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I don't like Ed Zitron automatic dismissal of everything AI and the constant profanities in his writing are getting old, and it's usually not very well structur
by karel-3d 1y ago
I don't like Ed Zitron automatic dismissal of everything AI and the constant profanities in his writing are getting old, and it's usually not very well structured, but that said... I like the perspective he has about the money involved.
https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-case-against-generative-ai/ https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-case-against-generative-ai/
OpenAI needs 1 trillion dollars in next four years just to keep existing. That's more than all currently available capital, together, from all private equity. If you take all private equity together, it still won't be enough for OpenAI in next four years.
It's just staggering amount of money that the world needs to bet on OpenAI.
- aiiizzz 1y agoThe openai bet goes "within 4 years, we need to be able to tell the AI to make money for us." Are they on track?
- rcxdude 1y agoThere's another important bit there: 'we need to be able to tell the AI to make money for us and no-one else can compete with us on that'. I think both halves of that are questionable.
- whaleofatw2022 1y agoI mean FWIW they could probably make those folks happy by just spitting out a list of everything to short because of ai disruption on each new release lol
- sixtyj 1y agoNot sure. https://youtu.be/OYlQyPo-L4g https://youtu.be/OYlQyPo-L4g From 7th minute, truth about ChatGPT - 2% paid users.
- lkrubner 1y agoIn late 2021, Ed Zitron wrote (on Twitter) that the future of all work was "work from home" and that no one would ever work in an office again. I responded: "In the past, most companies have had processes geared towards office work. Covid-19 has forced these companies to re-gear their processes to handle external workers. Now that the companies have invested in these changed processes, they are finding it easier to outsource work to Brazil or India. Here in New York City, I am seeing an uptick in outsourcing. The work that remains in the USA will likely continue to be office-based because the work that can be done 100% remotely will likely go over seas." He responded: "Pee pee poo poo aaaaaaaaaaa peeeeee peeeeee poop poop poop." I don't know if he was taking drugs or what. I find his persona on Twitter to be baffling.
- thereitgoes456 1y agoHe was wryly communicating, "your argument was so stupid I don't even need to engage with it". In my experience he has a horrible response to criticism. He's right on the AI stuff, but he responds to both legitimate and illegitimate feedback without much thoughtfulness, usually non-sequitur redirect or ad hominem. In his defense though, I expect 97% of feedback he gets is Sam Altman glazers, and he must be tired.
- tptacek 1y agoIs he right on the AI stuff? Like, on the OpenAI company stuff he could be? I don't know? But on the technology? He really doesn't seem to know what he's talking about.
- bigyabai 1y ago> But on the technology? He really doesn't seem to know what he's talking about. That puts him roughly on-par with everyone who isn't Gerganov or Karpathy.
- nemothekid 1y agoHe's right on the AI stuff? How do you figure that? As far as I can tell, OpenAI is still operating. It sounds like you agree with him on the AI stuff, but he could be wrong, just like how he was wrong about remote work. I'm actually more inclined to believe he's wrong if he gets so defensive about criticism. That tells me he's more focused on protecting his ego than actually uncovering the truth.
- moistoreos 1y agoYou could literally eliminate homelessness, world hunger, and fully pay health care costs in that same timeframe with much less cash.
- codyb 1y agoFully pay health care costs for _who_ for four years with 1 trillion dollars? Doesn't America alone already spend 2 or 3 trillion a year on healthcare?
- bigyabai 1y ago> Doesn't America alone already spend 2 or 3 trillion a year on healthcare? There's a huge difference between "paying for healthcare" and "paying a healthcare provider" here in the United States. Oftentimes the latter has 2 or 3 additional zeroes attached.
- smcin 1y agoSure, but Congress invariably pretend to say the former but mean the latter. You're asking for single-payer instead of privatized health insurance, they will sooner bankrupt the country than switch to sanity. Congress and its funding sources are now captured by privatized health insurance: In 2023-4, Health came #7 in total political donations, #8 is Lawyers & Lobbyists; the combined "Finance/Insur/RealEst" is #1; would be useful to see "Insurance" broken out by health insurers vs non-health (can anyone cite a more granular breakdown?). [https://www.opensecrets.org/elections-overview/sectors https://www.opensecrets.org/elections-overview/sectors]
- int_19h 1y agoIt's not single payer vs privatized insurance. Why is this myth so persistent in US?? There are many different options for public healthcare, of which single payer is but one, and it's not even the most popular worldwide. Many European countries are not single payer, including e.g. Germany.
