6 ms·

AI's biggest critic has lost the plot

40 points by m-hodges 6mo ago

Related: AI's Economics Don't Make Sense - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47936867 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47936867

MarkusQ 6mo ago
> But time passes and situations evolve. Ed Zitron, though, clearly does not. > Over the last two years, he has called the top repeatedly: The AI bubble was definitely about to burst here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here. His conclusion hasn’t changed, but his arguments have. > The 2024 and 2025 articles make, basically, the business case against AI: that companies aren’t really using it, it isn’t adding value, and AI investors are betting that will change before they run out of cash. In 2026, the focus is much more on alleging widespread, Enron- or FTX-tier outright fraud. > This is basically an admission that he can’t make the case in terms of the economics anymore. And in deciding how seriously to take his case in 2026, I think it’s valuable to read it in parallel with his case from 2024 and 2025. Say what? This is exactly the progression that you'd expect if there was, in fact, outright fraud going on. * Someone claims to be able to do <impossible thing> * Critic call them on it * Rather than folding, the hype machine grows and they start claiming to be doing the thing * The critics start accusing them of fraud Also, I note, it's a cute trick to start of claiming "time passes and situations evolve. Ed Zitron, though, clearly does not" and then in the next paragraph object that "his conclusion hasn’t changed, but his arguments have". I don't have a pony in this race and don't know who Ed Zitron is, but this article makes me suspect he's correct. Acting as if going from "they are wrong" to "they are wrong and lying" is "losing the plot" is anti-convincing. [edit] The ending is much stronger: > I don’t actually think we need less skepticism in AI world. These companies are, indeed, run by people who are not very trustworthy, who often contradict each other or oversell their products. > And the things they say they’re trying to do are outrageous; people have every right to object to it. Skepticism is more than warranted. > But we desperately need better skepticism. In that spirit, I would like to offer this observation. The one substantive difference the author highlights is the claim that generative AI is now offering value that renders the claims that it's all fraud questionable. I would argue that the value it offers is effectively plagiarism-as-a-service, and, just as with the infinite energy machines that secretly harvest power from the wiring of the building, compatible with the notion of fraud.
- plytow 6mo ago
  [dead]
- rafterydj 6mo ago
  Not sure why you're being downvoted, your comment seems interesting to me.
- Lerc 6mo ago
  Can you give some specific instances of impossible things being claimed? When I search for such things I tend to only find claims that claims were made.
  - MarkusQ 6mo ago
    The main claim that I was claiming that TFA the claims to be incorrectly claimed to be impossible by the LLM-hype critic is roughly "current generative AI business models can be successful". The critic initially argued that there's no way to make money the way they were going, and then has subsequently concluded that any reports that they are making money are therefore fraudulent.
    - Lerc 6mo ago
      That is really hard to follow. But I think it boils down to a form of. Claim: There can never be an X Response: This here Y is an X Claim: No it isn't! I was asking for examples of Y so we could judge for ourselves.
      - MarkusQ 6mo ago
        That would be "a profitable AI company that isn't just fudging their numbers." I do not have an example to offer.
ForHackernews 6mo ago
I'm not familiar with Ed Zitron but failing to call the top of a bubble doesn't mean you're wrong about it being a bubble. People who were calling out the housing bubble in the 2000s were "wrong" right up until they were right. e.g. from 2006 https://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/02/opinion/no-bubble-trouble.html https://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/02/opinion/no-bubble-trouble... My own feeling is that it is a bubble: AI models are the new virtual machines. They will become commodified and low-margin hosting providers will dominate the market. Investors in OpenAI/Anthropic will lose their shirts.
- alex43578 6mo ago
  There has to be some time-based discount factor to calling a bubble.
- verdverm 6mo ago
  > They will become commodified and low-margin hosting providers will dominate the market. I have my doubts about this. We have not seen a viable YouTube alternative because the underlying costs of handling video content are significant and YT has custom hardware and sophisticated software. When we look to the broader cloud market, hyperscalers dominate. We are likely seeing similar when it comes to Google's TPU and access to Nvidia's best offerings. That being said, I did just pick up a DGX Spark and it runs qwen-3.6 sufficiently well to be a viable interactive coding assistant. Certainly more than enough for unattended agents.
