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I feel like too many people have a binary vision of the world, i.e. you're either "pro AI" or "anti AI". Ed Zitron doesn't say that AI doesn't work, that its i

I feel like too many people have a binary vision of the world, i.e. you're either "pro AI" or "anti AI". Ed Zitron doesn't say that AI doesn't work, that its impact on the world will not increase. He's basically saying that (1) the current data center investments are based on unrealistic revenue projections and (2) hyperscalers are using accounting tricks to move around "money" in a circular way to make it look like more money is already flowing to AI. You can believe all of that and still believe that AI (as in "LLM based services") work, are useful and will probably see their usefulness grow even more. Just not in the magnitude necessary to make the current investments make sense.

QwenGlazer9000 1mo ago
After looking at some of his recent interviews, he's acknowledged his previous predictions that 1. He was naive enough to think the investment won't keep coming despite lack of profitability and 2. He acknowledges that AI in it's current form is a billion dollar industry, not a trillion dollar one, but also not zero. Definitely less extreme than he used to be.
unreal37 1mo ago
If you ever listen to more than a couple of Zitron interviews, it's clear that he's not the "reasonable centrist" viewpoint on AI. He's the doom-and-gloom guy. Maybe there is someone out there positive on AI itself and calling out reasonable objections to some of the extreme things. But that's not Zitron.
- runarberg 1mo ago
  The center is not always the reasonable viewpoint. And sometimes the doom-and-gloom guy is correct.
  - heaney-555 1mo ago
    Right, but as the article linked lays out in detail, Zitron has been repeatedly and consistently objectively incorrect.
    - runarberg 1mo ago
      There are plenty of doom-and-gloom people to go around. Even if Ed Zitron is wrong about a lot of things, the doom-and-gloom part may still be accurate. Personally I am way to the left of Ed Zitron, I actually think he isn’t doom and gloom enough. My personal prediction is that whatever happens the people with all the money will find a way to spin the narrative in their favor and history will judge people like me (and Ed Zitron) as having been wrong.
  - CamperBob2 1mo ago
    Not this time.
- selfhoster1312 1mo ago
  As someone who's strongly anti-AI, i find Zitron to be absolutely too much pro-AI for my taste. He defends AI that's not LLMs. He barely touches on ecological impacts of AI, and barely mentions the enshittification of things. He's only really against the LLM craze, OpenAI/Anthropic over-evaluation (because Deepseek and local models will do the same for nearly free), and the crazy speculative bubble around datacenters. If you find him very negative about AI, and i find him very positive about AI, he might just be this reasonable centrist.
  - ainch 1mo ago
    Out of curiosity, what would you like to hear him saying about non-LLM AI?
    - selfhoster1312 1mo ago
      There's plenty of arguments to be had. I guess there could be some useful applications of non-LLM AI (eg. translation tools), but quality output is still a concern. Environmental impact is also still a concern. If output is of sufficient quality, who reaps the benefits is a concern ; if not, who pays the price of shittier products is a concern. Whether LLM or non-LLM tech, the question of surveillance capitalism and how models need to be fed swaths of privacy-invading data (eg. self-driving cars filming everything all the time) is also a concern. Overall, i think the ecological concern is still the biggest one. We are at the start of a major climate crisis, and any self-preserving measures were already hard fought by industry. I fear that any form of AI investment will lead (because it's already leading) to destroying any hope of saving an inhabitable planet.
      - Mentlo 1mo ago
        To play devil's advocate - unless you were to take the position of declaring bankruptcy on the possibility that a complex society of competing actors can agree on climate change - and therefore this being an unsolvable problem that you need AI to solve, as humans can't handle the complexity. I find a lot of the debate on either climate change or AI collapses if you point out that "we shouldn't do this, we should ALL just do this" is an extremely unrealistic position in an international complex ecosystem of competing actors.
square_usual 1mo ago
> Ed Zitron doesn't say that AI doesn't work, that its impact on the world will not increase He's said variants of both of these things before! That's the point OP makes too, people say "He doesn't say that" or "But what about this" when he's said a million, sometimes contradictory things.
- rrrx3 1mo ago
  Ed's whole cornerstone thesis is that "AI doesn't work." Like, if I had to sum him up in a short sentence, that's what it'd be that or "Angry but doesn't know much"
  - yousif_123123 1mo ago
    I think when cornered, he does say it works for coding and some other tasks. But to be honest it also makes a lot of bugs when writing code. I don't agree with everything he thinks, but I think I agree with him more than I do Sam Altman or Jensen.
    - dd8601fn 1mo ago
      I’d be interested in a real accounting of what he said, rather than what people say they’ve heard. If he says AI is changing work in some places but not-at-all in most… that’s defensible. Or at least we can look at that. Did he say it about the llm offerings from one or two providers or about (broad gesture) all AI efforts, everywhere? Etc. Certainly it’s changing sw development work. It’s less clear, most everywhere else.
  - DrewADesign 1mo ago
    No, the cornerstones of his thesis are: - LLM’s potential and capability are dramatically overstated - Business leaders are either driven by the Emperor’s New Clothes effect, or the legitimate fear of stock price or valuation drops, to admit it. - The amount of money being dumped into this industry will never pay off. He’s snide and condescending, to the detriment of his message. I can completely understand why people aren’t interested in listening to him. However, straw-manning his stances by oversimplifying or flat-out making uninformed assumptions about them isn’t a useful response to what he’s saying. Frankly, this industry squirts out enough bullshit to smother an active volcano every single day. If you think Ed isn’t credible, I sure hope you dismiss the industry leaders just as readily.
infecto 1mo ago
To be fair he is nothing more than a talking head who historically has had some pretty negative AI pieces. Sure nothing is binary but more than ever it feels like there are talking heads on both sides that have some pretty extreme views.
JumpCrisscross 1mo ago
> You can believe all of that You can believe all of that (I do) and see that Zitron is a liar and an influencer.
8note 1mo ago
> Ed Zitron doesn't say that AI doesn't work Ive seen him say it does work pretty consistently? He also talks about other things that are more interesting, but he still says it doesnt work
- ashkankiani 1mo ago
  If you watch his latest interviews you can see him talking about how he finds it useful for simple cases like in the Bloomberg terminal for generating code for queries, but it still has fundamental limitations for doing anything autonomously. As someone who has used LLMs heavily at work and at home in various serious experiments, I agree. It still requires heavy babysitting and a lot of its limitations wrt context length are fundamental, not something that’s going to be easy to overcome.
  - preg_match 1mo ago
    I also agree but the autonomous part comes from coding. We build autonomous systems with code, so it AI is really good at writing code (it is), we increase automation. Not with the AI itself, but with what it produces. Which is good, for many reasons: - environmental costs go down. Algorithms are cheap, LLM inference and training is not. - code is deterministic - code can be read and understood by professionals - code can be deployed trivially, whereas deploying an LLM costs huge infrastructure So using an LLM to help write code is the best of both worlds. You get velocity increase from the LLM, with none of the hallucination or environmental downsides at deployment time.
- selfhoster1312 1mo ago
  From anything i read/watched of him, the shorthand is "it doesn't work". When taking more than a few words to explain, it means it's not replacing humans altogether, because the output is low-quality and needs human quality control. In the end, he's not arguing LLMs are not working (as in returning 500 in your browser), but that the promise of autonomous agents replacing humans for increased productivity is a lie and doesn't work. I overall agree with his interpretation, but i'm afraid he might be wrong in the conclusion that noone is going to replace human labor with shittier agent slop. As long as we humans don't really have regulations and choice for proper quality of service, companies might just in fact enshittify everything with slop and make more profits while we suffer from lower-quality products and support.

