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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?

#891

Post by meta_gunslinger »

dofm wrote: post #293
adventured wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oracle fits in Nvidia's pocket at this point: $67b sales, $22b op income. Vs of course Nvidia: $302b sales, $197b op income. Oracle was never as big of a deal as that brief market cap run implied. The herd pushed it up for no reason. The comparison to Apple, Microsoft, Google and Amazon are pretty similar. Oracle fits in their pockets too. Who cares if their debt is junk. Ellison has nearly wrecked that ship on numer…

> Who cares if their debt is junk. Non-rhetorical answer to your rhetorical question, but: The near future of the political right wing of the USA is dependent on the Ellisons staying afloat to create an impervious right-wing media sphere that would survive the end of Fox. The Paramount-Skydance/Warner merger is now delayed until 2027. Trump/the GOP needs that merger to go ahead, but if Larry's debt position worsens i…

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

#892

Post by talideon »

pixelatedindex wrote: post #602
jxcole wrote: post #574

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If many people hated their products, they wouldn't use them. If they didn't use them they would not be financially successful. Google is not dying just because you personally have a feeling the results are worse than before and there is no definition of dying that would be consistent with Google's current state. If Google were to die they would die the way Yahoo did, because a competitor was demonstrably better than…

> If Google were to die they would die the way Yahoo did This might be true 20 years ago where Google had one true product, Search. Since then, they have diversified and got their fingers a million pies. I don’t think you can get true competition with the way MS,GOOG,AMZ have grown. You’ll get a duopoly, or maybe a triopoly.

The term "cartel" might be useful here.

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

#894

Post by scared_together »

socalgal2 wrote: post #709
scared_together wrote: post #657

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You "asked"? Who (or more likely, what) did you ask? Dan Luu's analysis of Kurzweil is in this article: https://danluu.com/futurist-predictions/ In the "Appendix: detailed information on predictions" he lists the predictions, and their truth or lack thereof. He was using a list on Wikipedia: https://web.archive.org/web/20170225013846/https://en.wikipe... For example Kurzweil apparently predicted in 2019 that: > Blind…

Maybe we have different interpretations of whether or not a prediction is correct or not. If someone predicts in 1999 predicts self driving cars by 2020 and it happens in 2030. That seems different than predicting something we see no indication of ever happening. Like if they predicted 2020 and it happened in 2021 is that a fail. To me, no. The prediction is that the tech will exist at or around that date, not that t…

First of all thanks for actually replying with a full list.

> Claiming it's a fail for being 1 second late is not a rational position and not at all in the spirit the predictions were made.

I would keep to the level of precision the predictor themselves claimed. If the predictor said an event would occur at “23:59:59 UTC” it would be fair to criticize them for being a second late. If the predictor claimed an event would occur on a day, fair to criticize them for being a day late, and so on for all units of time.

If a predictor says an event will occur in 2019 but it occurs in 2020, yes that is incorrect, the predictor could have hedged by a year if they wanted to. Why is it the observer’s job to do the hedging rather than the predictor’s job?

> Someone says computers will be in everything. You can say "there's no computer's in fruit!, FAIL!"

While I disagree about the timing, I agree slightly that there is some nuance regarding phrases like “everything”, “everywhere”, “popular” and so on.

However there is a way out for the predictor: use a more specific phrase like “used by over 20% of the US population” instead of “popular”.

Once again (and this applies to the entire page of comments not just yours): why is it the observer’s job to do the hedging rather than the predictor?

On to the specific predictions…

> 2009 * Most books will be read on screens rather than paper. The charitable interpretation is that most reading happens on screens, not paper. This is true today.

I disagree with the charitable interpretation, there has been plenty of writing outside of books for decades and a person like Kurzweil getting their books published would know that. If the prediction says “books” instead of “writing” it should be judged for that choice.

> * Intelligent roads and driverless cars will be in use, mostly on highways. False in 2009, False in 2026 but directionally true.

Even if the prediction were true in 2026, 15 years is a long time to be off. A person who decided not to get a driving license thinking that driverless cars are right around the corner would be disappointed. That’s a silly way to behave mainly because when making a decision like that, people have other sources to turn to than Kurzweil.

