6 ms·

This critique is leaning really hard on their interpretation of "dying". They take the literal company is going to fail type of dying where as I have always tak

by layoric 1mo ago

This critique is leaning really hard on their interpretation of "dying". They take the literal company is going to fail type of dying where as I have always taken it the same way he has presented it in his "rot-economy" context. They can remain financially "successful", but more and more people hate their products, their products are getting worse, their products are "dying". Google Search is still a good example, the old Google search is "dead" if you like, a know many people, including myself who no longer use it. More people hate and getting off Facebook. More people are jumping from Windows to macOS or Linux. These tech giants need AI to continue to grow, and that growth at the moment seems to be coming from just two AI companies who are burning a record about of investments. OpenAI has raised nearly $200B, that is more money than Australia's tax revenue.. and they are getting further from being profitable as Chinese models are getting better and much cheaper. The article linked seems right, but you have to take these morbid analogies in a very specific way, and assume that the only way to measure these companies is revenue/profits/money rather than their products. I wish people would hold actual professional media economists to the same standards, along with journalists who just repeat press releases without actually challenging statements. His main argument has been the numbers don't make sense, and can't see how this won't end badly for a lot of people.

pocksuppet 1mo ago
If I have a billion trillion dollars but 20% of the population hates me, but I get to live in a giant solid gold mansion with an army of servants keeping the 20% away from me, have I really failed?
- dosisking 1mo ago
  [flagged]
- ghostk 1mo ago
  type shit Louis the XVI would ponder about
  - jakeydus 1mo ago
    Let them generate studio ghibli profile pictures of themselves
- kshri24 1mo ago
  Still a failure because it is propped up by an inflated US dollar. Those trillions would mean nothing when the US economy collapses due to a cumulative effect of massive national debt, unending wars and inflation. At least if you have the population by your side, you wouldn't have "guns, gold, potassium iodide, antibiotics, batteries, water, gas masks from the Israeli Defense Force, and a big patch of land in Big Sur I can fly to" [1] They are all willing to risk everything to see if their bet on achieving "singularity" fructifies. I don't see us getting anywhere close (at least with the current tech). [1]: https://futurism.com/the-byte/openai-ceo-survivalist-prepper https://futurism.com/the-byte/openai-ceo-survivalist-prepper
- domador 1mo ago
  It'd depend on what specifically that 20% of the population hates that hypothetical you for. Maybe their hate in this scenario turns out to be an accurate signal that you are an awful human being. In that case, you'd be a very rich, awful human being. Have you really failed in this case? Not at making money and living a decadent, hedonistic life, if that was your goal, but yes at being a good human being, one who is good to others and is worthy of their respect, admiration, and support.
  - pocksuppet 1mo ago
    Further suppose that, as a result of my awfulness, everyone who is alive 100 years later is my descendant of me (E.g. Genghis Khan). Have I failed?
- LucasOe 1mo ago
  Yes.
- Paria_Stark 1mo ago
  How morally bankrupt can one be?
- customguy 1mo ago
  To even desire that you have to be so broken and impoverished I would say no, you wouldn't have failed, in the same way a dog farting didn't fail to make perfume. They don't even know what perfume is, don't know about any of the ingredients, equipment and processes. And even if they did, that wouldn't do them any good because they don't have opposable thumbs, so why be cruel and even try to explain it to them? It will either frustrate them because they don't understand, or frustrate them even more in the extremely unlikely case that they do. But more importantly, companies aren't people, they can't be unhappy or happy. They're like fire, you don't ask what the fire wants, you ask how to make it useful.
- amoss 1mo ago
  You should let them eat cake.
- GolfPopper 1mo ago
  Depends on your metric for failure. As a decent human being? Absolute failure. As a supervillain? Complete success.
jxcole 1mo ago
If many people hated their products, they wouldn't use them. If they didn't use them they would not be financially successful. Google is not dying just because you personally have a feeling the results are worse than before and there is no definition of dying that would be consistent with Google's current state. If Google were to die they would die the way Yahoo did, because a competitor was demonstrably better than them and everyone switched off. There is no realistic evidence that this might occur in the near future.
- taurath 1mo ago
  > If many people hated their products, they wouldn't use them You do understand how drugs work right?
- j2kun 1mo ago
  You must not talk to a lot of retired people, for whom every tech product is a bewildering nightmare.
  - Zetaphor 1mo ago
    They're the ones who are dying. Gen Z grew up on the cloud
    - owebmaster 1mo ago
      > Gen Z grew up on the cloud That's why many are tech illiterates and don't know what folders and files are.
      - tancop 1mo ago
        I would say that's a rich country and gen alpha thing. People who had to download games from a pirate site on the family computer know what a folder is.
    - customguy 1mo ago
      What does "the cloud" have to do with anything in this context? That is so utterly orthogonal to how good a UI/UX is.
oofbey 1mo ago
Was Microsoft dying under Balmer? I think we’d say yes. Even if the SEC filings indicated otherwise.
- loeg 1mo ago
  Right. If we merely define "dying" to mean something other than dying, it's possible for a not-dying company to be "dying."
- wmf 1mo ago
  https://danluu.com/ballmer/ https://danluu.com/ballmer/
  - oofbey 1mo ago
    Wow. Ballmer fans. Hot take - I like the novelty! And yeah, I never really thought about how Bing, Azure, and Office 365 are all actually stellar products. Somehow I missed that. Azure was particularly good in the early days when you could only run Windows servers, not Linux. That was also the Ballmer brilliance - cut off access to the alternatives and they’ll fade away to irrelevance. (Irrelevance is of course not the same as “dying”.) Along those lines, let’s not forget Windows Phone. Also underappreciated. Or Silverlight! Pure genius that one. So many gems from the Ballmer era.
    - KellyCriterion 1mo ago
