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Ed Zitron loses his mind annotating an AI doomer macro memo
- returnInfinity 8mo agoOfftopic - The success of coding agents must be Ed Zitron's nightmare. He has been a perpetual bear
- Lariscus 8mo agoWhich success? I still see those things churning out laughably wrong code at every turn.
- delaminator 8mo agoI guess everyone stopped using Claude Code already then, if it doesn't work.
- coldtea 8mo agoIt doesn't work precisely because people are using claude. If it worked, there'd be no people using it.
- simianwords 8mo ago[flagged]
- danielbln 8mo ago[flagged]
- ubercore 8mo agoIt's not a point and click code machine, but it's laughably wrong to say they just churn out laughably wrong code.
- noosphr 8mo agoHalf of developers are below average. Half of developers say that the code Ai produces is amazing. Would you like a venn diagram?
- dash2 8mo agoYou’re saying that AI is already good enough to replace 50% of developers. Sounds like you agree it will be very important.
- rwmj 8mo agoHe's saying the good half of developers have to deal with the increased slop output of the bad half. Probably will be overwhelmed by it, in the end.
- ludicrousdispla 8mo ago
- cleaning 8mo agoYou're telling on yourself here
- vv_ 8mo agoHave they been successful?
- simianwords 8mo agoSome one should compile concrete predictions that he made vs how they turned out.
- Kye 8mo agoHe 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.
- simianwords 8mo agoits 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.
- zero_shift 8mo agoI don't think so. His argument is not "this tech doesn't work", but rather "these businesses aren't economically viable" And that the smoke and mirrors accounting and perpetual thirst for more billions indicates just how unviable it is Whilst he does dunk on LLM capabilities, the framing is the business angle - can Anysphere etc. actually form a moat and make a profit?
- simianwords 8mo ago>His argument has never been "this tech doesn't work", but rather "these businesses aren't economically viable" Why? because of cost?
- zero_shift 8mo agoCost, debt, difficulty forming a moat, gap between what the product promises and what it can do, and the difficulty actually raising capital required. His style is acerbic and (imo) excessive sometimes. But he's also one of a minority of journos actually looking at the numbers and adding them up. Which seems to be a rarity
- hiddencost 8mo agoDisagree. He's cherry picking an extremely limited subset of numbers, based on a weak understanding of the industry and a lack of access to a lot of private data, and taking advantage of vulnerable people.
- zero_shift 8mo agoI'm not sure how anyone can respond to that, without asking you to divulge that private data
- danlitt 8mo ago>taking advantage of vulnerable people What on earth do you mean by this? Who is getting taken advantage of?
- luke-stanley 8mo agoThis is not off-topic at all!
- jaredcwhite 8mo ago"Success" is a very relative statement in this context.
- decimalenough 8mo agoThe original memo: https://www.citriniresearch.com/p/2028gic https://www.citriniresearch.com/p/2028gic HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47114579 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47114579
- Thanemate 8mo agoI'm somewhat halfway through the original memo, and I hate the fact that kernels of truth lie here and there. For example, I used to work as a full-stack developer for about 2 years, and now I got forced into what the memo calls "gig economy" just to pay the rent, because companies slowed down hiring junior developers thanks to... Honestly, I don't really care at this point what I have to thank for. All I know is, whenever I read testimonies from people whose companies suddenly decided to force LLM usage for productivity to be "AI first", having colleagues opening PR's who are only machine reviewed with implementations they cannot justify themselves outside of "Claude wrote it", makes me burnout just reading them. And it's only going to get worse until it becomes better, but not for the developers. Honestly, the one thing that I could see justify all the investment companies make for LLM-assisted coding is the full automation of software production. I can only see the current state of things as the "end game" for them, only if they suddenly decide to jack up pricing to tap directly on the corporate budget and not the individual developer's budget.
- notachatbot123 8mo agoWhere does the title come from? What is this document? What is the context?
- nielsbot 8mo agoGood questions. Here is the author's BlueSky post about it: https://bsky.app/profile/edzitron.com/post/3mfkc63h6222l https://bsky.app/profile/edzitron.com/post/3mfkc63h6222l > "Here is an annotated version of the Citrini Memo with my own intro. It is analyslop - scare-fiction written to ingratiate AI boosters and analysts/traders with tales of ultra-automation and socialist data center policies. Shameful that the markets reacted at all."