And where are the “intelligent roads”?

> * Computers can recognize their owner's face from a picture or video.

> Face ID shipped in 2017. Is that to far off?

Compared to 2009? Yeah that’s absolutely too far.

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

#895

Post by meta_gunslinger »

johnfn wrote: post #299
sfblah wrote: post #99

I don't think Zitron is wrong, exactly. He's just early. There are a lot of analysts who have faced the same criticism over the past 10-15 years. IMO the issue is that they fail to understand the staggering size and scope of the government fiscal + monetary interventions across those years. Essentially, the government has jammed all the risk into the future to repeatedly rescue near-term results. I think something si…

Zitron is wrong, not "early", and the post has an extremely long list of examples.

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

#896

Post by aesthesia »

iLoveOncall wrote: post #781
minimaxir wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not defensible.

It absolutely is. What has improved isn't the models, it's the harnesses. Give GPT-3.5 a 1M context window and a modern harness, and you won't see any meaningful difference with Opus 5. It's a bit hard to try with such old models, but for example I use Opus 5 / Fable at work and Sonnet 4.5 at home (because it's free via Amazon Q), and there's absolutely 0 difference in performance. None. Obviously 4.5 is only a year…

Benchmarks are far from everything, but I would love to see the outcome of an experiment benchmarking GPT-4o (which is one of the earlier models with a >100k context window) against GPT-5.6 or Opus 5 in modern harnesses.

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

#897

Post by thoughtpeddler »

aurareturn wrote: post #724
drayfield wrote: post #723

I used to be a fan of Zitron after listening to an old podcast of his, and also subscribing to his newsletter. Something weird happened after Taylor Lorenz guested on his show; a week later I received a welcome email to Taylor's own newsletter. This was especially strange because I definitely hadn't signed up to hers, and use individual masked emails in Fastmail per different service so I was sure that this was the e…

Ed Zitron is a grifter. Period. I highly doubt he believes any of the stuff he writes himself. He plays a role in society which is the role that tells people AI is going to fail so those who don't participate in or benefit from AI feel better. They sign up to his subscriptions and pay him money to confirm their own bias. If you look at the sub reddit r/betteroffline where these people gather and worship Zitron, most…

Doesn't it say something about our society that (a) it's known (at least among smart people, however 'smart' is defined) that AI is going to take away jobs, and (b) the way its treated is that people gather to online discussion forums to worship someone saying the thing that will replace their jobs isn't going to do it (but in actuality, eventually will)? In other words, who's actually doing anything to help the people out who will lose their jobs??

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

#898

Post by thoughtpeddler »

tolugenius wrote: post #112
dgellow wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cal Newport has been interesting on the topic. But it’s also possible to read Zitron and skip his personal opinions and just follow the discussion of financing, that’s what I personally do. I don’t understand why anyone would take the commentary of an internet pundit as a set of predictions to evaluate as gospel

I enjoy Newport myself, he's probably the most level-headed take I've come across. Everyone else has some agenda (or product) they're trying to get at and very much ruins the messaging (ex the agent 'civilization' piece is extremely overblown especially since..that's how multi agent systems coordinate already. Nothing happened that is unprecedented and isn't how the system is designed to work.

Newport does tend to be more level-headed, but honestly, the people that have gotten AI 'right' so far (in the true technical sense of how scaling laws held, etc) had their strong convictions set back in the mid-2010s, when Newport would've been far more skeptical. At least Newport's shown that he's capable of updating, but in general, he hasn't been someone I'd value for their predictive power.

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

#899

Post by george_max »

reticulates wrote: post #557
george_max wrote: post #539

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Help me understand where Meta and Alphabet's issues are. They seem to be doing quite well on paper -- nothing anomalous in terms of profitability or scaling recently. Layoffs are to be expected when AI can increase productivity.

Meta narrowly avoided disaster earlier this year: https://www.reuters.com/investigations/mark-zuckerberg-had-b... The problem with judging Alphabet and Meta on aggregate performance is that their advertising businesses print so much money that they can invest everything in a boondoggle and coast when it blows up. Zuckerberg burned $100,000,000,000 on the metaverse and it didn’t make a dent. That said, Alphabet and Me…

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