      So, WinPhone wasnt bad!It just didnt take off because of app availability and therefore, traction.
Joel_Mckay 1mo ago
>tech giants need AI to continue to grow You mean increase the -$2.50 lost for every $1 in revenue, or the $2Tn in debt disclosed 60 pages into the reports as a footnote. Let us be clear, the only "growth" is in the LLM ectoparasite living rent free in peoples imaginations. The fact is when (not if) the peak of inflated LLM use-case expectations corrects, a lot of the industry won't survive. Facebook has a founders-syndrome problem, and a product line catering to creeps. Note most normal people aren't creeps, but the ones that are creepy will buy creep-ware at a rate necessary to sustain the founder creeps ego. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Founder%27s_syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Founder%27s_syndrome Google hasn't built a successful product in decades, and acquired most of its successes like YT. There are 3 reasons this occurs, and 2 are related to corporate cult culture. One would have to fire 70% of the company to fix that problem, and one day someone will have to do just that. >wish people would hold actual professional media economists to the same standards OpenAI will go public soon, and the hype-cycle can finally settle down. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gartner_hype_cycle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gartner_hype_cycle LLM do have basic utility in search and pattern recognition, but only the delusional believe it will hyper-scale unconstrained forever. =3
- layoric 1mo ago
  I should have been clearer, "tech giants need something to meet their growth expectations, AI is currently that something". I completely agree this is all going to end badly, and AI has made these tech giants grow their market cap, which is what they seem to care almost solely about. I don't think the crash will be the end of Google/Microsoft/Meta/Amazon as companies, I do think it will be the end of OpenAI cause of the insane financial commitments they have, and I think Nvidia will drastically shrink, but this will all likely take longer than I'd like.
simianwords 1mo ago
What?? Ed Zitron has repeatedly said OpenAi or Anthropic would literally die. This keeps happening - Ed makes a prediction. It gets falsified. And people say, “no actually he meant something else”.
- chipdale 1mo ago
  Ed is in public relations. He did not amateurishly claim OpenAI and Anthropic would literally die. Like any PR savvy person, he qualified his predictions by making them conditional on whether OpenAI/Anthropic could raise more money, achieve a technical breakthrough, unlock new lucrative markets, etc. So far, OpenAI and Anthropic have raised more money. You might even be able to argue they've achieved some breakthroughs and unlocked some markets. Regarding his predictions: The jury is still out because Ed isn't actually making the falsifiable time-bounded predictions you think he's making. He's good at making his readers think he's putting his neck out, but he's really not. When you remove all his rhetoric and veneer, his conditional predictions are actually somewhere between bearish and cautious. It's mostly theatre.
  - simianwords 1mo ago
    “what I believe could happen in the next 18 months” “One of the major AI companies will collapse” “OpenAI and Anthropic” “one of these companies has to die” AI Bubble 2027 — Ed Zitron, Aug. 27, 2025
devhunt-org 1mo ago
[dead]
JumpCrisscross 1mo ago
> These tech giants need AI to continue to grow This is unfalsifiable. AI is juicing the tech majors’ growth. And in the modern economy, it may be necessary for them. But did Disney need the internet to grow in the 1990s? No, probably not. Did streaming give it all kinds of new growth victors? Yes. And would ignoring the internet for that last three decades have probably killed it? Also yes.
- ModernMech 1mo ago
  How much did Disney invest in backbone Internet technologies in the 1990s?
  - ben_w 1mo ago
    Irrelevant. If AI turns out to be a short-lived fad, a bubble that pops and we all laugh at in a few year's time, Google's investments in AI were simply wasted, it does not follow that Google itself will die from having made the investment. Same for Meta, whose current name is due to a previous bad investment we laugh at. The popping of the investment bubble of AI, that might kill Tesla and SpaceX, perhaps also Anthropic and OpenAI, but most of the tech giants won't be all that badly hurt.
    - ModernMech 1mo ago
      Maybe, but it does make the analogy poor. Also what was said was they need AI to continue to grow, not that they will die without it. Some big companies just hit a ceiling and do consulting or become a bank. Look at GM or IBM. Apple is already halfway there.
    - datsci_est_2015 1mo ago
      > If AI turns out to be a short-lived fad, a bubble that pops and we all laugh at in a few year's time I think you can be even more precise here, because “AI” can be a wild success, and the Anthropic and OpenAI product strategy can blow up at the same time. Transformers, LLMs, and harnesses are all technologies with amazing utility like many machine learning methods before them. But there may be no moat that justify the current investments in “AI” - I would reckon if there is no proper moat for OpenAI and Anthropic they may be 100x (give or take an order of magnitude) overleveraged. That’s still a pretty catastrophic bubble given the figures we’re discussing. VR still has a path to utility / viability. Meta (Zuck) just made an absolutely terrible product strategy around it. That can’t be overstated. Just atrocious judgement on display.
tripledry 1mo ago
> More people hate and getting off Facebook. More people are jumping from Windows to macOS or Linux. Might be true. But here is another angle, thinking about the people I know that are not in tech or avid gamers, which I would say is still easily the majority of people. Most are basically addicted to Instagram, Youtube etc.. Meta and Google owned companies, same goes with OS's, I can't think of one person that considered linux as their daily driver (other than unknowingly through phone).
bigDinosaur 1mo ago
You can define any word to be whatever you want and thus have linguistically correct predictions that are functionally useless.
- datsci_est_2015 1mo ago
  This cuts both ways: you can interpret any word to be whatever you want and thus have linguistically correct criticisms for predictions that are functionally useless.
  - sebzim4500 1mo ago
    Very clever but if your definition of a dying company includes companies that make more revenue and profit year after year then your definition is pointless. Words mean things.
    - datsci_est_2015 1mo ago
      [dead]

