[jollyllama]

Lots of dismissive comments ITT, very few tackling the substance of the article.

> AI Cannot Afford To Slow Down — It Needs $3 Trillion Or More In Revenue By End Of 2030 To Sustain Its Existence

Is this true? With the total 2024 wages being 11.7 trillion USD [0], and nonfarm payrolls totaling 158,000 in the same year [1], it's an order of magnitude higher than my back of the napkin guesses I've made that AI needs to take or create 1/20 jobs minimum to break even.

[0] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/BA06RC1A027NBEA [1] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/PAYEMS

[avarun]

There is no substance to the article to tackle. Ed Zitron is a clown that makes seven million dollars a year writing unsubstantiated bullshit on the internet. He has been consistently wrong in every single one of his predictions and will continue predicting the sky is falling, because his content has zero educational value. It is purely a confirmation-bias inducing dopamine hit for the perpetually aggrieved.

[kolinko]

To name some of his "predictions", in 2024 he was saying that "things are beginning to collapse":

https://www.wheresyoured.at/subprimeai/

He is extremely vague in his predictions and timelines, and yet still manages to miss.

[opsnooperfax]

Hypothetically speaking, how does one go about being so handsomely rewarded for being wrong about everything? I feel like I am well qualified for this type of job.

[rdslw]

There are three things to make money:

- tell lies to ones who want to hear lies -> riches

- tell truth to ones who want to hear truth -> modesty

- tell truth to ones who want to hear lies -> bankruptcy

p.s. read it on a blog name I dont remember :(

[abustamam]

Ask Alex Jones before he got sued for being wrong, or just any politician in general.

[psychoslave]

Not in the divine secrets, never heard of that person before, but my wild guess would be have the relevant people in your acquaintances?

[ElProlactin]

You never know if people who are running a skeptic grift are at the same time long the very trends they're criticizing.

I agree with the general thesis that AI is a bubble and there's a lot of over/mal-investment, but that hasn't stopped me from riding the wave and making a considerable amount of money investing in AI-related stocks.

If I was more ambitious, I'd write a $70/year newsletter ranting about how AI is a massive bubble that could collapse at any moment to make money on both sides.

[afro88]

I'd love to read about the predictions that have been wrong (genuinely)

[JimDabell]

> AI's biggest critic has lost the plot

— https://www.theargumentmag.com/p/ais-biggest-critic-has-lost...

[dcre]

He has said every month for the past three years that there is no technical progress left to be made in LLMs and that there is no more room in the market for inference spending to grow.

Here[0] is a fun selection of excerpts from his July 2024 post "How Does OpenAI Survive?"[1]

"I see no signs that the transformer-based architecture can do significantly more than it currently does."

[0]: https://xcancel.com/pathsnotchosen/status/206360940100129633...

[1]: https://www.wheresyoured.at/to-serve-altman/

[aurareturn]

He’s started a cult around anti AI basically.

[Peaches4Rent]

That statement isn't proof of anything.

If I start a climate crisis cult, doesn't mean my predictions are wrong

[aurareturn]

I don’t have much time to compile his predictions. I’ll let someone else do that.

That said, I just wanted to point out the grift he is doing. He’s making money by telling some people what they want to hear.

If AI invents a cure for cancer, he will tell you it’s still useless because it didn’t invent immortality.

[tipiirai]

Where is the source for that "makes seven million dollars a year" claim?

[svantana]

Probably this: [1]

80k * $7/month * 12 months/year = $6.7M/year

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jan/19/ed-zitron...

[evil-olive]

that's confusing "subscribers" and "paid subscribers".

from Zitron's own website [0]:

> I have 84,000 subscribers and a 55-60% open rate, as well as an 8-11% clickthrough rate.

if the 84k number was all paid subscribers, then the "55-60% open rate" would mean that ~40% of his paying audience doesn't bother to read the thing they're paying for, which does not add up.

also, that's in the "Can I Advertise On Your Newsletter?" section. if there were an even higher number of non-paying subscribers, he'd have an obvious incentive to mention that, because the total number of eyeballs is what a potential advertiser cares about.