- Lariscus 8mo agoI do enjoy a good Ed Zitron sneer. The fact that the original article moved markets says a lot about the critical thinking skills of stock market traders.
- davorb 8mo agoYou should look into how he destroyed the small indie MMO Darkfall and gave the game 2/10 without ever playing it, in a Eurogamer review a few years ago. The developers had receipts and could prove that he hadn't played it. It doesn't have any material effect on this article, but it says something about his ethics.
- Lariscus 8mo agoIts word against word in this situation. The logs prove nothing as they are easily modifiable and the devs had a good reason to do so.
- surgical_fire 8mo agoFrom Wikipedia: > Darkfall lead developer Tasos Flambouras claims that game server logs show that the Eurogamer reviewer played the game for under three hours, a claim denied by the writer. Even if we take the lead developer's word for it, what you are describing is simply false.
- GaryBluto 8mo agoEd Zitron, from what little I have heard of him, seems incredibly irrational. I don't think I've ever seen anybody stick their head deeper in the sand more than I've seen him do. It's one thing to dislike or even detest something, but to constantly claim it is worthless and without use when people are already benefitting from it everyday is nothing short of delusion.
- 000ooo000 8mo ago>from what little I have heard of him That's an interesting way to start criticism about ignorance
- shimonabi 8mo agoI've also heard Cory Doctorow recently offer a similarly dismissive view, describing AI as "just statistics".
- palmotea 8mo ago> I've also heard Cory Doctorow recently offer a similarly dismissive view, describing AI as "just statistics". Well, AI partisans have applied grandiose terms like "thinking," "intelligence," and "soul" to these machines. It's not wrong to push back and remind people what they really are.
- keeda 8mo agoWell, if you look into the current scientific consensus on human cognition, our intelligence is also "just statistics." So I guess we all agree, except that some people think "just statistics" is derogatory phrasing!
- palmotea 8mo agoWhat a software engineer comment.
- emp17344 8mo agoThat is absolutely not the consensus in neuroscience.
- keeda 8mo agoWas thinking more about cognition than neuroscience, but sure, even there. Think of any counter-examples -- I'm guessing things like symbolic reasoning or pre-existing structures in the brain -- and then consider the origins of those concepts. Admittedly I'm an absolute layman just dabbling in this, but I could find not a single concept that cannot be traced to statistical origins. Like, symbols are essentially "vectors" of thousands of neurons firing simultaneously, and the pre-existing structures in the nervous system originate from evolution, which is a statistical process. "Just statistics", as far as I can tell! ;-)
- BrenBarn 8mo ago> Commented [1]: what if pee pee was poo poo Rarely do I read something that starts off with such promise!
- pityJuke 8mo agoDon’t encourage his diaper fetish! [0] [0]: https://bsky.app/search?q=from%3Aedzitron.com+diaper https://bsky.app/search?q=from%3Aedzitron.com+diaper
- danlitt 8mo ago"Search is currently unavailable when logged out"
- Kye 8mo agoHe has this thing where he tries to involve people in his ABDL roleplay without consent.
- pibaker 8mo agoI find Zitron's writing bad and his character questionable but exaggerated accusations like this is why no one takes sexual assault accusations from progressives seriously any more. You guys spent a decade crying wolf about how everything is literally sexual assault and now you wonder why conservatives are being so successful cracking down on sexual deviance using fabricated accusations. You reap what you sow.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- Kye 7mo agoWho is "you guys" You're reading your own hangups and bugaboos into my comment. The problem begins and ends with the lack of consent. There are plenty of people who would be into it if he asked first.
- hresvelgr 8mo ago> "What if our AI bullishness continues to be right...and what if that’s actually bearish" - what if pee pee was poo poo Despite the vulgarity, it is exceptionally illuminating to how much some of these slop pieces are just a mere pretension of rhetoric. I see this pretty consistently with a lot of the material I come across on the job that's gone through the LLM meat-grinder. Also, the comment made me giggle like a little kid.