QwenGlazer9000 1mo ago

After looking at some of his recent interviews, he's acknowledged his previous predictions that 1. He was naive enough to think the investment won't keep coming despite lack of profitability and 2. He acknowledges that AI in it's current form is a billion dollar industry, not a trillion dollar one, but also not zero. Definitely less extreme than he used to be.

unreal37 1mo ago

If you ever listen to more than a couple of Zitron interviews, it's clear that he's not the "reasonable centrist" viewpoint on AI. He's the doom-and-gloom guy. Maybe there is someone out there positive on AI itself and calling out reasonable objections to some of the extreme things. But that's not Zitron.

runarberg 1mo ago
The center is not always the reasonable viewpoint. And sometimes the doom-and-gloom guy is correct.
- heaney-555 1mo ago
  Right, but as the article linked lays out in detail, Zitron has been repeatedly and consistently objectively incorrect.
  - runarberg 1mo ago
    There are plenty of doom-and-gloom people to go around. Even if Ed Zitron is wrong about a lot of things, the doom-and-gloom part may still be accurate. Personally I am way to the left of Ed Zitron, I actually think he isn’t doom and gloom enough. My personal prediction is that whatever happens the people with all the money will find a way to spin the narrative in their favor and history will judge people like me (and Ed Zitron) as having been wrong.
- CamperBob2 1mo ago
  Not this time.
selfhoster1312 1mo ago
As someone who's strongly anti-AI, i find Zitron to be absolutely too much pro-AI for my taste. He defends AI that's not LLMs. He barely touches on ecological impacts of AI, and barely mentions the enshittification of things. He's only really against the LLM craze, OpenAI/Anthropic over-evaluation (because Deepseek and local models will do the same for nearly free), and the crazy speculative bubble around datacenters. If you find him very negative about AI, and i find him very positive about AI, he might just be this reasonable centrist.
- ainch 1mo ago
  Out of curiosity, what would you like to hear him saying about non-LLM AI?
  - selfhoster1312 1mo ago
    There's plenty of arguments to be had. I guess there could be some useful applications of non-LLM AI (eg. translation tools), but quality output is still a concern. Environmental impact is also still a concern. If output is of sufficient quality, who reaps the benefits is a concern ; if not, who pays the price of shittier products is a concern. Whether LLM or non-LLM tech, the question of surveillance capitalism and how models need to be fed swaths of privacy-invading data (eg. self-driving cars filming everything all the time) is also a concern. Overall, i think the ecological concern is still the biggest one. We are at the start of a major climate crisis, and any self-preserving measures were already hard fought by industry. I fear that any form of AI investment will lead (because it's already leading) to destroying any hope of saving an inhabitable planet.
    - Mentlo 1mo ago
      To play devil's advocate - unless you were to take the position of declaring bankruptcy on the possibility that a complex society of competing actors can agree on climate change - and therefore this being an unsolvable problem that you need AI to solve, as humans can't handle the complexity. I find a lot of the debate on either climate change or AI collapses if you point out that "we shouldn't do this, we should ALL just do this" is an extremely unrealistic position in an international complex ecosystem of competing actors.