- mattgreenrocks 1y agoAll that money and they’ve been trying to shy away from talk of AGI recently to lower expectations.
- CuriouslyC 1y agoA lot of this is because there isn't a good definition of AGI. Look at Sama's recent interviews, that's how he deflects, along with the statement about the Turing test having ultimately been inconsequential. They have an internal definition of AGI that is "the model can perform the vast majority of economically viable tasks at the level of the highest humans" which isn't the story the investors are expecting when they hear AGI, so they're trying to stay mum to truthfully roadmap AGI while not blatantly lying to capital.
- impossiblefork 1y agoThe AI is getting better at things like maths. I recently asked it about iterating the Burrows-Wheeler transform, and it appeared to really understand that. It's not super easy to reason about why it's reversible, etc. and I felt that it got it. This is obviously not AGI, and we're very far from AGI as we can see by trying out these LLMs on things like stories or on analyzing text, or dealing with opposing arguments, but for programming and maths performance is at a level where it's actually useful.
- rhetocj23 1y agoMy answer to this is - so what? What are the effects in the real economy? Theres probably a good 2-3 years left of runway for substantial progress before things really fall off a cliff. There has to be some semblance of GDP (real) growth.
- impossiblefork 1y agoI think it might be possible to automate development of short programs. I also think it might be possible to reduce the confusion, misunderstandings and cliches, so that the models can work for longer stretches. But people probably expect to get the next version for what they pay in subscriptions now, so I can't imagine much more revenue growth for the model companies.
- gooodvibes 1y ago> OpenAI needs 1 trillion dollars in next four years just to keep existing. More like $115 billion based on your own link. The $1T is a guess based on promises made, far from "needs to spend that much just to exist". Spending $30 billion a year doesn't sound that apocalyptic.
- KaiserPro 1y ago> Spending $30 billion a year doesn't sound that apocalyptic. they have $1000billion in future liabilities. https://www.ft.com/content/5f6f78af-aed9-43a5-8e31-2df7851ceb67 https://www.ft.com/content/5f6f78af-aed9-43a5-8e31-2df7851ce... they have income of about 4billion a half, with a loss of $13bn.
- rco8786 1y agoThose numbers still fall way short of $1T and the $4.3b in rev is only the first half of 2025 - they're projecting $12-13b for the year. I have my own reservations about the company, but there's a pretty real path toward huge revenues and profitability for them that seems pretty obvious to me.
- tim333 1y ago"signed about $1tn in deals" doesn't have to mean you have $1tn in future liabilities. It depends on what deals you've done.
- AgentME 1y agoHasn't he been saying that OpenAI is going to shut down every year for the last few years now? And that models are never going to get better than they were in 2022? I think he's pretty clearly a grifter chasing an audience that wants to be reassured that big tech is going away soon.
- jaredcwhite 1y agoEd Zitron may be many things but he is no grifter. He writes what he believes and believes what he says, and I basically agree with all of it. The chattering class in SV has been wildly wrong for years, and they'll really look foolish when the market crashes horribly and these companies collapse.
- tptacek 1y agoHe's saying more than that the companies are going to collapse; he's making pronouncements about the underlying technology, which are claims that are much harder to defend. I'm not entirely sure he understands the distinction between the companies and the technology, though.
- B56b 1y agoRespectably...what?? Ed at this point is one of the most well read people on Earth for this topic. Of course he knows the difference between the companies and the technology. He goes in depth both on why he think the companies are financially unviable AND why he's unimpressed by LLM's technologically alllll the time.
- OtherShrezzing 1y agoI like reading Zitron’s output, but this remark stood out to me as him weighing in on a domain he’s basically clueless about. Spread across 4 years, there’s way more than $1tn in available private capital. Berkshire Hathaway alone has 1/3 of that sitting in a cash pile right now. You don’t have to look at many balance sheets to see that the big tech companies are all also sitting on huge piles of cash. I don’t personally believe OAI can raise that money. But the money exists.
- ACCount37 1y agoIsn't that every domain? The dude is a living embodiment of "overconfident and wrong". He picks a side, then cherry picks until he has it all lined up so that his side is Obviously Right and anything else is Obviously Wrong. Then reality happens and he's proven wrong, but he never fucking learns.
- fishmicrowaver 1y agoHe is following a very well worn path of writing histrionically about a bubble and making money off it. Point out the obvious that it's a bubble. Throw out a lot of figures supporting it. Get your emotional hooks in (prey on fears of job loss, hatred of corporate mismanagement/execs etc) and charge a subscription for it. I liked an article or two of his but he's basically meatGPTing The Information with cursing.