- Jordan-117 8mo agoWhat's pretend-rhetoric about it? They're positing agents will prove to be very capable, but that this would ultimately be a bad thing by automating away too much of the economy. You can argue whether that's plausible or not, but it isn't an incoherent or vapid argument.
- piker 8mo agoI suggest you read the annotation if that question isn't just rhetorical. I'm not familiar with Ed, but he has a pretty good take down in here if you can get past his somewhat juvenile writing style. It is a problem when your doomsday timeline for obsolescence is behind the minute you publish. The memo itself was fantasy doomer porn on day 1.
- hiddencost 8mo agoI'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 Internet 30 years ago. And we built transatlantic cables and ran new wires to everyone's house. People I care about, engineers with 20 years of experience, are having mental health breakdowns, caused by Zitron's work. 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 someone is having a crisis about this, I hope they start talking to a therapist. I don't need them to agree with me, but I do need them to not harm themselves.
- bsshdjnddn 8mo ago[flagged]
- v3xro 8mo agoThere's nothing to recover from, what are you even talking about? I'm not a token user (and I can't make predictions about the future and whether it will force me to use token but still). That the industry is collectively having a delusion about what constitutes good software (in all senses of the word - functionality and consequences for society) is clear to see, something I too fear we might never recover from, but I stand quite clearly on the side of people not of corporations hoping to extract more more more.
- vv_ 8mo ago> They insist the tech will never work, and avoid learning about it, becoming progressively more paranoid and isolated. They can always learn the technology later, when and if it proves itself to be useful :) I personally don't understand the hype, even after using Claude and other AI tools - but perhaps that will change in the future.
- orwin 8mo ago
- arowthway 8mo agoThe financial market things are over my head and I don't have a dog in the game, but I think "Nobody is replacing salesforce with their internally vibe coded software" is just false? Both taken literally [0] [1] and as denying the general trend. Just in my company we already replaced WMS software subscription with own solution, and I wouldn't be able to write it fast enough and maintain it by myself without the use of Claude Code. I'd say "Not perfectly or with every edge case handled, but well enough that the CIO reviewing a $500k annual renewal started asking the question “what if we just built this ourselves”" is an accurate description. [0] https://lovable.dev/blog/how-a-startup-replaced-a-salesforce-contract-with-a-lovable-built-crm https://lovable.dev/blog/how-a-startup-replaced-a-salesforce... [1] https://seekingalpha.com/news/4144652-klarna-shuts-down-salesforce-as-service-provider-workday-to-meet-same-fate-amid-ai-initiatives https://seekingalpha.com/news/4144652-klarna-shuts-down-sale...
- Ozzie_osman 8mo agoAgreed. If anything, it puts downward pressure on pricing. Even if the CIO still buys Salesforce or whatever other tool, they won't be willing to pay as much.
- MadxX79 8mo agoIf you don't give me a discount on my salesforce subscription I'll shoot myself in the face with this AI enabled gun?
- square_usual 8mo agoYou don't need AI to shoot yourself in the face; salesforce can do that just fine.
- rwmj 8mo agoI didn't think something could be worse than everyone using Salesforce, but everyone using a different, constantly broken, incompatible SF clone that no one understands may be that.
- simianwords 8mo agoEd's main thesis is that cost is unsustainable for AI companies but this is clearly wrong. The unit cost is going down and has gone down by more than 20-30x over the years. Sure, the fixed cost of training is going up but that's because of the implied returns. Once the returns to training don't happen, it would simply reduce modulo cutoff date updates. The companies have a choice to just stop training and focus on inference cost reduction. What am I missing here? Unless the consumers decide that they are no longer willing to pay the same amount as before and their expectations are rising with prices falling, what else?
- MadxX79 8mo agoIs that the cost per token or the actual cost of the user having a conversation, reasoning and all?
- simianwords 8mo agoCost per defined capability. Meaning you fix the task and then find how much it cost to achieve it including reasoning, tokens etc.
- MadxX79 7mo agosource?
- simianwords 7mo agohttps://epoch.ai/data-insights/llm-inference-price-trends https://epoch.ai/data-insights/llm-inference-price-trends
- MadxX79 7mo agoFrom your link: "We excluded reasoning models from our analysis of per-token prices. Reasoning models tend to generate a much larger number of tokens than other models, making these models cost more in total to evaluate on a benchmark. This makes it misleading to compare reasoning models to other models on price per token, at a given performance level." It's just price per token. Token usage is exploding.
