Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

danluu.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

801–810 of 1001 posts

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

#801

Post by coldtea »

unsupp0rted wrote: post #788
coldtea wrote: post #774

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can do that, but then you’re no longer discussing his predictions. You’re discussing your predictions, and your own positioning. Depends if you care about the "prediction" part or if you care about the assessment of the situation (regardless of date). If someone in 2000 said "the subprime mortgages market is a bubble and will blow no later than 2003", they got the prediction wrong, but their assessment would be…

Predicting things 5 years too early is often as useless as not predicting anything. You can say "AI will be able to _____" and be right 99.9 times out of 100, but the question is when. You can say "The AI market will go to 0" and be at least directionally right eventually. But none of it matters if you get the timing wrong.

>Predicting things 5 years too early is often as useless as not predicting anything.

It's not the predicting that's important to me, it's the assessing.

I don't care if it will do X in 2 or 5 years.

I do care if something IS "X", and we should correct course to not get the bad outcome associated with X (whenever it might come) or not.

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

#802

Post by delis-thumbs-7e »

DiogenesKynikos wrote: post #693
polski-g wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Oh c’mon. You must be trolling. Great, now we have have scientific papers with formally correct English, but data and sources of which are fabricated and most of the paragraphs are utter nonsense. And publications are drowning on these. Oh thanks for changing the world!

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

#803

Post by avisser »

yousif_123123 wrote: post #796

Things in general I think he's right about: 1. Revenue if anthropic and openai is unlikely to grow to the high levels they need to pay for their commitments. Many of their heavy users (coding) will eventually offset a lot of usage to more efficient and cheaper open weight models. I know of people in a company I was at that spend thousands of dollars a month on tokens. I am sure that what they're using it for can be s…

> I am sure that what they're using it for can be substituted in large part by way cheaper models.

I saw a commit in the repo at work that edited a few config files and a dictionary.txt file. "co-authored by Fable"

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

#804

Post by gorbachev »

avisser wrote: post #803
yousif_123123 wrote: post #796

Things in general I think he's right about: 1. Revenue if anthropic and openai is unlikely to grow to the high levels they need to pay for their commitments. Many of their heavy users (coding) will eventually offset a lot of usage to more efficient and cheaper open weight models. I know of people in a company I was at that spend thousands of dollars a month on tokens. I am sure that what they're using it for can be s…

> I am sure that what they're using it for can be substituted in large part by way cheaper models. I saw a commit in the repo at work that edited a few config files and a dictionary.txt file. "co-authored by Fable"

I have colleagues who have replaced ctrl-f on a (long) document they already have open with prompting an LLM to find things for them.

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

#805

Post by reticulates »

yousif_123123 wrote: post #796

Things in general I think he's right about: 1. Revenue if anthropic and openai is unlikely to grow to the high levels they need to pay for their commitments. Many of their heavy users (coding) will eventually offset a lot of usage to more efficient and cheaper open weight models. I know of people in a company I was at that spend thousands of dollars a month on tokens. I am sure that what they're using it for can be s…

re: substituting with cheaper models. I think some people here are oblivious to how much of Anthropic and OpenAI’s usage is artificial.

Take this one example of a user with 15 Codex subscriptions ($3k) generating $60k in API-equivalent usage per month: https://hraness.com/writing/my-girlfriend-asked-me-why-i-hav...

“there’s a once in a lifetime discount happening at the OpenAI Intelligence Depot, and I brought 15 shopping carts.”

We have to understand current usage with this behavior in mind, there are tens of thousands of people just like this author who are intentionally generating as much usage as possible on their subsidized plans because they feel compelled by some need to get free intelligence.

The only reason these expensive models are generating so much usage is because they are so heavily subsidized. Pragmatic users will shift to cheaper models which will hurt per token revenue, yes, but huge volumes of usage is going to just disappear because there isn’t the demand when it isn’t being subsidized. Less revenue per token and less tokens.

https://tokscale.ai/leaderboard a small sample of just 2k users have generated over $100m of API-equivalent usage while paying closer to just $1m.

https://aicharts.io/gpt-subsidy

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

#806

Post by wccrawford »

spiderfarmer wrote: post #799
wccrawford wrote: post #782

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hilarious, but he never actually said he'd stop writing, just that he'd continue writing until proven wrong. And provably, he did. He wrote until then, and continued after. Since he never stopped writing, he met the challenge. He's now free to stop writing whenever he wants and still not fail that statement. ;)

Are you a software tester?

