[lz400]

Already many comments saying this but Ed Zitron is not a person I trust. He's been so biased and wrong on stuff that I consider very obvious and trivial that his complicated analysis with numbers and trends I can't just take at face value.

As an example of obvious wrong things, I remember a tweet of his where he was mocking people talking about agents and agentic coding. He was kind of saying that he was going crazy as agents weren't a thing really and people talking about them like they were real. Something like "agents?! what agents?! these guys hear themselves?!". The answers were full of hundreds of people patiently explaining how they were actually _using_ agents. This wasn't in 2023, it was a couple of months ago.

He just has an audience and an engagement target. His objective is clicks, not informing.

[dghlsakjg]

His numbers are based on sources that he says he doesn’t trust, which is quite interesting. While he may be directionally accurate (eg. The revenue needed to match the spend seems lofty at best) he seems to be mixing and matching numbers to create a worst case scenario that doesn’t necessarily line up with reality. Combined with his complete unwillingness to be open minded about anything even tangentially related to AI, and I can’t take him that seriously.

Publications love a doom and gloom rant, which is why he seems to have built an entire career on hysterical anti-ai screeds. It doesn’t mean that he’s right though.

[w29UiIm2Xz]

It's disappointing that this article got mindshare when a more neutral author could better argue the bearish case for AI valuations. I want the steelman argument from a more respected individual.

The problem is when untrusted authors take positions, then it circulates widely, then people discredit the author and by proxy the position, when the position could be correct.

The article has a number of emotional appeals in it. Something more focused on raw numbers would foster more curious discussion.

[Grombobulous]

He provided a lot of quantitative analysis in this article. Perhaps an example or two you think these numbers are off-base could help bolster this point?

I think the most compelling part of the article is that these numbers point to a situation where the level of investment required seems unsustainably high by plain dollars.

You don’t really have to agree with the author to see how it plays out. OpenAI and SpaceX and Anthropic need to go public this year to avoid running out of money. There’s no more private money, not enough to fund them. The IPO is the last funding round.

They can continue growing extremely quickly and AI can still be highly useful and maybe be transformative, but still not have the money to fund that growth.

That part he wrote about an AI company gone bust canceling their Oracle contract made Oracle feel like a Nortel analogy to me. If they have a sudden lapse with a big chunk of their customers they are writing down triple digit billions of dollars.

[lz400]

I guess what I'm saying is that I won't look at his numbers since he's an unreliable source from my point of view and there's a chance that he's going to try to deceive me and it's a waste of time for me to listen to him.

I do have other sources of information and I probably agree in general that AI companies are doing pretty shady financial shenanigans. I even think it's possible that openai is in real trouble. But I don't extrapolate that into "AI is useless", which is what he does.

[lavezzi]

> I guess what I'm saying is that I won't look at his numbers since he's an unreliable source from my point of view and there's a chance that he's going to try to deceive me and it's a waste of time for me to listen to him.

But he's linking out to sources

[Grombobulous]

I would agree with you that extrapolating to “AI is useless” is definitely a giant step too far, and that part of the article ruins a lot of the other interesting bits of it.

It’s great that he cites a lot of sources but some of them aren’t great, like the Microsoft story about canceling their Claude spend. I think that particular story isn’t much of an indicator of anything, and it might not even be true.

But the financial part…this guy isn’t the only person out there sounding the alarm about the math not mathing.

[lz400]

FWIW I agree the financials are a bit crazy and OpenAI went a bit nuts with the circular deals. That said, honestly, I don't think it's the end of the world. I think there will probably be some correction/crash and it will probably be healthy. A lot of these circular deals will get canceled, but it's at the end of the day people changing imaginary numbers with each other. The underlying tech I still think it's revolutionary regardless, the same way that the internet was and the tech boom crash at the end of the day was a distraction from the fact that these companies did end up "ruling the world"

[dabedee]

This is what critical reading is for. It requires you examining your own assumptions as much as the text's. If you don't engage with something or someone because of your own bias or assumptions, that is also willful ignorance; you also might end up never updating your prior stance when new information emerges.

There is a financial argument and capability argument.

In this case, he doesn't make the claim one follows from the other.

[lz400]

There's no shortage of sources of information. I'll exercise "critical reading" with sources I consider trustworthy to begin with. I've no time to engage with difficult analysis from people who are not worth the effort. You wouldn't engage with every lunacy you read on a tabloid, right? similar principle

[dabedee]

Fair enough. I won't debate preferences or how you choose to spend your time. I think one of the merits of his articles is that he surveys and gathers sources that others can engage with. Even if we admit he is biased, that exercise (his writing) alone is valuable because one can contradict or reassess his claims.

[no-name-here]

Grandparent comment’s primary claim was that Ed has frequently claimed untrue things in the past and so questioned why people would continue going to such a source, but your reply didn't seem to address that at all?

Someone else separately linked Ed’s 2024 claims [1] that:

A. AI revenue had about already maxed out.

B. AI's output accuracy was already about as high as it would ever be

C. AI users were already declining or was as high as it would ever be.

So we have 3 2024 claims about whether AI was already the biggest/best it would ever be, and whether AI usage was even already shrinking. All ended up being the opposite of true.

Have you looked at whether Ed’s previous claims that went against popular AI views and are testable ended up being true or not?

Does it matter whether an author’s claims like that are true or not for whether you will continue consuming them?

If straightforward claims like the above are so easily disprovable, what makes you believe that he isn't cherry-picking other stats in order to spread misinformation or disinformation, as the individual stats he points to might even be completely true, but if they are cherry-picked, they may be more misleading than elucidative?

If someone has a multi-year history of frequently spreading false claims, should we trust their predictions about future events more than other sources?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48447549

[JoeJonathan]

He also calls everyone a grifter, when he seems like one himself. Im deeply skeptical of our AI overlords, but its disingenuous to keep pretwnding theres nothing there.