I don't know if Ed Zitron is right about allhis analysis, but it's nice to have an alternative, well-argued narrative to the gushing torrent of AI company propaganda.
Read a little more of what he's written before you praise him, so you don't end up looking as dumb as I did.
Ed may be right about some of his claims, but he is 100% a crank, and he makes so many incoherent claims I'd say that if he's right, it's in the nature of a broken clock.
If you want to dismiss him for being hyperbolic or under estimating the usefulness of AI go for it.
If you are making the case that he is full of shit, please provide some actual evidence of his main thesis that AI companies are not going about this in any sustainable way
> his main thesis that AI companies are not going about this in any sustainable way
The point isn't that his thesis is fucked, just that his analysis tends to be free with details in a way that shouldn't inspire confidence, e.g. mixing up EBIT and EBITDA.
Someone elsewhere in this thread referenced this guy [1]. His takes properly summarise the lack of care Zitron appears to display for getting detailed arguments right.
If you're deeply familiar with financial jargon, I think he's fine. But if you're not, it's easy to get whisked into woo-woo nonsense that's falsely precise due to mis-using (and in some cases, very clearly mis-understanding) core financial and economic concepts.
AI is going to be very useful going into the future. It’s just that it will just be incorporated into the existing programmers tool kit, and not the be all end all.
i think it was cory doctorow (?) who said in an interview: "its just a plugin" for your ide...
what i see at $employer is wanting to do everything with ai from start to finish (and i mean everything) but from looking at the output (or lack of) of coworkers i'm thinking that perspective may be closer to the truth...
>And yes, that sound you hear is the slow deflation of the bubble I've been warning you about since March...
>How does GPT – a transformer-based model that generates answers probabilistically (as in what the next part of the generation is most likely to be the correct one) based entirely on training data – do anything more than generate paragraphs of occasionally-accurate text?
etc.
Basically the essence is he's skeptical of AI / LLMs being any good so thinks all the investment is down the drain. Meanwhile AI progresses such that Fable can probably beat most humans and IQ tests, maths and the like. And the 'bubble' didn't deflate yet.
My take is that as a PR guy, used to people hyping stuff and not that up on comp-sci he fundamentally doesn't get what's going on. He assumes it's all hype rather than the steady progress in computing reaching brain equivalent levels and beyond.
He's not wrong about the numbers, and you may be seeing what you want to see a little, here.
Fable scoring OK on some benchmarks does not the mean the investment has financially paid off, because that's not how ROI works.
You're right that no bubble has deflated, but I think we can all see that a) there seems to be a bubble - I'm old enough to remember the dot-com era bubble, and this definitely feels like that, b) the only company clearly making a profit on AI right now is NVIDIA, and c) the net economic value of the sector as a whole (i.e. money out > money in), is still unproven
It's not even obvious to me as somebody who is up on comp-sci, that this isn't all hype, that the progress is/will be steady, and that reaching brain equivalent levels and beyond using these architectures will be economically viable.
I can create a perfectly good human brain in 9 months, train it in ~20 years, and have it pay off economically in a more proven way than [waves hands] all of this.
For some reason we've decided paying a hyperscaler the equivalent of a year's salary to do a job in a a day that a similarly paid and skilled human could do in a month is value for money.
You could probably give everyone in the US free healthcare for life and a free ride through college for less money than has been pumped into AI in the last 5 years, and have a more proven economic model.
Sure, time value is a thing, but given the error rates, the energy issues... this direction is not exactly a slam dunk as a net benefit, and I think that's all he's called out in any of the writing I've seen of his.
I also happen to agree with his take on Oracle, as it happens - they're only going to survive if it turns out they're a part of critical national infrastructure deep in the bowels of the US government. They look totally over-leveraged otherwise.
I agree it's a bit like the dot com bubble and I don't think he's wrong about everything but he seems to think it's a bit more like the NFT craze with nothing there rather than dot coms where the web/internet was of real importance.