by layoric 1mo ago

pocksuppet 1mo ago

If I have a billion trillion dollars but 20% of the population hates me, but I get to live in a giant solid gold mansion with an army of servants keeping the 20% away from me, have I really failed?

dosisking 1mo ago
[flagged]
ghostk 1mo ago
type shit Louis the XVI would ponder about
- jakeydus 1mo ago
  Let them generate studio ghibli profile pictures of themselves
kshri24 1mo ago
Still a failure because it is propped up by an inflated US dollar. Those trillions would mean nothing when the US economy collapses due to a cumulative effect of massive national debt, unending wars and inflation. At least if you have the population by your side, you wouldn't have "guns, gold, potassium iodide, antibiotics, batteries, water, gas masks from the Israeli Defense Force, and a big patch of land in Big Sur I can fly to" [1] They are all willing to risk everything to see if their bet on achieving "singularity" fructifies. I don't see us getting anywhere close (at least with the current tech). [1]: https://futurism.com/the-byte/openai-ceo-survivalist-prepper https://futurism.com/the-byte/openai-ceo-survivalist-prepper
domador 1mo ago
It'd depend on what specifically that 20% of the population hates that hypothetical you for. Maybe their hate in this scenario turns out to be an accurate signal that you are an awful human being. In that case, you'd be a very rich, awful human being. Have you really failed in this case? Not at making money and living a decadent, hedonistic life, if that was your goal, but yes at being a good human being, one who is good to others and is worthy of their respect, admiration, and support.
- pocksuppet 1mo ago
  Further suppose that, as a result of my awfulness, everyone who is alive 100 years later is my descendant of me (E.g. Genghis Khan). Have I failed?
LucasOe 1mo ago
Yes.
Paria_Stark 1mo ago
How morally bankrupt can one be?
customguy 1mo ago
To even desire that you have to be so broken and impoverished I would say no, you wouldn't have failed, in the same way a dog farting didn't fail to make perfume. They don't even know what perfume is, don't know about any of the ingredients, equipment and processes. And even if they did, that wouldn't do them any good because they don't have opposable thumbs, so why be cruel and even try to explain it to them? It will either frustrate them because they don't understand, or frustrate them even more in the extremely unlikely case that they do. But more importantly, companies aren't people, they can't be unhappy or happy. They're like fire, you don't ask what the fire wants, you ask how to make it useful.
amoss 1mo ago
You should let them eat cake.
GolfPopper 1mo ago
Depends on your metric for failure. As a decent human being? Absolute failure. As a supervillain? Complete success.

