I don't know what it is but I feel there is some sort of logical fallacy here. Ed Zitron is an analyst. His viewpoint is that AI is bad for whatever reasons and he does his job by trying to uncover those reasons and does a solid work. He presents a lot of insider knowledge that would otherwise be left unheard. What are his alternatives? To stop claiming that AI is bad and pivot to "AI is good" writing? To quit writin…
An analyst shouldn't have a conclusion carved in stones and work backwards to support said conclusion, for the starter.
More people need to read Ed, especially tech journalists. I feel like he's one of the rare few people that are actually speaking about the industry honestly.
I've been subscribed to ed for a long time. I commend his foundational ideas like what he laid out in "The Era of the Business Idiot" or "The Rot Economy". My recommendation line for him to anyone else is "if nothing else, he'll leave you with something to chew on for a while to come". My issue with Ed is that he doesn't have the ability to draw the line. In the pursuit of making a point he goes so dogmatic that he i…
Outside of coding agents, which are overhyped, I can't really think of any other agents that are particularly useful for getting work done. I installed cowork at one point and couldn't figure out anything I'd want to use it for. I guess there's maybe call center agents, which don't work great and live in an uncanny valley.
I really respected Ed Zitron, but I feel like he's very much lost the plot on AI. Scroll back not too far and he was publishing criticisms that no one wants to spend actual money AI. Anthropic has shattered all notions of that since then. Then there was the idea that even if people want it, we have way too much GPU capacity to ever be saturated. Now almost all providers are hitting limits. Now, its the next iteration…
I don't know what it is but I feel there is some sort of logical fallacy here. Ed Zitron is an analyst. His viewpoint is that AI is bad for whatever reasons and he does his job by trying to uncover those reasons and does a solid work. He presents a lot of insider knowledge that would otherwise be left unheard. What are his alternatives? To stop claiming that AI is bad and pivot to "AI is good" writing? To quit writin…
That’s not an analyst, that’s a pundit. An analyst can have a clear point of view that is different from yours and, very far off the consensus in any direction. But the value of an analyst is they have a consistent point of view that they apply to any situation and flag as their point of view evolves.
A pundit starts from a pre-declared conclusion and works backwards to generate the argument. An analyst lets the conclusion be dictated by the analysis.
I've been subscribed to ed for a long time. I commend his foundational ideas like what he laid out in "The Era of the Business Idiot" or "The Rot Economy". My recommendation line for him to anyone else is "if nothing else, he'll leave you with something to chew on for a while to come". My issue with Ed is that he doesn't have the ability to draw the line. In the pursuit of making a point he goes so dogmatic that he i…
Outside of coding agents, which are overhyped, I can't really think of any other agents that are particularly useful for getting work done. I installed cowork at one point and couldn't figure out anything I'd want to use it for. I guess there's maybe call center agents, which don't work great and live in an uncanny valley.
Personally I think the big benefits are gonna be in pretty specific business processes which are currently done manually. Lots of KYC and data entry between systems where it wasn't plausible to automate before are now doable.
I'm pretty uncertain around the businesses of foundation models but the tech is definitely useful.
I've been subscribed to ed for a long time. I commend his foundational ideas like what he laid out in "The Era of the Business Idiot" or "The Rot Economy". My recommendation line for him to anyone else is "if nothing else, he'll leave you with something to chew on for a while to come". My issue with Ed is that he doesn't have the ability to draw the line. In the pursuit of making a point he goes so dogmatic that he i…
> "Probably the weirdest thing about this entire era is how nobody wants to talk about the fact that AI isn’t actually doing very much, and that AI agents are just chatbots plugged into an API." That's a massive stretch to make. With the notable exception of TTI models, that description seems accurate to me. Is there any widely promoted "AI product" that is more than a chatbot in fancy dress?