0: https://www.wheresyoured.at/about/

[dzonga]

wrong math: usually 1-5% of subscribers are paying customers.

[opsnooperfax]

I find that completely unbelievable. There’s too much high-quality free information for me to ever consume to even think about paying for it, let alone something of mediocre quality. Are we sure the newsletter subscribership isn’t just a total fabrication? Or that it isn’t just a money laundering scheme?

[watwut]

Also, I would not see "making seven million dollars a year by writing" as a reason to dismiss someone. Like, sounds like that such person is doing something other writers just cant.

[munksbeer]

The reason is obviously that engagement drives his revenue, and correctness or facts have nothing to do with it. Everyone knows that content creators will maximise engagement, and clearly he has found an audience who are seeking out a certain narrative, and will write to that narrative to generate revenue.

[tipiirai]

"clearly he has found an audience"

What do you mean "clearly"? Do you know his engagement numbers? Or you just find the content engaging?

[pjc50]

Youtube view/subscribe/like numbers are public. His are .. definitely in the area one can make a living off, but still below popular game streamers.

[munksbeer]

I haven't fact checked anything here, I took the $7 million at face value. If he is generating that amount of money from his content creation, then I think my statement makes sense, right?

I don't wacth/read his content at all because I find AI-doomers really boring and tiresome.

[ofjcihen]

The issue he highlights is purely number driven here.

His predictions timing sucks but he’s right in pointing out the insane numbers involved.

I think AI is a wonderful tool but I also think that there are many wonderful tools that if we bet our entire economy on would result in a catastrophe.

[52-6F-62]

So a writer making money is not okay and means he is incorrect by default, but the CEOs siphoning billions off of circular investment schemes is fine?

Personally, I see both parties making predictions.

Meanwhile, I still must labour. How many more yachts are needed before the earth becomes the utopia they keep selling everyone on? How many more communities must have their rights trampled against their expressed will?

Or do I need to scan my retinas and provide Alt-man a DNA sample for a handful of empty crypto currency first?

[tcp_handshaker]

Go ahead. Spend all your money on the SpaceX IPO. I always love to see newcomers in Financial Darwin Awards Prize.

[avarun]

?

[jollyllama]

Ok, so how many jobs does AI have to take (replacing existing or filling new "jobs") to pay off, then?

[Peaches4Rent]

Any proof of this?

[Zetaphor]

I am unfamiliar with his work, can you provide sources for his past incorrect predictions?

[nikisil80]

lol - the guy who thinks every single subscriber to a newsletter is a paying customer wants to be taken seriously. Zitron's POVs are always deeply researched, well-sourced and clearly formulated - things that, in and of themselves, are extremely valuable in today's world. Oh the AI bubble hasn't burst yet, so he's an idiot? Please tell me how you think the US stock market as a whole, following the Iran war, Trump's tariffs, etc. isn't just pure fraud at this point? The fact it hasn't collapsed /yet/ is not indicative of him being wrong, but rather that the 'economy' is absolutely detached from any real value whatsoever (something it historically had to be tied to, at least tangentially).

[raincole]

The funniest thing is that his articles are constantly pushed to HN frontpage, and every time the top comments (or the comments one level nested below top comments) are pointing out how wrong he's always been.

Either that he's HN mods's favorites or we're experiencing a special case of xkcd 1053[0]: there are always ten thousand people haven't realized how wrong Ed Zitron is.

At this point I don't think even Ed himself believes what he writes. It's just fan service for subscribers. And that is totally reasonable if we view blogging as a business.

[0]: https://xkcd.com/1053/

[Pikamander2]

One of HN's quirks, for better or worse, is that the lack of ability to downvote submissions encourages "controversial" content to rise to the top.

On Reddit, if 500 people like a submission and 500 people dislike it, then it'll end up with 0 points and fail to reach /r/all

But on HN, the same content will end up at 500 points since only the people who like it can affect its rank (unless it dies after getting mass flagged).

The end result is that HN's system favors "hot takes" while Reddit's system favors "preaching to the choir".

The two systems have their pros and cons, but personally I dislike being unable to downvote articles that are full of nonsense.

[pjc50]

People (ab)use the flagging system for that. I've seen plenty of categories of article that get upvoted onto the front page and then instantly vaporized off it by flagging.

