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Ed Zitron loses his mind annotating an AI doomer macro memo

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Re: Ed Zitron loses his mind annotating an AI doomer macro memo

#81

Post by Kye »

Moomoomoo309 wrote: post #73
frozenseven wrote: post #54

Good to see people are finally turning against this grifter. " AI fake, AI poo poo, AI going away! " is the only argument he ever had. Nothing more.

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 with dark fiber after the .com bubble popped and continue building out stuff like NotebookLM.

Amazon and Microsoft will still be there selling server time to model providers and doing custom enterprise solutions like always. They already host the major proprietary models and sell API access.[0]

The top open models are already good enough. At this point prompting and coordination are the big bottlenecks. It would be nice if the bubble lasts long enough for open models to match at least the latest Opus.

His problem is the focus on the bubble and not on what usually happens after. People will bandy his pieces about insisting it's all short lived and they can just wait it out. Kimi K2.5, GLM 5, and MiniMax 2.5 aren't going away.

[0] For example: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/claude-opus-4-6-anthr...

https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2026/2/claude-opu...

Re: Ed Zitron loses his mind annotating an AI doomer macro memo

#82

Post by pityJuke »

GaryBluto wrote: post #42
pityJuke wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don’t encourage his diaper fetish! [0] [0]: https://bsky.app/search?q=from%3Aedzitron.com+diaper

I thought there would be one or two results, perhaps a result of poor reoccurring phrasing. Nope. >i'm going to change your diaper and burp you >Carlito is a very good boy Go piss in your diaper you big baby >He doesn't care. He is a big baby who filled up his diaper with pee pee and poo poo >you are a big baby and i am going to change your diaper and burp you >To be clear I call executives of multi trillion dollar c…

Yeah it’s become a mini-meme amongst the AI folk on Bluesky [0]

[0]: https://bsky.app/profile/dame.is/post/3ltnty3gebs22

Re: Ed Zitron loses his mind annotating an AI doomer macro memo

#83

Post by lelanthran »

hiddencost wrote: post #26

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…

> They insist the tech will never work, and avoid learning about it, becoming progressively more paranoid and isolated. I'm trying to be supportive and help them start to recover, but it's slow going.

If you are right, and the tech works, both you and them will be continuing this conversation in a soup kitchen.

Re: Ed Zitron loses his mind annotating an AI doomer macro memo

#84

Post by simianwords »

Kye wrote: post #77
simianwords wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some one should compile concrete predictions that he made vs how they turned out.

He hedges so much that it's probably impossible to catch him in a contradiction or missed prediction. It must be all that practice running a PR firm for AI companies.

its not that hard really

>You can fight with me on semantics, on claiming valuations are high and how many users ChatGPT has, but look at the products and tell me any of this is really the future.

Imagine if they’d done something else.

Imagine if they’d done anything else.

Imagine if they’d have decided to unite around something other than the idea that they needed to continue growing.

Imagine, because right now that’s the closest you’re going to fucking get.

This is what he said. Clearly wrong in spirit.

Re: Ed Zitron loses his mind annotating an AI doomer macro memo

#85

Post by surgical_fire »

Kye wrote: post #76
surgical_fire wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The graph you linked seems to compare different OpenAI models in terms of "price per million tokens". I am very skeptical of any financial information that comes from OpenAI. I have no idea how truthful those numbers are, or how creatively they can be collected to paint a rosier future for them. Even if the numbers are truthful, I have no idea how the calculate price there. Is it in terms of cost of compute they rent…

>> "The dataset for this insight combines data on large language model (LLM) API prices and benchmark scores from Artificial Analysis and Epoch AI." I don't know about Epoch AI, but Artificial Analysis shares its methodology: https://artificialanalysis.ai/methodology Their chart of inference prices split by benchmark intelligence: https://artificialanalysis.ai/trends#efficiency

> For our language model benchmarking, we note that we consider endpoints to be serverless when customers only pay for their usage, not a fixed rate for access to a system. Typically this means that endpoints are priced on a per token basis, often with different prices for input and output tokens.

Okay, correct me if I am wrong, so this is measuring the inference costs for clients of AI services, not the the inference costs that the AI service itself has when they offer the service?

I mean, the other guy's claim is that inference costs had come down 20x-30x. But the analysis, if I understood correctly, is based on how much clients are paying for it, not how much it actually costs.

I can charge you 20x less for a service and have massive losses for it.

Re: Ed Zitron loses his mind annotating an AI doomer macro memo

#86

Post by simianwords »

surgical_fire wrote: post #85
Kye wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> "The dataset for this insight combines data on large language model (LLM) API prices and benchmark scores from Artificial Analysis and Epoch AI." I don't know about Epoch AI, but Artificial Analysis shares its methodology: https://artificialanalysis.ai/methodology Their chart of inference prices split by benchmark intelligence: https://artificialanalysis.ai/trends#efficiency

> For our language model benchmarking, we note that we consider endpoints to be serverless when customers only pay for their usage, not a fixed rate for access to a system. Typically this means that endpoints are priced on a per token basis, often with different prices for input and output tokens. Okay, correct me if I am wrong, so this is measuring the inference costs for clients of AI services, not the the inferenc…

It could be that OpenAI is subsidising their models by _fifty times_. Do you really think they are doing that? In some cases the costs went down by 200x. Do you really think OpenAI is subsidising their models by 200??

Its easier to just admit that technological advances helped decrease the cost instead of coming up with more complicated reasons like VC funding, subsidies and so on.

For instance take Deepseek and other opensource models - even they have reduced their costs by a huge margin. What explanation is there for opensource models?

Re: Ed Zitron loses his mind annotating an AI doomer macro memo

#88

Post by simianwords »

orwin wrote: post #69
simianwords wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

cost is going down 20x, 30x over the years so he's wrong about this.

That doesn't matter if the free models are as performant in 6 months. I will never personally pay for a model I can have for free. ChatGPT 5 used to be my preferred model as a DMing help tool, now deepseek and LeChat are the one I use, and are better at what OpenAI model use to be better at. And I think the models hit their limit for my usecase, I don't need better one. I never 'reprompt' anymore, and just roll/impro…

i find it interesting that in no case do you allow openapi to profit

- if the costs go up then they can't make profits

- if the costs go down then you won't pay for them

Re: Ed Zitron loses his mind annotating an AI doomer macro memo

#89

Post by ludicrousdispla »

noosphr wrote: post #21
ubercore wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a point and click code machine, but it's laughably wrong to say they just churn out laughably wrong code.

Half of developers are below average. Half of developers say that the code Ai produces is amazing. Would you like a venn diagram?

minor correction: they say AI produces code that is 'mostly' amazing.

Re: Ed Zitron loses his mind annotating an AI doomer macro memo

#90

Post by orwin »

simianwords wrote: post #88
orwin wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That doesn't matter if the free models are as performant in 6 months. I will never personally pay for a model I can have for free. ChatGPT 5 used to be my preferred model as a DMing help tool, now deepseek and LeChat are the one I use, and are better at what OpenAI model use to be better at. And I think the models hit their limit for my usecase, I don't need better one. I never 'reprompt' anymore, and just roll/impro…

i find it interesting that in no case do you allow openapi to profit - if the costs go up then they can't make profits - if the costs go down then you won't pay for them

It's hard to sell something I can have for free.

The only way for openAI to get my subscription back would be my country making open-weight ai or deepseek illegal. It was worth the price tbh, but they can't compete with free.

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