I am a developer, but my wife is a tester. And I've always enjoyed logic puzzles. :D

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

#807

Post by randusername »

arctic-true wrote: post #191
sfblah wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience, people who make fun of AI's ability to eliminate white-collar work are exactly the same people who are white-knuckling it, hoping they can make another $300k next year to buy that Rivian. People who don't need a salary look at the situation more objectively and, in general, can see that a lot of white-collar work is in peril.

I think that is tied to the general trend that people see themselves as far less replaceable than others. And I’m not sure that people who don’t need a salary are exactly objective about it - unless you mean people who live off the state or something, those are people who need their capital reserves to continue to appreciate in order to sustain their lifestyles, and are thus relying on the destruction of white collar…

> I think that is tied to the general trend that people see themselves as far less replaceable than others.

What if (almost) everyone is right, that their work really is more difficult to automate than others realize?

This could be the lesser minds problem. Based on it I am doubtful most knowledge workers are as immediately replaceable as everyone suspects.

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

#808

Post by barrell »

yousif_123123 wrote: post #796

Things in general I think he's right about: 1. Revenue if anthropic and openai is unlikely to grow to the high levels they need to pay for their commitments. Many of their heavy users (coding) will eventually offset a lot of usage to more efficient and cheaper open weight models. I know of people in a company I was at that spend thousands of dollars a month on tokens. I am sure that what they're using it for can be s…

Yeah personally I think he is right about a lot of the current state of affairs. I think he has a decent grasp of the situation despite being incredibly biased.

His predictions though? I don’t think I’ve ever read anything from him to get his read on how things will play out.

Just because one makes the wrong predictions does not mean that the data used to make them was wrong. A lot of people seem to dismiss his reporting because of his takeaways

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

#809

Post by datsci_est_2015 »

ben_w wrote: post #789
ModernMech wrote: post #783

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much did Disney invest in backbone Internet technologies in the 1990s?

Irrelevant. If AI turns out to be a short-lived fad, a bubble that pops and we all laugh at in a few year's time, Google's investments in AI were simply wasted, it does not follow that Google itself will die from having made the investment. Same for Meta, whose current name is due to a previous bad investment we laugh at. The popping of the investment bubble of AI, that might kill Tesla and SpaceX, perhaps also Anthr…

> If AI turns out to be a short-lived fad, a bubble that pops and we all laugh at in a few year's time

I think you can be even more precise here, because “AI” can be a wild success, and the Anthropic and OpenAI product strategy can blow up at the same time. Transformers, LLMs, and harnesses are all technologies with amazing utility like many machine learning methods before them. But there may be no moat that justify the current investments in “AI” - I would reckon if there is no proper moat for OpenAI and Anthropic they may be 100x (give or take an order of magnitude) overleveraged. That’s still a pretty catastrophic bubble given the figures we’re discussing.

VR still has a path to utility / viability. Meta (Zuck) just made an absolutely terrible product strategy around it. That can’t be overstated. Just atrocious judgement on display.

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

#810

Post by retr0rocket »

reticulates wrote: post #805
yousif_123123 wrote: post #796

Things in general I think he's right about: 1. Revenue if anthropic and openai is unlikely to grow to the high levels they need to pay for their commitments. Many of their heavy users (coding) will eventually offset a lot of usage to more efficient and cheaper open weight models. I know of people in a company I was at that spend thousands of dollars a month on tokens. I am sure that what they're using it for can be s…

re: substituting with cheaper models. I think some people here are oblivious to how much of Anthropic and OpenAI’s usage is artificial. Take this one example of a user with 15 Codex subscriptions ($3k) generating $60k in API-equivalent usage per month: https://hraness.com/writing/my-girlfriend-asked-me-why-i-hav... “there’s a once in a lifetime discount happening at the OpenAI Intelligence Depot, and I brought 15 sho…

[dead]
Post reply on HN