[abustamam]

I use a pushbullet channel for HN500. I get a notification whenever an HN submission hits 500 up votes.

It's not common, but every so often one of these submissions will be flagged by the time I get around to clicking the notification.

[vessenes]

I like how he's started preliminarily saying "Now listen, I don't make any trades on this fine thinking. And that's okay by me." So far below the standards of public markets due diligence. Sadly credulous readers will follow his advice. Which could turn out to be accurate in the public markets -- who knows? But if it's accurate it will be an accident, because the quality of analysis is so poor we should not call it analysis.

[tempfile]

Not sure what you're getting at here. Would you be happier if he was trading on the arguments he's making, introducing an incentive to lie?

[vessenes]

Yes, vastly. It’s not hard to do it ethically: “I’m short. Here’s why.”

[ido]

Why only US wages rather than global wages? The US is the biggest economy but it’s still only a minority of the global economy.

[zymhan]

Just consider the math there for a second, when you factor in the average US wage.

[ido]

But we know global GDP per capita (a proxy to wages)- the US represent about 25% of total global GDP (a metric which accounts for US wages being higher than average). I’m not being contrarian, I genuinely think the addressable market is the global market and not just the US (and by a wide margin) and as such thats the real potential of anthropic/openai/et al.

[rob74]

You're partly right. But OTOH, China is (pretty successfully) developing its own AI solutions, and even the (former?) US allies in Europe, America and Asia have become painfully aware that they are dependent on a hostile US administration and tech companies cozying up to that administration, and will be wary of further deepening this dependency, so they will also prefer home-grown solutions. So the addressable market for US companies is much smaller than the global market, even in countries that could theoretically afford Anthropic's and OpenAI's prices.

[baq]

Globally available AI means cheap LLM pilots offshore means huge wage deflation in white collar jobs in the US.

…assuming the AI pace of progress slows down enough that there are still meaningful white collar jobs to have.

[pjc50]

This is just the offshoring and remote discourse all over again. It turns out that the prestige of having a big office full of workers that the CEO can see is well worth the massive expense of siting it in California and paying California salaries. For whatever reason.

(also I suspect the anti-globalization discourse will get even more pointed)

[madaxe_again]

The other question nobody seems to ask - what will $3tn in 2030 be worth? I would bet quite a bit less than it is today.

[pjc50]

US inflation is slightly under 4%, so by my maths receiving $3tn in 2030 would be worth about $2.5tn in 2026 dollars.

[madaxe_again]

Currently slightly under 4%. I have a feeling that part of the solution here is going to end up being, what was the euphemism? Quantitative easing - also known as “printing money”. I would not be surprised if we end up seeing near double digit inflation in USD - it has also significantly lost its status as a global reserve currency, which makes this all the more likely.

Tbh I think it’s already happening in real terms, but the CPIs aren’t fully showing it yet.

[pjc50]

> Quantitative easing

Why though? This isn't a bank run situation. Sure, it's unwise to bet against "US President does something stupid", but the rationale is missing.

The oil situation remains very concerning, and you can't print oil.

[madaxe_again]

Oh but it is. The debt that’s funding the AI buildout ends up in the oddest of places - like pension funds. If defaults occur and work their way up the chain, it’s not dissimilar to the subprime affair - and at that point it’s bail out the poor pensioners or get crucified at the ballot box.

There’s lots of precedent for this over the past decades, both in the U.S. and over the pond.

[pjc50]

How much of this is debt as opposed to equity, though? Can we have a balance sheet?

[irishcoffee]

If I thought there were some actual small cabal of people running the global economy, this is almost like a novel: massive amounts of money entered the economy starting in 2008 and 2020-2023, the rich became insanely wealthy. Their wealth is now all tied up in the 2020s version of the railroad/fiber, we're going to essentially erase trillions of dollars from the global economy and reset.

We sure do need a reset.

[marcosdumay]

I really doubt the US will erase any money any time soon.

The reset is prone to happen by other means.

[irishcoffee]

I consider myself of average intelligence, and I see this coming. Maybe I assume too much.

