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Already many comments saying this but Ed Zitron is not a person I trust. He's been so biased and wrong on stuff that I consider very obvious and trivial that hi

by lz400 4mo ago

Already many comments saying this but Ed Zitron is not a person I trust. He's been so biased and wrong on stuff that I consider very obvious and trivial that his complicated analysis with numbers and trends I can't just take at face value. As an example of obvious wrong things, I remember a tweet of his where he was mocking people talking about agents and agentic coding. He was kind of saying that he was going crazy as agents weren't a thing really and people talking about them like they were real. Something like "agents?! what agents?! these guys hear themselves?!". The answers were full of hundreds of people patiently explaining how they were actually _using_ agents. This wasn't in 2023, it was a couple of months ago. He just has an audience and an engagement target. His objective is clicks, not informing.

JoeJonathan 4mo ago
He also calls everyone a grifter, when he seems like one himself. Im deeply skeptical of our AI overlords, but its disingenuous to keep pretwnding theres nothing there.
Grombobulous 4mo ago
He provided a lot of quantitative analysis in this article. Perhaps an example or two you think these numbers are off-base could help bolster this point? I think the most compelling part of the article is that these numbers point to a situation where the level of investment required seems unsustainably high by plain dollars. You don’t really have to agree with the author to see how it plays out. OpenAI and SpaceX and Anthropic need to go public this year to avoid running out of money. There’s no more private money, not enough to fund them. The IPO is the last funding round. They can continue growing extremely quickly and AI can still be highly useful and maybe be transformative, but still not have the money to fund that growth. That part he wrote about an AI company gone bust canceling their Oracle contract made Oracle feel like a Nortel analogy to me. If they have a sudden lapse with a big chunk of their customers they are writing down triple digit billions of dollars.
- lz400 4mo ago
  I guess what I'm saying is that I won't look at his numbers since he's an unreliable source from my point of view and there's a chance that he's going to try to deceive me and it's a waste of time for me to listen to him. I do have other sources of information and I probably agree in general that AI companies are doing pretty shady financial shenanigans. I even think it's possible that openai is in real trouble. But I don't extrapolate that into "AI is useless", which is what he does.
  - Grombobulous 4mo ago
    I would agree with you that extrapolating to “AI is useless” is definitely a giant step too far, and that part of the article ruins a lot of the other interesting bits of it. It’s great that he cites a lot of sources but some of them aren’t great, like the Microsoft story about canceling their Claude spend. I think that particular story isn’t much of an indicator of anything, and it might not even be true. But the financial part…this guy isn’t the only person out there sounding the alarm about the math not mathing.
    - lz400 4mo ago
      FWIW I agree the financials are a bit crazy and OpenAI went a bit nuts with the circular deals. That said, honestly, I don't think it's the end of the world. I think there will probably be some correction/crash and it will probably be healthy. A lot of these circular deals will get canceled, but it's at the end of the day people changing imaginary numbers with each other. The underlying tech I still think it's revolutionary regardless, the same way that the internet was and the tech boom crash at the end of the day was a distraction from the fact that these companies did end up "ruling the world"
  - dabedee 4mo ago
    This is what critical reading is for. It requires you examining your own assumptions as much as the text's. If you don't engage with something or someone because of your own bias or assumptions, that is also willful ignorance; you also might end up never updating your prior stance when new information emerges. There is a financial argument and capability argument. In this case, he doesn't make the claim one follows from the other.
dghlsakjg 4mo ago
His numbers are based on sources that he says he doesn’t trust, which is quite interesting. While he may be directionally accurate (eg. The revenue needed to match the spend seems lofty at best) he seems to be mixing and matching numbers to create a worst case scenario that doesn’t necessarily line up with reality. Combined with his complete unwillingness to be open minded about anything even tangentially related to AI, and I can’t take him that seriously. Publications love a doom and gloom rant, which is why he seems to have built an entire career on hysterical anti-ai screeds. It doesn’t mean that he’s right though.
w29UiIm2Xz 4mo ago
It's disappointing that this article got mindshare when a more neutral author could better argue the bearish case for AI valuations. I want the steelman argument from a more respected individual. The problem is when untrusted authors take positions, then it circulates widely, then people discredit the author and by proxy the position, when the position could be correct. The article has a number of emotional appeals in it. Something more focused on raw numbers would foster more curious discussion.