  - ForHackernews 6mo ago
    Maybe, but if custom hardware and economies of scale are the determining factor, that favors Google (and Amazon/Microsoft), not OpenAI or Anthropic.
    - verdverm 6mo ago
      Definitely, Google Vertex Ai serves up other companies models better than they can themselves. The TPU is the bee's knees. I really hope Google makes a take on the DGX Spark
apercu 6mo ago
Article kind of lost me at "It can no longer argue that costs aren’t falling; they are."
- simianwords 6mo ago
  They absolutely are. She has even linked a source for that. It’s almost indisputable that the prices (per capability) is going down. I think you should read it more deeply to understand the argument.
jospeh554 6mo ago
Saying something is a "bubble" doesn't mean it'll go away entirely when it pops... Which seems to be a lot of this article
- cindyllm 6mo ago
  [dead]
- SpicyLemonZest 6mo ago
  It doesn't necessarily mean that, but this specific person Ed Zitron believes and argues extensively that it's going to go away when it pops.
- simianwords 6mo ago
  This sort of egregious Motte Bailey that keeps popping up. Motte: AI is useless and unsustainable and fraud and the bubble will pop anytime Bailey: Ohh ackchually AI is a bubble but it will end up like the internet Why bother with useless arguments like this?
sweetheart 6mo ago
I'm pleasantly surprised to see this! Last year a few people I know in person, and a podcast I enjoy, talked about or to Ed Zitron and I felt like I was going crazy because so, so much of what he argued was either woefully outdated, or just a fallacy. It's also annoying because it'd be such an interesting topic to explore rigorously and without motive. As mentioned in the article, those analyses _can_ be found. But man, Ed Zitron just seems loud and silly.
ej88 6mo ago
my main qualm with Ed is his analysis on the financials is decent, but he absolutely refuses to admit that the technology is useful (especially in the hands of competent users), and that all the labs are extremely compute starved due to overwhelming demand.
- llbbdd 6mo ago
  I used to enjoy his writing a lot pre-AI around the time he was spending a lot of words on Musk, crypto, etc. More because it was an entertaining form of hate-reading about those topics than really informative, per se. Then he started doing this schtick with AI and I felt like I got hit hard with Gell-Man Amnesia because he so blatantly makes claims that anybody with a free ChatGPT account can dismiss handily, and it calls everything else he says into serious question.
- bigbadfeline 6mo ago
  > my main qualm with Ed is his analysis on the financials is decent, but he absolutely refuses to admit that the technology is useful Yeah, I find that sort of critics to cause more harm than good. The economic case for closed source AI isn't there - in macroeconomic sense, and accounting for all costs, it's more expensive than the value it provides. There's data to back that up, so focus on economics. On the other hand, hallucinating about what AI can or cannot do is useless, only research can provide the answer.
semiquaver 6mo ago
He’s hitched his wagon to a thesis and views everything through that lens come hell or high water. > he does not consider, even to disagree with it, the possibility that the industry is paying for Anthropic’s product for non-psychosis reasons, such as finding it useful) This is my main problem with Zitron. He is so obviously the epitome of motivated reasoning. He seems constitutionally incapable of admitting the possibility that companies derive usefulness and productivity from LLMs. For anyone capable of doing on the ground reporting this would be trivially obvious (at least when it comes to coding). So he ends up just cheerleading on the “AI bad” side whether the cheers make any sense or not. > “Nobody wants to talk about the fact that AI isn’t actually doing very much,” he complained, before going on to complain about people saying that agents are able to do tasks independently with oversight. “What tasks, exactly? Who knows!” he wrote. > > Ed, thousands of people know and it is your journalistic responsibility to be one of them! He’s intentionally incurious and doesn’t understand the idea of a general-purpose technology. This would be like looking at the rise of programming and computers in the 80s and 90s and asking “what are computer programs doing? I don’t see any concrete benefits right now, must be a scam”
- JPLeRouzic 6mo ago
  > This would be like looking at the rise of programming and computers in the 80s and 90s and asking “what are computer programs doing? I don’t see any concrete benefits right now, must be a scam” There were many people around me that said that in the 80s.
  - Lerc 6mo ago