- fragmede 1y agoEveryone's got to make a living somehow, I guess.
- Terr_ 1y agoAre there any better authors out there addressing the situation from the direction of skepticism and finance? If some exist I'd like to go see their output. If few/none exist... are there any conclusions we can draw from the rarity?
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- yibg 1y agoI think it's pretty smart actually. Altman has sort of linked the fate of OpenAI to that of Nvidia, AMD, Oracle, Microsft etc with these huge deals / partnerships. We've seen the impact of these deals on stock prices before even a penny has changed hands. Tracks with his reputation for power play and politics.
- bigbuppo 1y agoThat certainly explains why Microsoft is so desperate to force everyone into using their AI whether they want to or not. I'm wondering if the deal will end Microsoft when OpenAI goes belly up.
- rhetocj23 1y agoDifficult to say for certain. It depends on the extent to which the promise was peddled and whether MSFT can be trusted with the cash balance - investors will reflect that in the stock price in future if there is a bubble bursting event. If that scenario pans out, Apple will be sitting there very pretty given it has not spent any real money on pursuing LLMs.
- noir_lord 1y agoIt’s rapidly ending my deal with Microsoft. I want windows to play games, for computing I use Linux but they keep foisting shite I don’t want on me just to play games, AI and sodding OneDrive can piss off. I’ve kept windows around because it was less painful to game on than Linux but Linux is better than ever and windows is getting worse, at some point those lines are gonna cross and for the first time in 30 odd years I’ll not be running a single device with a Microsoft operating system on. And they deserve it.
- int_19h 1y agoIt's not just pushing it on the users. There's also a heavy-handed push to get teams to use more AI coding inside the company. I'll let you guess what that does to software quality, on average... Regarding Linux gaming, the biggest problem there right now is all the multiplayer games with kernel anti-cheat. But I suspect that it'll be resolved eventually by Valve pushing for SteamOS support (although I doubt it'll ever work on any random Linux distro).
- Rebuff5007 1y agoOpenAI WANTS 1 trillion dollars. They do not need it. Arguably no one needs it. I am at best luke-warm on LLMs, but how are any sane people rationalizing these requests? What is the opportunity cost of spending a billion or even a hundred billion dollars on compute instead of on climate tech or food security or healthcare or literally anything else?!
- AtlasBarfed 1y agoWell, it's the rich's money, dedicated to replacing as many people as possible in the Great war on labor. I easily see the rich betting a trillion dollars especially if it's not their money and they start employing government funds in the name of a fictitious AI arms race. They smell blood in the water. Reducing everyone to as minimum wage as possible. Capital is already concentrated, aligned along monopolies and cartels, oligarchical control, and AI is the final key to total control to whatever degree they desire.
- mschuster91 1y ago> Well, it's the rich's money, dedicated to replacing as many people as possible in the Great war on labor. A lot of "the rich's" money is actually backed by the pension funds, 401k and similar investment vehicles. That's the dirty secret in most of today's world. A lot of ultra-large companies would absolutely deserve getting broken up just for being way too powerful, the problem is any such attempts would send the stonk markets and, with them, people's pensions tanking.
- wubrr 1y ago> A lot of "the rich's" money is actually backed by the pension funds, 401k and similar investment vehicles. Not really clear what you mean by this. But arguably all of the rich's money (and all money in general) is backed by labour/the ability to exchange that money for someone else's labour.
- mschuster91 1y ago
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- dragonwriter 1y ago> OpenAI needs 1 trillion dollars in next four years just to keep existing. That's more than all currently available capital, together, from all private equity. Recent estimates I've seen of uninvested private equity capital are ~$1.5 trillion and total private equity $5+ trillion, with several hundred million in new pricate equity funds raised annually, so this simply seems incorrect even assuming either only currrent “dry powder" is considered, or only new funds available over the next four years, much less both and/or the rest of private equity.
- nl 1y ago> OpenAI needs 1 trillion dollars in next four years just to keep existing. That's a mischaracterization: They need that order of investment to meet the demand they forecast. It's unclear what other trajectories look like. Additionally, I don't know who Ed Zitron is but he clearly doesn't follow how infrastructure projects are funded and how OpenAI is doing deals. See for example the AMD deal last week where they seem to have at least partially used their ability to increase AMD's stock price to pay for future GPUs. Mining companies do the kids of "circular deals" that OpenAI is criticized for all the time - they will take equity in their supplier companies. It's easy to see similar arrangements for this $1T investment in the future.