[marcosdumay]

Every government has complete control on how much of their money exists. If it disappears from the private finance market, it can compensate with any amount it wishes.

[throwaway27448]

It would be better to lean into inflation and just dump a ton of money into the bottom of the market to dilute the top. Of course this only makes sense if the government is willing to regulate market control, which it has demonstrated time and time again it will not.

[bobthepanda]

Rapid inflation/devaluation is certainly a way to do it.

[beloch]

It's more interesting to ask, "Does AI need to follow the current model of evil megacorps building massive data centres that, collectively, guzzle more energy than most nations on Earth?"

Perhaps LLM's (or something better) will develop to be more efficient and quickly become something most people run on local hardware. Perhaps fad-obsessed management types will move onto the next big thing and AI will start being used more judiciously. Perhaps society will set sane regulatory limits that shape the direction AI is going in, from models that take jobs people want to models that, given the right hardware, can do the jobs few want.

Anthropic and OpenAI don't have to succeed for AI to succeed. If they turn out to be a bubble that bursts and torches a lot of investors, it might actually be a fundamentally good thing for everybody else.

[vessenes]

To be clear, nobody WANTS to have to go build all these datacenters. Well, maybe some pure-play hyperscalers do. But there's an immense amount of economic incentive to be able to do this more efficiently, capital and energy. And, what those hyperscalers want will not matter for a second if there isn't demand for the tokens output by those datacenters - they'll go instantly dark and have to seek new forms of valuable compute to offer.

If this current building spree ends in massive solar and other power generation being overbuilt and cutting energy costs, we've had a really good outcome.

[s08148692]

This is why there is so much interest in space based AI compute. It's not just SpaceX - Google, Anthropic and Nvidia have openly expressed interest

If you look at SpaceX plans and ambitions, they hope to deploy massive compute to orbit (multiple Terrawatts, hundreds of thousands of sats). If their ambitions even slightly materialise it would make ground based compute pale in comparison.

Whether or not they succeed in their plans is beside the point - the point is they know that terrestrial electric infra can't sustain the growth they need

[pjc50]

What is the multiplier in cost for a teraflop of compute in space vs on the ground? 100x? 1,000x?

> Whether or not they succeed in their plans is beside the point

No, I think that does matter eventually? Maybe for the IPO value?

[jason_s]

https://spectrum.ieee.org/orbital-data-centers

> In an interview, McCalip says his initial rough calculations a few years ago suggested that data centers in space would cost in the range of 7 to 10 times more, per gigawatt of capacity, than their terrestrial counterparts. “It just wasn’t practical,” he says. “Not even close.” But when Elon Musk began publicly backing the idea, McCalip revisited the numbers using publicly available information about Starlink’s and Tesla’s technologies and capabilities.

[joebe89]

How would cooling work in space based computing? To a layman like me it seems like a significant hurdle to overcome.

[Pingk]

It really doesn't. You're purely relying on radiation fins to carry heat away, which are incredibly inefficient.

> The radiator surface area problem also scales uncomfortably. At 838 watts per square meter, rejecting 1 megawatt of waste heat requires roughly 1,200 square meters of radiator. Deploying that much surface area on a satellite is a structural engineering challenge that gets harder with every order of magnitude. The ISS solar arrays span about 2,500 square meters total.

So even a 2MW data centre in space requires a cooling array rivalling the international space station. Starcloud launched a single H100 in November and they were unable to run it 24/7 due to heat buildup.

Even with novel solutions to make heat transfer to the fins more efficient, like phase-change liquids, the limiting factor is that the vacuum of space is a tremendous insulator.

https://thecoolingreport.com/intel/starcloud-orbital-data-ce...

https://satnews.com/2026/03/17/the-physics-wall-orbiting-dat...

[dgellow]

Can we stop spreading the obvious bullshit that is space compute?

[jorisw]

Care to at least refer to some sources why?

[butlike]

It's literally a deflection mechanism to the fact they want to build data centers all over the land by proposing a fantastical better way that simply won't work.

[dgellow]

That has been covered to death since months, there is no good solution to cooling without an atmosphere. But even going into the technical details is a waste of time, think about how complicated maintaining such a system in space would be compared to having it on earth, the whole idea is a complete grift from beginning to end. There is literally no benefit to do it in space other than as a marketing tool.