    I have often been criticised as way too optimistic for thinking some new thing might become commonplace. The topics change but the arguments seem to be the same. It's limited, if it were any good, then the prevailing industry would suppress it. (Video Recorders) to be fair industries did try to suppress it. There's literally centuries of doing things the old way. It doesn't matter if it's faster if half of your implements can't even be used with it. (Microwave ovens) The same measuring a new paradigm by the goals of an earlier paradigm, over and over. Encountered with computers, mobile phones, the web, wikipedia, Streaming video. It's all just "That thing can't fly, it doesn't have feathers" shifted to a new domain.
kritiko 6mo ago
Ed Zitron is annoying. But saying “I wish the argument was being made better” while using him as the basis for your article is more annoying to me! Just make the argument then. But publications like The Argument need to take shots to get views, I guess.
- 1attice 6mo ago
  I don't quite understand this -- the article is not written by a Zitron supporter or ally. I think it's a best practice in several fields to interact with the texts of other thinkers and kick the tires. Perhaps a slower, more nuanced scroll would serve you. (In all respect.)
  - kritiko 6mo ago
    Maybe I jumped a bit quickly to my conclusion there. I think The Argument / Piper know that an “Ed Zitron is wrong” angle drives more traffic than just writing better AI criticism. Secondly, I don’t think she kicks the tires that well. “AI skeptics underestimate its utility” is a tweet-length observation. (Derek Davidson, another Argument contributor, has made such a Tweet. I think it would be much better if she tried to steelman or engage Zitron a bit on the econ ramifications of the current bubble. When I say Zitron is annoying, it’s because he’s very strident and can make arguments that don’t make sense or are easy to refute. But that’s also the most boring way to engage with him!
Legend2440 6mo ago
Other professional critics like Gary Marcus and Emily Bender are the same way. It doesn't matter what neural networks do, they will always be a dead end that should be abandoned.
cmorp 6mo ago
I view the AI bubble more like huge investments into something with the goal to profit later, against the likelihood of a open source model (probably even models) running on affordable hardware in any home, making the bet and all the datacenter the real flop.
tim333 6mo ago
I dunno if he's lost the plot so much as repeating the "AI is rubbish, the investment is a bubble, it'll all crash" plot at the rate of 10,000 words a month year after year.
danaw 6mo ago
ed can be verbose and he can be exaggerated but it's funny to claim that he doesn't come with receipts when his last two articles exhaustively go over the many signs of financial deceptions and other pricing issues that signal manipulation this whole article was "i wish he made arguments the way i like"... ok then go do that yourself? its word policing at its most annoying
deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]
leecommamichael 6mo ago
I'm not familiar with Zitron as a character, but the article disagrees with his critique of AI progress slowing with the rebuttle that AI is getting more efficient to build and use. That comports with my perception that much of the recent work in the field has been focused on making the technology more profitable. See special emphasis in the last 2 releases from Google, OpenAI and Anthropic. I do think that's a meaningful change in their messaging. I don't know what it means exactly, but they are clearly sending a message about economics. I'm not a big user of AI for lack of interest, but have held for several years that I'd be more interested if it were faster and cheaper. If this form of AI is the future, I do hope it gets significantly more efficient, even if the capability caps out. I think there is plenty of room for interesting applications, if so.
niteshatqtos 6mo ago
As of now, neither side has "lost the plot" but I do understand general dislike for Zitron. This mostly stems from the fact that proof innocence (that AI will succeed) lies with teams making frontier models and one can continue to bash them until they do.
YeGoblynQueenne 6mo ago
>> You could, if you wanted, use this as an argument that OpenAI is on shaky financial ground: The pressure to come out with the next generation of models and stay in the lead is so intense that models are retired before the company has actually turned a profit on them. Certainly, if I were thinking about investing in OpenAI, I would want to think about when that is expected to turn around. Yeah but that's the whole point. If LLMs need to keep getting better before they can turn a profit they need to keep scaling. If they need to keep scaling then the LLM companies need to keep spending more to scale them. If they need to keep spending more then they need to be making more money. Are they? If they're not, then they're toast. Btw, this is true even if training gets cheaper over time. Cheaper training means more training not less money. Jevon's Paradox and all that.