I think both sides might be cherry picking the pieces that make their arguments the strongest - Pearkes has pulled out a few paragraphs, but there is a lot in Zitron's writing, so it's easy to select 6 bits you don't like/agree with or find fault with, but I'm not sure it undermines the rest.
I actually think Zitron would be better off focusing on those deals where there is clearly something weird going on (SpaceX IPO, Oracle/OpenAI/NVIDIA triangle, the neoclouds, and so on), than picking a fight with the one company that actually seems to be trying to play it straight in this sector (Anthropic), and I can see how he's covering the whole field with the same cynicism which might not be appropriate.
That said, I'm not entirely convinced that some of Pearkes' analysis deserves us all to align to the rosy bullish view he takes either.
Time will tell, it always does, but at least you've put forward some data unlike anyone else, so thank you for that.
Let me guess, you disagree with his views on the utility of Ai (which he's pretty bad about) and you use that as cover and/or to negate his real journalism that is based in facts (Ai being an unprecedented & unrecoupable bubble littered with unprofitable companies thats likely to crash our economy unless these Ai conglomerates cozy up lawmakers to situate themselves for a bail out)
My disagreement is that every time he turns out to be completely wrong he silently moves the goalposts instead of acknowledging it.
For years he was all-in on "AI is useless, it has no business value at all" claims, and then when that was decisively disproven by Claude Code, he didn't spend one second on self-reflection on why he was wrong and whether this might mean he is wrong about other things. He just smoothly pivoted to "AI companies will never be profitable, tokens are hugely subsidized". And now that that's about to be disproven (word on the street is that Anthropic will soon report profitability, and both Anthropic and OAI have repeatedly said inference is profitable), he's pivoting again to "tokens are too expensive and the ROI isn't there for business". No correction, no reflection, just "we're at war with Eurasia, we've always been at war with Eurasia".
Even if he’s sometimes right, there are better analysts out there who are also right and have the honesty, humility and integrity that Zitron lacks.
Ed's not a crank, but you need to pay close attention to the topic of his proclamations to separate the wheat from the chaff.
He's right about some things -- off the top of my head:
-- OAI's perpetual fundraising, due to their losses
--Coreweave
--Circular financing
--Revenue/capex imbalance
...all forensic economics analyses.
He's often wrong when on the topic of capabilities and adoption -- he mistakes a snapshot for a trajectory, and treats current limitations as permanent:
--Hallucination/unreliability an unsolvable problem
--OpenAI failing
--AI capabilities have plateaued / models will stop getting better
--Saying Microsoft's cancelled leases meant the bubble was popping
--Agents a marketing fad
--Gross miscalculation of OAI 2025 revenue
--Lack of adoption
--AI not getting more efficient (compared to 10-40x reduction in inference costs YoY)
--Repeating "95% of pilots fail" but ignoring massive
bottoms-up adoption
Christensen got this right when he had the insight to judge a technology by its rate of improvement relative to what a market needs, not by whether it's good enough today.
Put Zitron back at the early days of the integrated circuit and imagine what he would have written about the technology.
Some open predictions:
--Bubble is going to burst -- I tend to agree with the thesis that "there is some marginal capacity being planned/built today that will never pay back its capex"
--Losses mean there's no viable business here -- the recent moves by all of the players to some form of usage based pricing show there's price discovery occurring. I don't know of anyone who is stopping using LLMs because of the pricing changes...it's just changing their behavior.
Okay, but what’s your counter argument to Jim Chanos? Oh, that’s right, you don’t have one because he’s a tried and true Wall Street heavy who speaks in plain English. Ed and Jim are on the same page looking at it through different sets of prescription glasses. I hope you have your money where your mouth is, so to speak, because I certainly do (avoiding AI trade) and good luck with the SNAP paperwork in two years.
At this point I have yet to hear a solid argument against his arguments that use half as much evidence as he does.
That isn’t to say that he’s right, that’s just to say that while he gets creative in his phrasing numbers don’t lie and I haven’t seen anyone else present competing numbers that make sense.
