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Read a little more of what he's written before you praise him, so you don't end up looking as dumb as I did. Ed may be right about some of his claims, but he i

Read a little more of what he's written before you praise him, so you don't end up looking as dumb as I did. Ed may be right about some of his claims, but he is 100% a crank, and he makes so many incoherent claims I'd say that if he's right, it's in the nature of a broken clock.

dan_gee 3mo ago
Can you elaborate on what happened that made you look dumb?
deleted 3mo ago
[deleted]
Fricken 3mo ago
[flagged]
- JumpCrisscross 3mo ago
  > Show us on the doll where Zitron touched you Comment read sensibly until this bit.
  - deleted 3mo ago
    [deleted]
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    [deleted]
Jackpillar 3mo ago
Let me guess, you disagree with his views on the utility of Ai (which he's pretty bad about) and you use that as cover and/or to negate his real journalism that is based in facts (Ai being an unprecedented & unrecoupable bubble littered with unprofitable companies thats likely to crash our economy unless these Ai conglomerates cozy up lawmakers to situate themselves for a bail out)
- Analemma_ 3mo ago
  My disagreement is that every time he turns out to be completely wrong he silently moves the goalposts instead of acknowledging it. For years he was all-in on "AI is useless, it has no business value at all" claims, and then when that was decisively disproven by Claude Code, he didn't spend one second on self-reflection on why he was wrong and whether this might mean he is wrong about other things. He just smoothly pivoted to "AI companies will never be profitable, tokens are hugely subsidized". And now that that's about to be disproven (word on the street is that Anthropic will soon report profitability, and both Anthropic and OAI have repeatedly said inference is profitable), he's pivoting again to "tokens are too expensive and the ROI isn't there for business". No correction, no reflection, just "we're at war with Eurasia, we've always been at war with Eurasia". Even if he’s sometimes right, there are better analysts out there who are also right and have the honesty, humility and integrity that Zitron lacks.
  - bigstrat2003 3mo ago
    > For years he was all-in on "AI is useless, it has no business value at all" claims, and then when that was decisively disproven by Claude Code... No such disproval has happened. Claude Code does not provide business value, it provides the illusion of value. Just like everything else LLMs do.
PaulRobinson 3mo ago
Can you provide evidence of where he's been wrong?
- nerevarthelame 3mo ago
  Here's some criticism: https://bsky.app/profile/peark.es/post/3mmhtcib3622i https://bsky.app/profile/peark.es/post/3mmhtcib3622i (see the full thread) I'm not qualified enough myself to judge Zitron's reporting, nor this criticism. But George Pearkes is a reasonably respected financial analyst.
  - PaulRobinson 3mo ago
    I think both sides might be cherry picking the pieces that make their arguments the strongest - Pearkes has pulled out a few paragraphs, but there is a lot in Zitron's writing, so it's easy to select 6 bits you don't like/agree with or find fault with, but I'm not sure it undermines the rest. I actually think Zitron would be better off focusing on those deals where there is clearly something weird going on (SpaceX IPO, Oracle/OpenAI/NVIDIA triangle, the neoclouds, and so on), than picking a fight with the one company that actually seems to be trying to play it straight in this sector (Anthropic), and I can see how he's covering the whole field with the same cynicism which might not be appropriate. That said, I'm not entirely convinced that some of Pearkes' analysis deserves us all to align to the rosy bullish view he takes either. Time will tell, it always does, but at least you've put forward some data unlike anyone else, so thank you for that.
    - jerhewet 3mo ago
      > picking a fight with the one company that actually seems to be trying to play > it straight in this sector (Anthropic) https://stephenfollows.com/p/what-just-happened-to-thenumberscom-should-worry-us-all https://stephenfollows.com/p/what-just-happened-to-thenumber... Search for "Anthropic crawls over 38,000 pages for every single visitor". If they can't get their bots to work correctly, what makes you think Anthropic is doing anything else correctly?
- 3mo ago
rdedev 3mo ago
If you want to dismiss him for being hyperbolic or under estimating the usefulness of AI go for it. If you are making the case that he is full of shit, please provide some actual evidence of his main thesis that AI companies are not going about this in any sustainable way
- JumpCrisscross 3mo ago
  > his main thesis that AI companies are not going about this in any sustainable way The point isn't that his thesis is fucked, just that his analysis tends to be free with details in a way that shouldn't inspire confidence, e.g. mixing up EBIT and EBITDA. Someone elsewhere in this thread referenced this guy [1]. His takes properly summarise the lack of care Zitron appears to display for getting detailed arguments right. If you're deeply familiar with financial jargon, I think he's fine. But if you're not, it's easy to get whisked into woo-woo nonsense that's falsely precise due to mis-using (and in some cases, very clearly mis-understanding) core financial and economic concepts. [1] https://bsky.app/profile/peark.es/post/3mmhtcib3622i https://bsky.app/profile/peark.es/post/3mmhtcib3622i
- Danox 3mo ago
  AI is going to be very useful going into the future. It’s just that it will just be incorporated into the existing programmers tool kit, and not the be all end all.
  - andrekandre 3mo ago
    i think it was cory doctorow (?) who said in an interview: "its just a plugin" for your ide... what i see at $employer is wanting to do everything with ai from start to finish (and i mean everything) but from looking at the output (or lack of) of coworkers i'm thinking that perspective may be closer to the truth...
NordSteve 3mo ago
Ed's not a crank, but you need to pay close attention to the topic of his proclamations to separate the wheat from the chaff. He's right about some things -- off the top of my head: -- OAI's perpetual fundraising, due to their losses --Coreweave --Circular financing --Revenue/capex imbalance ...all forensic economics analyses. He's often wrong when on the topic of capabilities and adoption -- he mistakes a snapshot for a trajectory, and treats current limitations as permanent: --Hallucination/unreliability an unsolvable problem --OpenAI failing --AI capabilities have plateaued / models will stop getting better --Saying Microsoft's cancelled leases meant the bubble was popping --Agents a marketing fad --Gross miscalculation of OAI 2025 revenue --Lack of adoption --AI not getting more efficient (compared to 10-40x reduction in inference costs YoY) --Repeating "95% of pilots fail" but ignoring massive bottoms-up adoption Christensen got this right when he had the insight to judge a technology by its rate of improvement relative to what a market needs, not by whether it's good enough today. Put Zitron back at the early days of the integrated circuit and imagine what he would have written about the technology. Some open predictions: --Bubble is going to burst -- I tend to agree with the thesis that "there is some marginal capacity being planned/built today that will never pay back its capex" --Losses mean there's no viable business here -- the recent moves by all of the players to some form of usage based pricing show there's price discovery occurring. I don't know of anyone who is stopping using LLMs because of the pricing changes...it's just changing their behavior.
6stringmerc 3mo ago
Okay, but what’s your counter argument to Jim Chanos? Oh, that’s right, you don’t have one because he’s a tried and true Wall Street heavy who speaks in plain English. Ed and Jim are on the same page looking at it through different sets of prescription glasses. I hope you have your money where your mouth is, so to speak, because I certainly do (avoiding AI trade) and good luck with the SNAP paperwork in two years.

