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

danluu.com

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

#691

Post by dannersy »

I find it bizarre that this blogger can make sweeping claims of someone being wrong, quoting specific values that are admittedly speculative, and then just using them as gotchas for being wrong. The then ignore the conclusion that those "wrong" yet close values mean in the grand scheme of Zitron's point, even when the margin of error was inconsequential.

For example, one of his first big criticisms of Ed is Ed's claim that Meta has a dying product and its a dying company. Do I really need to look at the numbers here? Or should we look at the companies actions and history WITH the numbers included?:

- Metaverse was a complete and total disaster and forced upon the company by a CEO who is clearly completely out of touch but infallible within the company.

- Facebook is a bot riddled, AI slop haven, used only for special cases and is basically unanimously hated by the next couple generation of users. Users who are critical for revenue if the serving ads to bots scam ever implodes.

- Meta's successes seem to be solely on knowing who to buy and have failed for a decade to innovate anything.

"Dying" is not the same as "dead". As someone else has said, but I have forgotten who it was, Meta is a "mature" company trying to be young and sexy again when they should focus on their existing products.

How does anyone come away from all this with a business, where we hear all of the horrible things about their internal culture, that an AI pivot to be anything but a trend following desperation move? Then the author addresses but shrugs off entirely the fact that they now hide their Monthly Active Users. I think all of this context is pretty fucking important to think about with the numbers, especially since Meta is trending down when we get the totals for the year. Zitron's point, again, still tracks because you can list a portion of "profit" but it is too early for 2026 since they intentionally use misleading numbers. I would be very interested to see what the first half of 2024 and 2025 profit numbers were before the total year calculation. Either way, Meta's dump into AI is a huge gamble from the company that must pay off.

I don't know. I think this guy does not like Ed Zitron, which is fair. I see a man pointing fingers at someone while doing the same things he is criticising: Taking the speculative and sensational as literal and using it as some sort of gotcha to be speculative and sensational themselves.

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

#692

Post by JumpCrisscross »

DenisM wrote: post #392
tim333 wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone with a bit of understanding of accounts and finance I don't think Ed's analysis is very good. He's not someone who would pass a finance exam.

Is the source material good, in your opinion?

> Is the source material good, in your opinion?

No. For the same reason listening to Jim Kramer to get market data is a bad idea.

There are other, better sources for those data.

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

#694

Post by JumpCrisscross »

dgellow wrote: post #27
simonw wrote: post #3

> For any of his posts that I read, while there are numbers thrown around, the numbers don't actually connect to a coherent argument. In many cases, as we saw above, the numbers don't even really support his argument (such as an MAU decline in Facebook causing Meta financial problems which would then cause Meta to spuriously insert AI in places it doesn't belong). I suspect he's relying on people's eyes glazing over…

I don’t understand the issue, cannot you ignore his commentary and just look at the numbers?

No, particularly not when he manipulates and selectively discloses them.

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

#695

Post by DiogenesKynikos »

polski-g wrote: post #293
minimaxir wrote: post #117

Over the past few years, I had helped Ed with some difficult nuances around the obscure technical aspects of serving LLMs (e.g. benchmarks and model caching); he has also shouted myself and Simon Willison out positively multiple times. I stopped assisting him because he repeatedly misused said advice to the most cynical interpretation ("how can this be interpreted to make AI boosters sound crazy?) and often made it m…

He made a blog post, literally last month, and it said that AIs have no use outside of coding. It just shows he's done zero research on the things he talks about all day. Radiologists are using them, ad firms, artists, translators, law firms, auditors... It's hard to think of a white collar firm not using them.

One thing I've noticed is that since LLMs came out, scientific papers with poor English have essentially disappeared. Just one of the many ways that AI is changing the world. People are using AI in all kinds of fields.

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

#697

Post by alpineman »

ChoosesBarbecue wrote: post #32
simianwords wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Valid criticisms of AI - safety critics who think AI can take over the world like Yud (I find this the least credible but still valid) - Bernie type of critics who think AI can cause widespread job losses - Ruxandra Teslo who thinks AI can remove meaning which I feel is the most serious one [1] What are not valid - environmental like emissions and water usage - AI is useless and it will take the economy with it becau…

> - environmental like emissions and water usage Water usage, sure. But emissions has plenty of reasonable concern. There are the various xAI data centers have/are running using mobile gas turbines. In general, the extreme amount of power is going to put pressure on the grids. I hope this leads to the world doubling down on renewables to offset it all, but is that going to happen? Hell, the US actively paid [0] to st…

Eating meat is much worse than using AI though (both in terms of emissions and local environmental impact), yet no one talks about that

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

#698

Post by kennywinker »

scared_together wrote: post #667
rtpg wrote: post #494

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's two possible set of predictions: - a list of predictions that are entirely wrong, from A-to-Z, and are not even resembling what ends up happening - a list of predictions that are wrong, but where the underlying points are in fact interesting and have some predictive value, and it's just the "last step" that is wrong For example, one person might say "oh it's raining in Dallas therefore I should buy some TI sto…

> The prediction was early, overestimated how long of a tail RIM would experience, but how wrong was it? Was the prediction of some utility? Wrong enough that the utility is seriously diminished. Predicting a specific quantity dropping to a specific level at a specific date is a lot more valuable than saying “those guys are cooked”. And even if some minuscule utility existed: why should predictors be so coddled by th…

RIM is dying now -> useful for stock trading

RIM is dying in the next four years -> useful for life planning.

Anyway, i just wanna get on record that i predict an ai bubble pop event in the next 12 months.

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

#699

Post by bigDinosaur »

layoric wrote: post #563

This critique is leaning really hard on their interpretation of "dying". They take the literal company is going to fail type of dying where as I have always taken it the same way he has presented it in his "rot-economy" context. They can remain financially "successful", but more and more people hate their products, their products are getting worse, their products are "dying". Google Search is still a good example, th…

You can define any word to be whatever you want and thus have linguistically correct predictions that are functionally useless.
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