- chvid 8mo agoHe is funny and entertaining but does he provide constructive investment advice? I am not so sure.
- frozenseven 8mo agoGood 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.
- Moomoomoo309 8mo agoDid 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.
- Kye 8mo agoBubble 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-anthropics-powerful-model-for-coding-agents-and-enterprise-workflows-is-now-available-in-microsoft-foundry-on-azure/ https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/claude-opus-4-6-anthr... https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2026/2/claude-opus-4.6-available-amazon-bedrock/ https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2026/2/claude-opu...
- 8mo ago
- seanhunter 8mo agoIt’s sort of disappointing to me how on both sides it seems hard to have any sort of rational perspective. I find both the Citrini memo (and the subsequent market reaction) and Ed Zitron’s critique of it to be wildly off-base. I wish everyone would just calm down a bit.
- ChrisArchitect 8mo agoRelated: An AI doomsday report shook US markets https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47138860 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47138860
- gneuron 8mo agoOkay, I'm tired of reading the debate about costs going down and therefore Ed is wrong. The cost of running the inference is not the problem. The cost of the input CHIPS is the problem. Let's return to Dario Amodei's interview [0] with Dwarkesh, shall we, for AI Economics 101? Here goes: The Epoch data everyone keeps citing measures the price per token charged to API customers. That's the sticker price. It tells you nothing about whether the business is viable, because the existential risk for AI companies isn't the marginal cost of running a query. It's the upfront capital expenditure on chips and datacenters, committed years before you know what demand looks like. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei spelled this out in his Dwarkesh interview. Here's the short version: 1. Data centers take 1-2 years to build out. 2. Each gigawatt costs roughly $10-15B per year. 3. The industry is currently at ~10-15 GW, scaling roughly 3x annually. 4. By 2028, ~100 GW. By 2029, ~300 GW. 5. We're talking multiple trillions per year in committed infrastructure spend across the industry. Now NVIDIA's Q4 earnings [1], which printed today: 1. $68.1B in quarterly revenue, $62.3B from data center alone. 2. Full-year: $215.9B, up 65% YoY. Guiding $78B next quarter. 3. Someone is writing those checks. Those checks are not refundable. Dario, who believes we're 1-3 years from a "country of geniuses in a data center," described his own demand prediction as a "hellish" problem. His exact framing: If this revenue comes in at $800B instead of $1T, "there's no force on earth, there's no hedge on earth" that could stop him from going bankrupt if he'd bought compute at the higher projection. He's at ~$10B annualized revenue today, and he won't commit to buying at the scale his own thesis demands, because being off by a single year is fatal. This is the actual argument (I'm not saying this is Ed's argument, but this is the argument against these companies). Not "inference tokens are expensive." The argument is structural: these companies must pre-commit billions in non-recoverable CAPEX based on demand projections that are, by the CEO's own admission, a coin flip. The gross margins on serving tokens might be great. But the training spend for next-gen models grows exponentially, and it has to be funded before that model earns a dollar. The Epoch chart measures what customers pay per token. It doesn't measure the $215.9B NVIDIA invoice those customers collectively funded this year, or that these chip purchases are one-way bets against future demand that may or may not materialize. Inference costs going down 20x is wonderful for consumers. It tells you almost nothing about whether the companies making those chips, or the companies buying them, will survive the demand prediction gauntlet. And if we're being honest, the Epoch data showing 9x to 900x price drops per year should make you more nervous, not less, because it means the asset you bought last year is depreciating at a rate that makes used cars look like gold bars. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n1E9IZfvGMA&t=2298s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n1E9IZfvGMA&t=2298s [1] https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/nvidia-announces-financial-results-for-fourth-quarter-and-fiscal-2026 https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/nvidia-announces-financia...
- LaSombra 7mo agoOnly those with no understanding of how multi-nationals compliance work think that replacing Salesforce or Monday with internal development systems, even with AI assistance tooling, is a reasonable use of their engineering's time. Salesforce, SAP, etc exist for a reason.