40 points by m-hodges 6mo ago

Related: AI's Economics Don't Make Sense - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47936867 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47936867

MarkusQ 6mo ago

> But time passes and situations evolve. Ed Zitron, though, clearly does not. > Over the last two years, he has called the top repeatedly: The AI bubble was definitely about to burst here, and here, and here, and here, and here, and here. His conclusion hasn’t changed, but his arguments have. > The 2024 and 2025 articles make, basically, the business case against AI: that companies aren’t really using it, it isn’t adding value, and AI investors are betting that will change before they run out of cash. In 2026, the focus is much more on alleging widespread, Enron- or FTX-tier outright fraud. > This is basically an admission that he can’t make the case in terms of the economics anymore. And in deciding how seriously to take his case in 2026, I think it’s valuable to read it in parallel with his case from 2024 and 2025. Say what? This is exactly the progression that you'd expect if there was, in fact, outright fraud going on. * Someone claims to be able to do <impossible thing> * Critic call them on it * Rather than folding, the hype machine grows and they start claiming to be doing the thing * The critics start accusing them of fraud Also, I note, it's a cute trick to start of claiming "time passes and situations evolve. Ed Zitron, though, clearly does not" and then in the next paragraph object that "his conclusion hasn’t changed, but his arguments have". I don't have a pony in this race and don't know who Ed Zitron is, but this article makes me suspect he's correct. Acting as if going from "they are wrong" to "they are wrong and lying" is "losing the plot" is anti-convincing. [edit] The ending is much stronger: > I don’t actually think we need less skepticism in AI world. These companies are, indeed, run by people who are not very trustworthy, who often contradict each other or oversell their products. > And the things they say they’re trying to do are outrageous; people have every right to object to it. Skepticism is more than warranted. > But we desperately need better skepticism. In that spirit, I would like to offer this observation. The one substantive difference the author highlights is the claim that generative AI is now offering value that renders the claims that it's all fraud questionable. I would argue that the value it offers is effectively plagiarism-as-a-service, and, just as with the infinite energy machines that secretly harvest power from the wiring of the building, compatible with the notion of fraud.

plytow 6mo ago
[dead]
rafterydj 6mo ago
Not sure why you're being downvoted, your comment seems interesting to me.
Lerc 6mo ago
Can you give some specific instances of impossible things being claimed? When I search for such things I tend to only find claims that claims were made.
- MarkusQ 6mo ago
  The main claim that I was claiming that TFA the claims to be incorrectly claimed to be impossible by the LLM-hype critic is roughly "current generative AI business models can be successful". The critic initially argued that there's no way to make money the way they were going, and then has subsequently concluded that any reports that they are making money are therefore fraudulent.
  - Lerc 6mo ago
    That is really hard to follow. But I think it boils down to a form of. Claim: There can never be an X Response: This here Y is an X Claim: No it isn't! I was asking for examples of Y so we could judge for ourselves.
    - MarkusQ 6mo ago
      That would be "a profitable AI company that isn't just fudging their numbers." I do not have an example to offer.

ForHackernews 6mo ago

I'm not familiar with Ed Zitron but failing to call the top of a bubble doesn't mean you're wrong about it being a bubble. People who were calling out the housing bubble in the 2000s were "wrong" right up until they were right. e.g. from 2006 https://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/02/opinion/no-bubble-trouble.html https://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/02/opinion/no-bubble-trouble... My own feeling is that it is a bubble: AI models are the new virtual machines. They will become commodified and low-margin hosting providers will dominate the market. Investors in OpenAI/Anthropic will lose their shirts.

alex43578 6mo ago
There has to be some time-based discount factor to calling a bubble.
verdverm 6mo ago
> They will become commodified and low-margin hosting providers will dominate the market. I have my doubts about this. We have not seen a viable YouTube alternative because the underlying costs of handling video content are significant and YT has custom hardware and sophisticated software. When we look to the broader cloud market, hyperscalers dominate. We are likely seeing similar when it comes to Google's TPU and access to Nvidia's best offerings. That being said, I did just pick up a DGX Spark and it runs qwen-3.6 sufficiently well to be a viable interactive coding assistant. Certainly more than enough for unattended agents.
- ForHackernews 6mo ago
  Maybe, but if custom hardware and economies of scale are the determining factor, that favors Google (and Amazon/Microsoft), not OpenAI or Anthropic.
  - verdverm 6mo ago
    Definitely, Google Vertex Ai serves up other companies models better than they can themselves. The TPU is the bee's knees. I really hope Google makes a take on the DGX Spark

apercu 6mo ago

Article kind of lost me at "It can no longer argue that costs aren’t falling; they are."