by lz400 4mo ago

JoeJonathan 4mo ago

He also calls everyone a grifter, when he seems like one himself. Im deeply skeptical of our AI overlords, but its disingenuous to keep pretwnding theres nothing there.

Grombobulous 4mo ago

He provided a lot of quantitative analysis in this article. Perhaps an example or two you think these numbers are off-base could help bolster this point? I think the most compelling part of the article is that these numbers point to a situation where the level of investment required seems unsustainably high by plain dollars. You don’t really have to agree with the author to see how it plays out. OpenAI and SpaceX and Anthropic need to go public this year to avoid running out of money. There’s no more private money, not enough to fund them. The IPO is the last funding round. They can continue growing extremely quickly and AI can still be highly useful and maybe be transformative, but still not have the money to fund that growth. That part he wrote about an AI company gone bust canceling their Oracle contract made Oracle feel like a Nortel analogy to me. If they have a sudden lapse with a big chunk of their customers they are writing down triple digit billions of dollars.

lz400 4mo ago
I guess what I'm saying is that I won't look at his numbers since he's an unreliable source from my point of view and there's a chance that he's going to try to deceive me and it's a waste of time for me to listen to him. I do have other sources of information and I probably agree in general that AI companies are doing pretty shady financial shenanigans. I even think it's possible that openai is in real trouble. But I don't extrapolate that into "AI is useless", which is what he does.
- Grombobulous 4mo ago
  I would agree with you that extrapolating to “AI is useless” is definitely a giant step too far, and that part of the article ruins a lot of the other interesting bits of it. It’s great that he cites a lot of sources but some of them aren’t great, like the Microsoft story about canceling their Claude spend. I think that particular story isn’t much of an indicator of anything, and it might not even be true. But the financial part…this guy isn’t the only person out there sounding the alarm about the math not mathing.
  - lz400 4mo ago
    FWIW I agree the financials are a bit crazy and OpenAI went a bit nuts with the circular deals. That said, honestly, I don't think it's the end of the world. I think there will probably be some correction/crash and it will probably be healthy. A lot of these circular deals will get canceled, but it's at the end of the day people changing imaginary numbers with each other. The underlying tech I still think it's revolutionary regardless, the same way that the internet was and the tech boom crash at the end of the day was a distraction from the fact that these companies did end up "ruling the world"
- dabedee 4mo ago
  This is what critical reading is for. It requires you examining your own assumptions as much as the text's. If you don't engage with something or someone because of your own bias or assumptions, that is also willful ignorance; you also might end up never updating your prior stance when new information emerges. There is a financial argument and capability argument. In this case, he doesn't make the claim one follows from the other.

dghlsakjg 4mo ago

His numbers are based on sources that he says he doesn’t trust, which is quite interesting. While he may be directionally accurate (eg. The revenue needed to match the spend seems lofty at best) he seems to be mixing and matching numbers to create a worst case scenario that doesn’t necessarily line up with reality. Combined with his complete unwillingness to be open minded about anything even tangentially related to AI, and I can’t take him that seriously. Publications love a doom and gloom rant, which is why he seems to have built an entire career on hysterical anti-ai screeds. It doesn’t mean that he’s right though.

w29UiIm2Xz 4mo ago

It's disappointing that this article got mindshare when a more neutral author could better argue the bearish case for AI valuations. I want the steelman argument from a more respected individual. The problem is when untrusted authors take positions, then it circulates widely, then people discredit the author and by proxy the position, when the position could be correct. The article has a number of emotional appeals in it. Something more focused on raw numbers would foster more curious discussion.