If anyone has them to the degree with which he provides them then please, by all means, I’m interested.
Ya, there are already three pure ad hominem comments here with no examples. Zitron isn't even anti-AI per se. He clearly talks out his ass at times (like AI doesn't work for developers... which he's not saying so much anymore, I don't think) but his main talking points are around numbers and profitability.
As a C++ developer, AI does not work well for software development in my experience. Maybe LLM developer tools work better if you write React or HTML/CSS, but they have been inadequate for my use case since their arrival.
Casey Muratori, who doesn't use AI, made this point on a podcast. Specifically he said that he doesn't blame web developers for wanting to use AI because it's such a mess of an ecosystem and impossible to keep everything you need to know to be successful in your head.
I'm a web developer to myself who has done zero game or systems programming so I can't speak to that side of it, but you reminded me of it!
I find it bad for generating code but alright for review, I put it as a tool to run along static analysis to catch if I missed something on a code change or merge request (being specifically about C++)
> Ya, there are already three pure ad hominem comments here with no examples.
You should probably understand Thomas' comment in part as a reaction to Zitron attacking Thomas in a pretty low-brow fashion, essentially for saying "hey folks, AI coding works and you should be using it":
The bottom line is that Ed Zitron, like Gary Marcus, built their entire brand on being AI contrarians; they can't say anything positive about it without qualifying it with a more damning negative. There's nothing wrong about having voices like that, but it makes them unreliable narrators. I am apprehensive about AI and its externalities, but I don't want to be caught citing either of them for that reason.
I swear to Christ before this comment I had completely forgotten that Zitron had ever written anything about me. Zitron isn't an engineer and doesn't code, so I'm not all that het up by his attempt to rebut me.
> You should probably understand Thomas' comment in part as a reaction to Zitron attacking Thomas
Sure, but an ad hominem is still an ad hominem regardless of one's personal feelings (it took me a good minute to figure out who "Thomas" is).
Otherwise, I agree, and I try not to cite extremists or bullies on either side. I don't even really care that much about defending Zitron, but I do put him on in the background because he does so many podcasts as I find it soothing to listen to someone rant and rave against the tech bro overlords, even if some of the shit he says annoys me. But he does show his work sometimes and wanted to point that out.
You were just attacking his character without backing it up? Do I not know what an ad hominem is? If that's the case, then that's embarrassing for me. Unless you're saying that your remark doesn't technically bash his character?
Yeah, you're off on what an ad hominem is. I would dispute that I attacked his character at all, but that doesn't matter: an ad hominem isn't an "attack on character", it's an argument that is predicated on an unrelated character attack.
My argument here is just that Zitron says things that are wrong all the time.
You could fairly rebut me by saying I didn't substantiate that argument. That's true! That doesn't make the argument fallacious; it just means it isn't facially dispositive.
I don’t have numbers, but I would like to point out that he's missing a crucial number as well. The fact that maxing out a subscription's limit makes a user generate an amount of tokens that costs much more than the subscription itslef isn't enough to back his claim. What we need to know, is the average use of subscriptions. Think about Gyms. My gut feeling is that, if we run the numbers, we see that by maxing out a gym subscription we can get more value out of it than what we paid for. And still, gyms are profitable because the average customer is using less than what they're paying for. Now, I still think AI companies will have to rise their prices (they are already doing that), but the situation could be less dramatic than what people pointing at those figures based on subscription maxing are claiming.
You do really need to see the useage numbers for this. Movie pass famously thought they could price movie tickets like gym memberships - I assume they looked at how often the average person watched movies in theaters at the start - but then found out having a subscription to see movies for free / cheap any time you want changed that rate substantially and they ran out of vc money.
Having a subscription might make people run agents overnight, or casually generate images for fun, or start more coding projects. The reason gym memberships work is that people like the idea of going to the gym a lot but don't really enjoy actually doing it very much and fall off over time, leaving the gym for the rare person who's really into fitness to use it cheaply.
is AI like that where most users will get bored? or is it like movies where they'll try to get their money's worth?