simianwords 6mo ago
They absolutely are. She has even linked a source for that. It’s almost indisputable that the prices (per capability) is going down. I think you should read it more deeply to understand the argument.

jospeh554 6mo ago

Saying something is a "bubble" doesn't mean it'll go away entirely when it pops... Which seems to be a lot of this article

cindyllm 6mo ago
[dead]
SpicyLemonZest 6mo ago
It doesn't necessarily mean that, but this specific person Ed Zitron believes and argues extensively that it's going to go away when it pops.
simianwords 6mo ago
This sort of egregious Motte Bailey that keeps popping up. Motte: AI is useless and unsustainable and fraud and the bubble will pop anytime Bailey: Ohh ackchually AI is a bubble but it will end up like the internet Why bother with useless arguments like this?

sweetheart 6mo ago

I'm pleasantly surprised to see this! Last year a few people I know in person, and a podcast I enjoy, talked about or to Ed Zitron and I felt like I was going crazy because so, so much of what he argued was either woefully outdated, or just a fallacy. It's also annoying because it'd be such an interesting topic to explore rigorously and without motive. As mentioned in the article, those analyses _can_ be found. But man, Ed Zitron just seems loud and silly.

ej88 6mo ago

my main qualm with Ed is his analysis on the financials is decent, but he absolutely refuses to admit that the technology is useful (especially in the hands of competent users), and that all the labs are extremely compute starved due to overwhelming demand.

llbbdd 6mo ago
I used to enjoy his writing a lot pre-AI around the time he was spending a lot of words on Musk, crypto, etc. More because it was an entertaining form of hate-reading about those topics than really informative, per se. Then he started doing this schtick with AI and I felt like I got hit hard with Gell-Man Amnesia because he so blatantly makes claims that anybody with a free ChatGPT account can dismiss handily, and it calls everything else he says into serious question.
bigbadfeline 6mo ago
> my main qualm with Ed is his analysis on the financials is decent, but he absolutely refuses to admit that the technology is useful Yeah, I find that sort of critics to cause more harm than good. The economic case for closed source AI isn't there - in macroeconomic sense, and accounting for all costs, it's more expensive than the value it provides. There's data to back that up, so focus on economics. On the other hand, hallucinating about what AI can or cannot do is useless, only research can provide the answer.

semiquaver 6mo ago

He’s hitched his wagon to a thesis and views everything through that lens come hell or high water. > he does not consider, even to disagree with it, the possibility that the industry is paying for Anthropic’s product for non-psychosis reasons, such as finding it useful) This is my main problem with Zitron. He is so obviously the epitome of motivated reasoning. He seems constitutionally incapable of admitting the possibility that companies derive usefulness and productivity from LLMs. For anyone capable of doing on the ground reporting this would be trivially obvious (at least when it comes to coding). So he ends up just cheerleading on the “AI bad” side whether the cheers make any sense or not. > “Nobody wants to talk about the fact that AI isn’t actually doing very much,” he complained, before going on to complain about people saying that agents are able to do tasks independently with oversight. “What tasks, exactly? Who knows!” he wrote. > > Ed, thousands of people know and it is your journalistic responsibility to be one of them! He’s intentionally incurious and doesn’t understand the idea of a general-purpose technology. This would be like looking at the rise of programming and computers in the 80s and 90s and asking “what are computer programs doing? I don’t see any concrete benefits right now, must be a scam”