dan_gee 3mo ago

Can you elaborate on what happened that made you look dumb?

deleted 3mo ago

[deleted]

Fricken 3mo ago

[flagged]

JumpCrisscross 3mo ago
> Show us on the doll where Zitron touched you Comment read sensibly until this bit.
- deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]

Jackpillar 3mo ago

Let me guess, you disagree with his views on the utility of Ai (which he's pretty bad about) and you use that as cover and/or to negate his real journalism that is based in facts (Ai being an unprecedented & unrecoupable bubble littered with unprofitable companies thats likely to crash our economy unless these Ai conglomerates cozy up lawmakers to situate themselves for a bail out)

Analemma_ 3mo ago
My disagreement is that every time he turns out to be completely wrong he silently moves the goalposts instead of acknowledging it. For years he was all-in on "AI is useless, it has no business value at all" claims, and then when that was decisively disproven by Claude Code, he didn't spend one second on self-reflection on why he was wrong and whether this might mean he is wrong about other things. He just smoothly pivoted to "AI companies will never be profitable, tokens are hugely subsidized". And now that that's about to be disproven (word on the street is that Anthropic will soon report profitability, and both Anthropic and OAI have repeatedly said inference is profitable), he's pivoting again to "tokens are too expensive and the ROI isn't there for business". No correction, no reflection, just "we're at war with Eurasia, we've always been at war with Eurasia". Even if he’s sometimes right, there are better analysts out there who are also right and have the honesty, humility and integrity that Zitron lacks.
- bigstrat2003 3mo ago
  > For years he was all-in on "AI is useless, it has no business value at all" claims, and then when that was decisively disproven by Claude Code... No such disproval has happened. Claude Code does not provide business value, it provides the illusion of value. Just like everything else LLMs do.