Nobody who suggests the idea has ever presented a model that is even remotely close to reality

[brokenmachine]

What a surprise that something this implausible could come from the same guy who proposed trains that run in vacuum tubes.

I can't believe the people who actually listen to this guy can tie their own shoelaces. And somehow he became the richest person on earth. Humans are irredeemable.

[davemp]

Ah yes. Just need to displace 16 million people’s livelihoods. No big deal.

[piokoch]

#3 Trillion, or even more, will be achievable. We are at the very beginning of the monetization of AI. It all started with the free Chat GPT, and a few others. Now the standard is $20 a month if you are not using AI tools too much and you don't need anything fancier. Otherwise you need to pay more, like $200 a month.

Unless you are not company and you don't have some "enterprise deal". And you need an enterprise deal, as 1) it guarantees that your (and your customers) data will not be sold to someone else 2) you are scared that your competitor will have such deal and become much more productive.

This is what we have now. What will be the future?

Well, soon, if you want something like financial advice or medical advice or job search/CV polishing you will be told, that your $20/$200 is not covering that, you need to purchase additional model to have that. Will you do that? It depends how much you are desperate to get medical advice or find a job.

Anthropic Mythos is an example. Soon, if you are programmer and you will ask AI Agent to spot a bugs, AI Agent will tell you that you need to buy extra model for this. Same with performance analysis, same with the design using tool X, Y or Z.

This is pretty scary, as it will put our well-being, productivity in the hands of few corps. It will be event worst that Google Search monopoly we used to have (until AI chats broke this, replacing Google Monopoly with a few other vendors monopoly).

Can this be prevented? Surely. Hopefully we will have capable open models and consumer-level hardware will catch up. But I think this is the place where governments should step in, invest into alternative models which will be at least comparable with flagships.

Chinese models shows that this is doable, DeepSeek is worst than Chat GPT/Claude/Gemini, but not that much and is clearly better than Grok (which is a huge disappointment for me). I guess India would join this game (especially with nationalist like Modi as the leader).

Europe could join this game, the problem is it kills its capabilities with high energy prices and inability to come out with some reasonable, well financed solution. So the only thing EU was able to come up with is some set of regulations that are blocking fast AI development in Europe...

There is French Mistral, but it is French, it is under-financed, it is only-French, as France would not like to lose control over it.

Germany have totally different strategy, they invest into manufacturing oriented AI, what makes a lot of sense, but does not help with the dangers we are facing.

The rest of the Europe is just too poor to spend billions on AI.

There is still time to buckle up for Europe, but given the course of events, stupidity of Brussels elites who does not see the storm coming I am not optimistic.

[gizajob]

The only thing you’re neglecting is that personal computers will be able to run “good enough” open source models locally within 3 years. Can already run it today.

[indianmouse]

Extremely sorry for this unrelated rant. Got triggered by the keyword "Modi".

Quoting Modi is a joke which one cannot even remotely relate w.r.t to AI and don't even feel sorry for saying that since that man blabbers on every stage about non-sensical / non-existent stuff! Watching his videos is the best timepass one can have!

Having said that, the infra and mindset is definitely not there in India to even remotely to innovate or compete in AI race!

Academia is a huge BS where every other person is a backstabber!

A lot of talent is there for sure, but all wants to work for some company or another since there is absolutely zero support for entrepreneurs . No real innovation.

All copy cats as they have proven with mobile and robotics. Just copying or masking Chinese products with the local brand names and reselling. That's all they are good at and that's the irony.

So far, nothing has come from that country which is a real innovation or ground breaking. The day it happens probably one can consider that they are good.

But otherwise, they are good at selling / reselling and scamming the world and nothing else! They cannot produce anything or whatever they produce is taken control by a handful of big corporates from the western region. That's a narcistic corporate monopoly!

Extremely bad tax structure, endless corruption and useless and unqualified ministers occupying worst portfolios, people are really struggling to survive!

Where will they innovate or compete in the global AI race?

Everyone at every level just want to scam and make money to surive that's all!

Period.