jxcole 1mo ago

If many people hated their products, they wouldn't use them. If they didn't use them they would not be financially successful. Google is not dying just because you personally have a feeling the results are worse than before and there is no definition of dying that would be consistent with Google's current state. If Google were to die they would die the way Yahoo did, because a competitor was demonstrably better than them and everyone switched off. There is no realistic evidence that this might occur in the near future.

taurath 1mo ago
> If many people hated their products, they wouldn't use them You do understand how drugs work right?
j2kun 1mo ago
You must not talk to a lot of retired people, for whom every tech product is a bewildering nightmare.
- Zetaphor 1mo ago
  They're the ones who are dying. Gen Z grew up on the cloud
  - owebmaster 1mo ago
    > Gen Z grew up on the cloud That's why many are tech illiterates and don't know what folders and files are.
    - tancop 1mo ago
      I would say that's a rich country and gen alpha thing. People who had to download games from a pirate site on the family computer know what a folder is.
  - customguy 1mo ago
    What does "the cloud" have to do with anything in this context? That is so utterly orthogonal to how good a UI/UX is.

oofbey 1mo ago

Was Microsoft dying under Balmer? I think we’d say yes. Even if the SEC filings indicated otherwise.

loeg 1mo ago
Right. If we merely define "dying" to mean something other than dying, it's possible for a not-dying company to be "dying."
wmf 1mo ago
https://danluu.com/ballmer/ https://danluu.com/ballmer/
- oofbey 1mo ago
  Wow. Ballmer fans. Hot take - I like the novelty! And yeah, I never really thought about how Bing, Azure, and Office 365 are all actually stellar products. Somehow I missed that. Azure was particularly good in the early days when you could only run Windows servers, not Linux. That was also the Ballmer brilliance - cut off access to the alternatives and they’ll fade away to irrelevance. (Irrelevance is of course not the same as “dying”.) Along those lines, let’s not forget Windows Phone. Also underappreciated. Or Silverlight! Pure genius that one. So many gems from the Ballmer era.
  - KellyCriterion 1mo ago
    So, WinPhone wasnt bad!It just didnt take off because of app availability and therefore, traction.

Joel_Mckay 1mo ago

>tech giants need AI to continue to grow You mean increase the -$2.50 lost for every $1 in revenue, or the $2Tn in debt disclosed 60 pages into the reports as a footnote. Let us be clear, the only "growth" is in the LLM ectoparasite living rent free in peoples imaginations. The fact is when (not if) the peak of inflated LLM use-case expectations corrects, a lot of the industry won't survive. Facebook has a founders-syndrome problem, and a product line catering to creeps. Note most normal people aren't creeps, but the ones that are creepy will buy creep-ware at a rate necessary to sustain the founder creeps ego. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Founder%27s_syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Founder%27s_syndrome Google hasn't built a successful product in decades, and acquired most of its successes like YT. There are 3 reasons this occurs, and 2 are related to corporate cult culture. One would have to fire 70% of the company to fix that problem, and one day someone will have to do just that. >wish people would hold actual professional media economists to the same standards OpenAI will go public soon, and the hype-cycle can finally settle down. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gartner_hype_cycle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gartner_hype_cycle LLM do have basic utility in search and pattern recognition, but only the delusional believe it will hyper-scale unconstrained forever. =3

layoric 1mo ago
I should have been clearer, "tech giants need something to meet their growth expectations, AI is currently that something". I completely agree this is all going to end badly, and AI has made these tech giants grow their market cap, which is what they seem to care almost solely about. I don't think the crash will be the end of Google/Microsoft/Meta/Amazon as companies, I do think it will be the end of OpenAI cause of the insane financial commitments they have, and I think Nvidia will drastically shrink, but this will all likely take longer than I'd like.