PaulRobinson 3mo ago

Can you provide evidence of where he's been wrong?

nerevarthelame 3mo ago
Here's some criticism: https://bsky.app/profile/peark.es/post/3mmhtcib3622i https://bsky.app/profile/peark.es/post/3mmhtcib3622i (see the full thread) I'm not qualified enough myself to judge Zitron's reporting, nor this criticism. But George Pearkes is a reasonably respected financial analyst.
- PaulRobinson 3mo ago
  I think both sides might be cherry picking the pieces that make their arguments the strongest - Pearkes has pulled out a few paragraphs, but there is a lot in Zitron's writing, so it's easy to select 6 bits you don't like/agree with or find fault with, but I'm not sure it undermines the rest. I actually think Zitron would be better off focusing on those deals where there is clearly something weird going on (SpaceX IPO, Oracle/OpenAI/NVIDIA triangle, the neoclouds, and so on), than picking a fight with the one company that actually seems to be trying to play it straight in this sector (Anthropic), and I can see how he's covering the whole field with the same cynicism which might not be appropriate. That said, I'm not entirely convinced that some of Pearkes' analysis deserves us all to align to the rosy bullish view he takes either. Time will tell, it always does, but at least you've put forward some data unlike anyone else, so thank you for that.
  - jerhewet 3mo ago
    > picking a fight with the one company that actually seems to be trying to play > it straight in this sector (Anthropic) https://stephenfollows.com/p/what-just-happened-to-thenumberscom-should-worry-us-all https://stephenfollows.com/p/what-just-happened-to-thenumber... Search for "Anthropic crawls over 38,000 pages for every single visitor". If they can't get their bots to work correctly, what makes you think Anthropic is doing anything else correctly?
3mo ago

rdedev 3mo ago

If you want to dismiss him for being hyperbolic or under estimating the usefulness of AI go for it. If you are making the case that he is full of shit, please provide some actual evidence of his main thesis that AI companies are not going about this in any sustainable way

JumpCrisscross 3mo ago
> his main thesis that AI companies are not going about this in any sustainable way The point isn't that his thesis is fucked, just that his analysis tends to be free with details in a way that shouldn't inspire confidence, e.g. mixing up EBIT and EBITDA. Someone elsewhere in this thread referenced this guy [1]. His takes properly summarise the lack of care Zitron appears to display for getting detailed arguments right. If you're deeply familiar with financial jargon, I think he's fine. But if you're not, it's easy to get whisked into woo-woo nonsense that's falsely precise due to mis-using (and in some cases, very clearly mis-understanding) core financial and economic concepts. [1] https://bsky.app/profile/peark.es/post/3mmhtcib3622i https://bsky.app/profile/peark.es/post/3mmhtcib3622i
Danox 3mo ago
AI is going to be very useful going into the future. It’s just that it will just be incorporated into the existing programmers tool kit, and not the be all end all.
- andrekandre 3mo ago
  i think it was cory doctorow (?) who said in an interview: "its just a plugin" for your ide... what i see at $employer is wanting to do everything with ai from start to finish (and i mean everything) but from looking at the output (or lack of) of coworkers i'm thinking that perspective may be closer to the truth...

NordSteve 3mo ago

Ed's not a crank, but you need to pay close attention to the topic of his proclamations to separate the wheat from the chaff. He's right about some things -- off the top of my head: -- OAI's perpetual fundraising, due to their losses --Coreweave --Circular financing --Revenue/capex imbalance ...all forensic economics analyses. He's often wrong when on the topic of capabilities and adoption -- he mistakes a snapshot for a trajectory, and treats current limitations as permanent: --Hallucination/unreliability an unsolvable problem --OpenAI failing --AI capabilities have plateaued / models will stop getting better --Saying Microsoft's cancelled leases meant the bubble was popping --Agents a marketing fad --Gross miscalculation of OAI 2025 revenue --Lack of adoption --AI not getting more efficient (compared to 10-40x reduction in inference costs YoY) --Repeating "95% of pilots fail" but ignoring massive bottoms-up adoption Christensen got this right when he had the insight to judge a technology by its rate of improvement relative to what a market needs, not by whether it's good enough today. Put Zitron back at the early days of the integrated circuit and imagine what he would have written about the technology. Some open predictions: --Bubble is going to burst -- I tend to agree with the thesis that "there is some marginal capacity being planned/built today that will never pay back its capex" --Losses mean there's no viable business here -- the recent moves by all of the players to some form of usage based pricing show there's price discovery occurring. I don't know of anyone who is stopping using LLMs because of the pricing changes...it's just changing their behavior.

6stringmerc 3mo ago

Okay, but what’s your counter argument to Jim Chanos? Oh, that’s right, you don’t have one because he’s a tried and true Wall Street heavy who speaks in plain English. Ed and Jim are on the same page looking at it through different sets of prescription glasses. I hope you have your money where your mouth is, so to speak, because I certainly do (avoiding AI trade) and good luck with the SNAP paperwork in two years.