make it to IPO before it all comes tumbling down. Google will buy up all the datacenters in a fire sale like they did…
>The top open models are already good enough . Rare opportunity for me to actually downplay frontier AI for a change. We can do a lot better. I think the next 6 months will be a stream of releases that shall leave all the current models in the dust. Opus 4.6 will be no more relevant than 3.5 Sonnet. If this is the case, all bubble talk will have to be re-evaluated.
Why would it need to be re-evaluated? The financials haven't changed, the end goal hasn't changed, even if the AI is better or more useful, the stuff Zitron puts out assumes AI will continue to get better until the money runs out. Unless the AI genuinely starts taking jobs en masse (and not just being used as an excuse for layoffs), they're still in the same situation.
The financial market things are over my head and I don't have a dog in the game, but I think "Nobody is replacing salesforce with their internally vibe coded software" is just false? Both taken literally [0] [1] and as denying the general trend. Just in my company we already replaced WMS software subscription with own solution, and I wouldn't be able to write it fast enough and maintain it by myself without the use o…
What percentage of companies that use salesforce employ software developers? Many don’t even have IT workers.
It’s easy to assume the conditions in software companies are generalizable to everyone else but they’re really not. For the majority of companies, which have no software development expertise, it would be a catastrophe. Hiring someone to do it, and managing the initiative, would cost more than salesforce.
I don't think so. His argument is not "this tech doesn't work", but rather "these businesses aren't economically viable" And that the smoke and mirrors accounting and perpetual thirst for more billions indicates just how unviable it is Whilst he does dunk on LLM capabilities, the framing is the business angle - can Anysphere etc. actually form a moat and make a profit?
>His argument has never been "this tech doesn't work", but rather "these businesses aren't economically viable" Why? because of cost?
I've started to feel like Ed Zitron is actively hurting people I care about. I'm lucky to have worked in the field for a long time, and be able to spend a lot of tokens. In the last month it's become clear to me that the tech works. The science is done, and what's left is engineering. There are a lot of risks and mitigations and theory to build, but it's all solvable. The tech isn't mature, but neither was the Intern…
What looks isolated to you merely looks separated from the SV hype pool to the rest of the world. Most people aren’t in on this.
I've started to feel like Ed Zitron is actively hurting people I care about. I'm lucky to have worked in the field for a long time, and be able to spend a lot of tokens. In the last month it's become clear to me that the tech works. The science is done, and what's left is engineering. There are a lot of risks and mitigations and theory to build, but it's all solvable. The tech isn't mature, but neither was the Intern…
Not sure how this comment got upvoted; calling skepticism of an emerging industry a "mental breakdown" and suggesting those "suffering" from it to talk to a therapist doesn't really clear the bar for discussion here. This reads more like a manager being salty that their team isn't using up all the Grok budget this quarter or whatever. And let it be clear that nobody is being "actively hurt" by legitimate economic/bus…
It got upvoted because this hype is essentially running on faith at this point, and the only way to fight someone questioning your faith is calling them crazy, confused, or evil.
That is absolutely not the consensus in neuroscience.
Was thinking more about cognition than neuroscience, but sure, even there. Think of any counter-examples -- I'm guessing things like symbolic reasoning or pre-existing structures in the brain -- and then consider the origins of those concepts. Admittedly I'm an absolute layman just dabbling in this, but I could find not a single concept that cannot be traced to statistical origins. Like, symbols are essentially "vect…
That is absolutely not the consensus in neuroscience.
Was thinking more about cognition than neuroscience, but sure, even there. Think of any counter-examples -- I'm guessing things like symbolic reasoning or pre-existing structures in the brain -- and then consider the origins of those concepts. Admittedly I'm an absolute layman just dabbling in this, but I could find not a single concept that cannot be traced to statistical origins. Like, symbols are essentially "vect…
>The top open models are already good enough . Rare opportunity for me to actually downplay frontier AI for a change. We can do a lot better. I think the next 6 months will be a stream of releases that shall leave all the current models in the dust. Opus 4.6 will be no more relevant than 3.5 Sonnet. If this is the case, all bubble talk will have to be re-evaluated.
Why would it need to be re-evaluated? The financials haven't changed, the end goal hasn't changed, even if the AI is better or more useful, the stuff Zitron puts out assumes AI will continue to get better until the money runs out. Unless the AI genuinely starts taking jobs en masse (and not just being used as an excuse for layoffs), they're still in the same situation.
>the stuff Zitron puts out assumes AI will continue to get better until the money runs out
This is categorically false. The big part of his "thing", from the first moment he ever started talking about AI, is the insistence that AI isn't getting better and very soon undergo a devastating collapse.