simianwords 1mo ago

What?? Ed Zitron has repeatedly said OpenAi or Anthropic would literally die. This keeps happening - Ed makes a prediction. It gets falsified. And people say, “no actually he meant something else”.

chipdale 1mo ago
Ed is in public relations. He did not amateurishly claim OpenAI and Anthropic would literally die. Like any PR savvy person, he qualified his predictions by making them conditional on whether OpenAI/Anthropic could raise more money, achieve a technical breakthrough, unlock new lucrative markets, etc. So far, OpenAI and Anthropic have raised more money. You might even be able to argue they've achieved some breakthroughs and unlocked some markets. Regarding his predictions: The jury is still out because Ed isn't actually making the falsifiable time-bounded predictions you think he's making. He's good at making his readers think he's putting his neck out, but he's really not. When you remove all his rhetoric and veneer, his conditional predictions are actually somewhere between bearish and cautious. It's mostly theatre.
- simianwords 1mo ago
  “what I believe could happen in the next 18 months” “One of the major AI companies will collapse” “OpenAI and Anthropic” “one of these companies has to die” AI Bubble 2027 — Ed Zitron, Aug. 27, 2025

devhunt-org 1mo ago

[dead]

JumpCrisscross 1mo ago

> These tech giants need AI to continue to grow This is unfalsifiable. AI is juicing the tech majors’ growth. And in the modern economy, it may be necessary for them. But did Disney need the internet to grow in the 1990s? No, probably not. Did streaming give it all kinds of new growth victors? Yes. And would ignoring the internet for that last three decades have probably killed it? Also yes.

ModernMech 1mo ago
How much did Disney invest in backbone Internet technologies in the 1990s?
- ben_w 1mo ago
  Irrelevant. If AI turns out to be a short-lived fad, a bubble that pops and we all laugh at in a few year's time, Google's investments in AI were simply wasted, it does not follow that Google itself will die from having made the investment. Same for Meta, whose current name is due to a previous bad investment we laugh at. The popping of the investment bubble of AI, that might kill Tesla and SpaceX, perhaps also Anthropic and OpenAI, but most of the tech giants won't be all that badly hurt.
  - ModernMech 1mo ago
    Maybe, but it does make the analogy poor. Also what was said was they need AI to continue to grow, not that they will die without it. Some big companies just hit a ceiling and do consulting or become a bank. Look at GM or IBM. Apple is already halfway there.
  - datsci_est_2015 1mo ago
    > If AI turns out to be a short-lived fad, a bubble that pops and we all laugh at in a few year's time I think you can be even more precise here, because “AI” can be a wild success, and the Anthropic and OpenAI product strategy can blow up at the same time. Transformers, LLMs, and harnesses are all technologies with amazing utility like many machine learning methods before them. But there may be no moat that justify the current investments in “AI” - I would reckon if there is no proper moat for OpenAI and Anthropic they may be 100x (give or take an order of magnitude) overleveraged. That’s still a pretty catastrophic bubble given the figures we’re discussing. VR still has a path to utility / viability. Meta (Zuck) just made an absolutely terrible product strategy around it. That can’t be overstated. Just atrocious judgement on display.

tripledry 1mo ago

> More people hate and getting off Facebook. More people are jumping from Windows to macOS or Linux. Might be true. But here is another angle, thinking about the people I know that are not in tech or avid gamers, which I would say is still easily the majority of people. Most are basically addicted to Instagram, Youtube etc.. Meta and Google owned companies, same goes with OS's, I can't think of one person that considered linux as their daily driver (other than unknowingly through phone).

bigDinosaur 1mo ago

You can define any word to be whatever you want and thus have linguistically correct predictions that are functionally useless.

datsci_est_2015 1mo ago
This cuts both ways: you can interpret any word to be whatever you want and thus have linguistically correct criticisms for predictions that are functionally useless.
- sebzim4500 1mo ago
  Very clever but if your definition of a dying company includes companies that make more revenue and profit year after year then your definition is pointless. Words mean things.
  - datsci_est_2015 1mo ago
    [dead]