Thats the thing though. The reduction of agents to Chatbots in a fancy dress doesn't make sense. Whether there's much of a moat to the models agentic approaches is a different question. But the idea of reframing questions and results in a back and forth between itself while holding on to context and all the laundered knowledge it has (no I'm never letting go of the lack of ethics in its knowledge acquisition) is an impressive feat. To say it isn't doing much is to liken someone doing any kind of thinking as doing nothing much. I'm not saying LLMs are sentient or intelligent in a human sense. But their synthetic intelligence does have capabilities that are impressive and they are capable of reducing so much busy work for me personally. Those ai agents that aren't apparently doing much can help me narrow down my reading about prior art in security implementations super quickly by going site by site, categorizing, locating the correct page in docs, or a Reddit discussion, extracting a relevant paragraph, sourcing it, and putting it down for me. The idea that this isn't much is reductive. That would have been 2 hours of my energy previously and instead I pick up the completed work, visit the links I asked the agent to get for me, do my reading in a pre planned structured way, and complete my work (I always try to be respectful of source material instead of attributing to the LLM). That is very useful behaviour and I think we thumb our nose at it to our own detriment.
Outside of coding agents, which are overhyped, I can't really think of any other agents that are particularly useful for getting work done. I installed cowork at one point and couldn't figure out anything I'd want to use it for. I guess there's maybe call center agents, which don't work great and live in an uncanny valley.
Personally I think the big benefits are gonna be in pretty specific business processes which are currently done manually. Lots of KYC and data entry between systems where it wasn't plausible to automate before are now doable. I'm pretty uncertain around the businesses of foundation models but the tech is definitely useful.
Yep. I like to sometimes think of Agents as a slow but tireless unofficial API glue between completely disparate elements. I dislike the approach the companies took in laundering information through them. But their ability to work through clerical work that no one should be doing ideally has been incredible for me. Of course there's nuance to that last sentence. Someone needs to have an eye on certain things in domains like finance. But it's up to companies to be smart here and ask how AI can augment that process rather than trying to get rid of it. For example, collecting all relevant context and presenting it on demand for a suspicious transaction flag would eliminate what could be days of inter departmental wrangling in a normal work process.
My only side note of sadness here is that companies are more likely to implement such stuff in a haphazard way rather than anything actually thoughtful.
Personally I think the big benefits are gonna be in pretty specific business processes which are currently done manually. Lots of KYC and data entry between systems where it wasn't plausible to automate before are now doable. I'm pretty uncertain around the businesses of foundation models but the tech is definitely useful.
Yep. I like to sometimes think of Agents as a slow but tireless unofficial API glue between completely disparate elements. I dislike the approach the companies took in laundering information through them. But their ability to work through clerical work that no one should be doing ideally has been incredible for me. Of course there's nuance to that last sentence. Someone needs to have an eye on certain things in domai…
> My only side note of sadness here is that companies are more likely to implement such stuff in a haphazard way rather than anything actually thoughtful.
This will definitely happen, but the trend will end up towards automating a bunch of this stuff with manual checks on a subsample to ensure that it's working effectively. It's rather like moving from phone/mail based ordering to online ordering, in that it'll take a while but it's almost certainly gonna happen.
It's not really a character attack so much as a poor track record attack.
Track record would matter if we would need to trust him. (E.g. he knows some hidden insider data which stays secret, while he shares only a conclusion without must justification) Track record is not relevant if it is a prediction with all the arguments laid out in the open. Which is our situation closer to?
Facts can be cherry picked. As an example of Ed's stuff see:
>Anthropic Is Bleeding Out ...Anthropic is very likely losing money on every single Claude Code customer, and based on my analysis, appears to be losing hundreds or even thousands of dollars per customer. (Ed, 10 months ago) https://www.wheresyoured.at/anthropic-is-bleeding-out/
vs
>Mind-Blowing Growth Is About to Propel Anthropic Into Its First Profitable Quarter
The startup expects a 130% revenue surge to $10.9 billion in the June quarter and its first operating profit, defying skeptics of the AI boom (wsj, yesterday)
If you look at Ed's piece there the facts are correct but he just moans about costs and ignores the growth. Most of his stuff is kind of like that.
The counter argument (not mine): Software Engineers are willing to spend their own money on AI. The same people that wouldn't pay 10 dollars for code if there was a workaround that took hours.
The same people that laugh at you when you mention paying for Kagi or alternative to an advertising supported web.
The counter argument (not mine): Software Engineers are willing to spend their own money on AI. The same people that wouldn't pay 10 dollars for code if there was a workaround that took hours.
> Software Engineers are willing to spend their own money on AI. Unless you’re a freelancer you should never pay for your tools. You’re literally paying your company to do their work. If they want the benefits of an LLM they can pay for it. Otherwise they get what you came with: your hands and skills.
The company I work for pays for my tokens, but I find enough joy in doing weekend projects supercharged by AI to chip in myself too