JPLeRouzic 6mo ago
> This would be like looking at the rise of programming and computers in the 80s and 90s and asking “what are computer programs doing? I don’t see any concrete benefits right now, must be a scam” There were many people around me that said that in the 80s.
- Lerc 6mo ago
  I have often been criticised as way too optimistic for thinking some new thing might become commonplace. The topics change but the arguments seem to be the same. It's limited, if it were any good, then the prevailing industry would suppress it. (Video Recorders) to be fair industries did try to suppress it. There's literally centuries of doing things the old way. It doesn't matter if it's faster if half of your implements can't even be used with it. (Microwave ovens) The same measuring a new paradigm by the goals of an earlier paradigm, over and over. Encountered with computers, mobile phones, the web, wikipedia, Streaming video. It's all just "That thing can't fly, it doesn't have feathers" shifted to a new domain.

kritiko 6mo ago

Ed Zitron is annoying. But saying “I wish the argument was being made better” while using him as the basis for your article is more annoying to me! Just make the argument then. But publications like The Argument need to take shots to get views, I guess.

1attice 6mo ago
I don't quite understand this -- the article is not written by a Zitron supporter or ally. I think it's a best practice in several fields to interact with the texts of other thinkers and kick the tires. Perhaps a slower, more nuanced scroll would serve you. (In all respect.)
- kritiko 6mo ago
  Maybe I jumped a bit quickly to my conclusion there. I think The Argument / Piper know that an “Ed Zitron is wrong” angle drives more traffic than just writing better AI criticism. Secondly, I don’t think she kicks the tires that well. “AI skeptics underestimate its utility” is a tweet-length observation. (Derek Davidson, another Argument contributor, has made such a Tweet. I think it would be much better if she tried to steelman or engage Zitron a bit on the econ ramifications of the current bubble. When I say Zitron is annoying, it’s because he’s very strident and can make arguments that don’t make sense or are easy to refute. But that’s also the most boring way to engage with him!

Legend2440 6mo ago

Other professional critics like Gary Marcus and Emily Bender are the same way. It doesn't matter what neural networks do, they will always be a dead end that should be abandoned.

cmorp 6mo ago

I view the AI bubble more like huge investments into something with the goal to profit later, against the likelihood of a open source model (probably even models) running on affordable hardware in any home, making the bet and all the datacenter the real flop.

tim333 6mo ago

I dunno if he's lost the plot so much as repeating the "AI is rubbish, the investment is a bubble, it'll all crash" plot at the rate of 10,000 words a month year after year.

danaw 6mo ago

ed can be verbose and he can be exaggerated but it's funny to claim that he doesn't come with receipts when his last two articles exhaustively go over the many signs of financial deceptions and other pricing issues that signal manipulation this whole article was "i wish he made arguments the way i like"... ok then go do that yourself? its word policing at its most annoying

deleted 6mo ago

[deleted]

leecommamichael 6mo ago

I'm not familiar with Zitron as a character, but the article disagrees with his critique of AI progress slowing with the rebuttle that AI is getting more efficient to build and use. That comports with my perception that much of the recent work in the field has been focused on making the technology more profitable. See special emphasis in the last 2 releases from Google, OpenAI and Anthropic. I do think that's a meaningful change in their messaging. I don't know what it means exactly, but they are clearly sending a message about economics. I'm not a big user of AI for lack of interest, but have held for several years that I'd be more interested if it were faster and cheaper. If this form of AI is the future, I do hope it gets significantly more efficient, even if the capability caps out. I think there is plenty of room for interesting applications, if so.

niteshatqtos 6mo ago

As of now, neither side has "lost the plot" but I do understand general dislike for Zitron. This mostly stems from the fact that proof innocence (that AI will succeed) lies with teams making frontier models and one can continue to bash them until they do.

YeGoblynQueenne 6mo ago

>> You could, if you wanted, use this as an argument that OpenAI is on shaky financial ground: The pressure to come out with the next generation of models and stay in the lead is so intense that models are retired before the company has actually turned a profit on them. Certainly, if I were thinking about investing in OpenAI, I would want to think about when that is expected to turn around. Yeah but that's the whole point. If LLMs need to keep getting better before they can turn a profit they need to keep scaling. If they need to keep scaling then the LLM companies need to keep spending more to scale them. If they need to keep spending more then they need to be making more money. Are they? If they're not, then they're toast. Btw, this is true even if training gets cheaper over time. Cheaper training means more training not less money. Jevon's Paradox and all that.