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Zitron: "Everyone Has Been Sold a Lie" on AI [video]
- tolugenius 3mo agoI don't fully agree with Zitron on all his points but it's very hard to disprove the larger points will somehow resolve themselves. One point that I think will determine the future, moreso with data centers, is politics. Laws are not unchangeable and making decisions that determine the next 5-10 years of action based on the current law is a recipe for disaster. "Buying" a politician still has to account for the fact they can be voted out.
- perpetuallunch 3mo ago> making decisions that determine the next 5-10 years of action based on the current law is a recipe for disaster. How else can one make business decisions? Or any long term decision, financial or otherwise. If you are correct, which I fear you may be, then we, in the West generally, are now living in a low trust society. Which is not a good thing at all, and should be of utmost concern.
- toomuchtodo 3mo agoLet us assume a person cannot change society, they simply do not have the leverage, even if they are a billionaire or most politicians. This is a systems problem, requiring enormous investment of time and resources to change trajectories of. Therefore, the choices available are to continue to live in a low trust society, or move to a high trust society and minimize your exposure to low trust society impact on your life. It's unfortunate. I would very much like to be wrong, please correct me if I am mistaken. https://www.visualcapitalist.com/mapped-where-people-trust-each-other-most-by-country/ https://www.visualcapitalist.com/mapped-where-people-trust-e... https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/self-reported-trust-attitudes https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/self-reported-trust-attit...
- landedgentry 3mo agoThis data conflicts with my image of Japan and China, and I wonder where the discrepancy lies.
- toomuchtodo 3mo agoI cannot speak to China, but my recent personal experience is that Japan is high trust throughout Tokyo, Kyoto, and Osaka. Would love to hear about the trust situation in China from anywhere who has recent ground truth.
- perpetuallunch 3mo agoThe propagandised idea that living in China means living under an oppressive communist regime, runs counter to the countries wild success at pretty much everything it does.
- landedgentry 3mo agoI don't think success directly translates into high trust. I think of China as a hypercompetitive place, which to me should mean lower trust.
- perpetuallunch 3mo agoExplain why hyper competitiveness should mean lower trust? Doesn’t competition imply rule and order? The other direction is merely organised crime, which tends to have very few big players.
- GlacierFox 3mo ago"Doesn’t competition imply rule and order?" What? No, how have you formulated that?
- archagon 3mo agoHey, remember Naomi Wu? She used to post a lot here. I wonder whatever happened to her?
- DanHulton 3mo agoI feel like it’s been understood that we live in a low trust society for a while now. If not for all of us, at least for a LOT of us.
- HWR_14 3mo agoIn a newly evolving situation, you have to assume that it's possible that the laws will change. Typically the way you account for this is hedging or keeping reserves to adapt.
- Brian_K_White 3mo agoAll day every day you make decisions based on things you think you can safely assume, and things you know you can't assume. The most likely behavior of a political office is just one of the things you know you can not safely assume, that's all.
- artninja1988 3mo agoWhat laws do you think will change
- sublinear 3mo agoEven if we don't consider economics, the reason "AI" has not increased white collar productivity is because it's not necessary for knowledge work beyond aggregating information for research. Knowledge work has always been a lot more arguing than "doing". Google was already the default option for this, and Google Gemini is a genuine improvement for Google Search. Google (and Apple) have sidestepped all the drama by just improving their existing products. Sometimes that's the right call in the shorter term, and this is one of those times.
- jay_kyburz 3mo agoYes, and the scary thing is, when Google starts selling ads in Gemini results, you wont be able to see them, it will be a bigger business that Google Search ever was. Update: Perhaps this is what Zitron doesn't want to say out loud, (and why investors are confused), the return on investment is going to come from having the largest mind control machine the world has even known.
- flextheruler 3mo agoThere's just no easy way to see what makes LLMs able to duplicate the profits of the entire existing tech sector of the economy. This is the return they need to make based on what they're currently expensing and projecting. Couple that with the circular financing agreements and it's just preposterous. Zitron may have been first and most outspoken to this argument, but like all bubbles it's an open secret.
- HWR_14 3mo agoLLM advertising consuming all current advertising dollars plus more is realistic. That's a solid chunk of the entire tech center it eats right there.
- sublinear 3mo ago> the return on investment is going to come from having the largest mind control machine the world has even known This is what Google already was and continues to be. They didn't need OpenAI and Anthropic as foils to maintain that position or expand Google Cloud. If anything, they did all this work with Gemini despite what's happening on the sidelines. OpenAI secured their multinational defense contract with Project Stargate. I can easily see the extremely high demand to get rid of so many contractors with security clearances. No government believes that the risk of another Snowden-like whistleblower is worth the mediocre intelligence summaries. The loser will be Anthropic unless Microsoft buys them out for a lowball price at the last minute in an attempt to make Copilot less terrible. For everyone else, it's business as usual.
- jay_kyburz 3mo agoSo right towards the end Zitron says it isn't clear what Google, MS and Amazons plan is. But he just finished explaining that Anthropic and Open AI are paying for them to build data centers, and implied that on face value, this was to rent the data centers back to Anthropic and Open AI. Seems to me they are just bleeding them dry so that when the money runs out for Anthropic and Open AI, they will be left with data centers that the can run their own (or open) models.
- JoeAltmaier 3mo agoAnother view of that is, hedging their bets. Which businesses do all the time.
- Driver4732 3mo agoIf you read more of Zitron's work, he says that there's little demand for the AI compute power outside of OpenAI and Anthropic. If they are bled dry, then the hyperscalers will not have enough customers for the data centers which they have blown so much capex spend on and will have to soon go into debt to ensure they can be built. The GPUs and the high bandwidth memory they use have little use other than to run and train these LLMs.
- bdangubic 3mo agoand he wrong on all of those accounts. but he’s got the best gig, he has been writing literally one same article for years, gets LLM to shuffle the words and publishes it under a different title :)
- ikidd 3mo agoI don't think Zitron has been right about anything in the last 5 years. But he talks a good talk.
- piloto_ciego 3mo agoI cannot understand why people listen to him? I feel like I must be living in an alternate universe to a substantial amount of people? It's bananas...
- mariuolo 3mo ago> It's bananas... Actually, it's lemons (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Zitron https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Zitron). Sorry, I couldn't resist:)
- piloto_ciego 3mo agoBoooooooo! <the dad joke make me smile, but insert Zoidberg meme here>
- dumberquestions 3mo agoWell he's saying what a lot of people desperately want to believe.
- piloto_ciego 3mo agothis strikes me as a much more plausible answer, thanks. A LOT of people are really scared about the future. That's kind of stupid for a lot of reasons, but I suppose you're right, selling people what they want to hear has a long history.
- Moomoomoo309 3mo agoThe problem with his work is that a lot of the conclusions he comes to are a step too far, but the problems he identifies with how money is moving or how much datacenters cost or how no one has ever built a 1GW datacenter and we're expected to believe they can build a bunch of them, or even a 10GW data center - those are real.
- periodjet 3mo ago[flagged]
- GlacierFox 3mo agoElaborate your nonsense comment?
- periodjet 3mo ago[flagged]
- jxy6 3mo agoThe chimp brain cant handle unpredictability for too long. Just keep pushing people into unpredictable situations or specifically try getting someone to say I dont know constantly. Beyond a point story generation starts, to feel sane within an "I dont know" reality. Truth is things are unpredictable. Predictability of anything hasnt increased. Stories/Lies exist for cope. Cause of chimp brain dynamics responding to unpredictability.
- cindyllm 3mo ago[dead]