square_usual 1mo ago

> Ed Zitron doesn't say that AI doesn't work, that its impact on the world will not increase He's said variants of both of these things before! That's the point OP makes too, people say "He doesn't say that" or "But what about this" when he's said a million, sometimes contradictory things.

rrrx3 1mo ago
Ed's whole cornerstone thesis is that "AI doesn't work." Like, if I had to sum him up in a short sentence, that's what it'd be that or "Angry but doesn't know much"
- yousif_123123 1mo ago
  I think when cornered, he does say it works for coding and some other tasks. But to be honest it also makes a lot of bugs when writing code. I don't agree with everything he thinks, but I think I agree with him more than I do Sam Altman or Jensen.
  - dd8601fn 1mo ago
    I’d be interested in a real accounting of what he said, rather than what people say they’ve heard. If he says AI is changing work in some places but not-at-all in most… that’s defensible. Or at least we can look at that. Did he say it about the llm offerings from one or two providers or about (broad gesture) all AI efforts, everywhere? Etc. Certainly it’s changing sw development work. It’s less clear, most everywhere else.
- DrewADesign 1mo ago
  No, the cornerstones of his thesis are: - LLM’s potential and capability are dramatically overstated - Business leaders are either driven by the Emperor’s New Clothes effect, or the legitimate fear of stock price or valuation drops, to admit it. - The amount of money being dumped into this industry will never pay off. He’s snide and condescending, to the detriment of his message. I can completely understand why people aren’t interested in listening to him. However, straw-manning his stances by oversimplifying or flat-out making uninformed assumptions about them isn’t a useful response to what he’s saying. Frankly, this industry squirts out enough bullshit to smother an active volcano every single day. If you think Ed isn’t credible, I sure hope you dismiss the industry leaders just as readily.

infecto 1mo ago

To be fair he is nothing more than a talking head who historically has had some pretty negative AI pieces. Sure nothing is binary but more than ever it feels like there are talking heads on both sides that have some pretty extreme views.

JumpCrisscross 1mo ago

> You can believe all of that You can believe all of that (I do) and see that Zitron is a liar and an influencer.

8note 1mo ago

> Ed Zitron doesn't say that AI doesn't work Ive seen him say it does work pretty consistently? He also talks about other things that are more interesting, but he still says it doesnt work

ashkankiani 1mo ago
If you watch his latest interviews you can see him talking about how he finds it useful for simple cases like in the Bloomberg terminal for generating code for queries, but it still has fundamental limitations for doing anything autonomously. As someone who has used LLMs heavily at work and at home in various serious experiments, I agree. It still requires heavy babysitting and a lot of its limitations wrt context length are fundamental, not something that’s going to be easy to overcome.
- preg_match 1mo ago
  I also agree but the autonomous part comes from coding. We build autonomous systems with code, so it AI is really good at writing code (it is), we increase automation. Not with the AI itself, but with what it produces. Which is good, for many reasons: - environmental costs go down. Algorithms are cheap, LLM inference and training is not. - code is deterministic - code can be read and understood by professionals - code can be deployed trivially, whereas deploying an LLM costs huge infrastructure So using an LLM to help write code is the best of both worlds. You get velocity increase from the LLM, with none of the hallucination or environmental downsides at deployment time.
selfhoster1312 1mo ago
From anything i read/watched of him, the shorthand is "it doesn't work". When taking more than a few words to explain, it means it's not replacing humans altogether, because the output is low-quality and needs human quality control. In the end, he's not arguing LLMs are not working (as in returning 500 in your browser), but that the promise of autonomous agents replacing humans for increased productivity is a lie and doesn't work. I overall agree with his interpretation, but i'm afraid he might be wrong in the conclusion that noone is going to replace human labor with shittier agent slop. As long as we humans don't really have regulations and choice for proper quality of service, companies might just in fact enshittify everything with slop and make more profits while we suffer from lower-quality products and support.