> is AI like that where most users will get bored?
User's getting bored will also spell trouble for the subscription model. I don't think we'll see a world where the average normie is going to be running agents in a loop overnight to make software. They'll get bored use it to cheat on their homework and as a Google replacement, generate silly images for a week then get bored of that, and then realize the have no actual reason to be spending $100/month and drop down to a lower tier or just cancel all together and live within the free-tier limits.
So if that happens, the labs are now left only with power users that can actually generate asymmetric cost. The market will bifurcate into free-tier users and "get their money's worth" users. So the risk isn't that the top 5% of users use more tokens than the subscription has any right to give you, it's that everyone else cancels their plans and only those top 5% of users remain.
The labs will have to put stricter rate limiting and token limits on the subscription plans to avoid MoviePass style burn.
Gyms get away with it because most don't let you cancel easily. You pay monthly, but are locked in for 6 months or a 1 year at a time (Adobe subscription style). Maybe the labs will start to do the same? Let you pay $20/month, but you are forced into an annual commitment?
It could have worked if they weren't leveraged to their necks on spending. All based on the assumption that they can make something like 10x or higher in a few years.
Another point against your gym analogy. When people don't have that much disposable income why would they subscribe to something they semi regularly use? And if it becomes more expensive why would they not cancel it?
> Another point against your gym analogy. When people don't have that much disposable income why would they subscribe to something they semi regularly use? And if it becomes more expensive why would they not cancel it?
I don't see where the difference is with gym subscriptions here.
I gotta say that if their best bet is “people forget to use it” I don’t think that that’s going to drive the adoption they need.
Especially if part two of your theory comes to fruition and they have to raise prices. I might of forgotten my Netflix subscription when it was 10 dollars a month but certainly not if it was 200 you know?
You're biasing for quantity of argument vs. quality of argument. That's Zitron's MO: writing 10k word rambles that cover 20 topics, ostensibly with tons of links to sourcing, but with most of the sources not actually saying what Zitron implies they do.
Nobody has the patience to read a comprehensive point by point rebuttal to any of it, it's just too tedious.
You say "numbers don't lie". But they do, when the numbers being presented have been adversarially chosen. You just find numbers (no matter how low quality) that fit the chosen narrative, you throw out the numbers (no matter how high quality) that rebut it. If you're trying to predict the future, you can't afford that of bias. If you're an anti-AI grifter, you can't afford to not have that bias, your entire livelihood depends on only showing things that support the narrative.
So I’ve heard this argument before but I’ve not even seen someone demonstrate HOW the numbers are “adversarial”.
This is the crux of my argument: Zitron provides numbers and he provides a lot of them sourced from reliable and trustworthy sources. He provides counterarguments to numbers-sparse arguments by using even more actual, real numbers with a logical theory formed from them.
This should make it rather easy to dispute his claims, no? So then where are the equally rational disputes?
Some of his numbers are rebutted all the time. It doesn't matter, because he will just ignore the rebuttals and just keep repeating the invalid or irrelevant numbers. For example, a few months ago he did some bad math with a broken spreadsheet to prove that Anthropic's ARR numbers had to be incorrect. That was quickly rebutted[0], but Zitron continued repeating the argument anyway.
Just this article has a dozen instances of numbers being used to prop up the argument. They're mostly irrelevant to whatever argument Zitron is trying to make at the time. Some others are straight up misrepresentations. HN really is not a good forum for point by point rebuttals for that many cases. Do you think there's a particularly high impact use of numbers in this article?
"The biggest thing we’ve learned from the large language model generation is how many people are excited to replace human beings, and how many people just don’t understand labour of any kind"
Really? I think we've heard C-suite blabbermouths and borderline nontechnical tech CEOs being amplified by social media making these assertions, but boy did the weakly efficient market deliver a relatively swift correction to that mindset, no?
Q: "What would it take to change your point of view?"
A: "[AI] would have to solve all hallucinations forever, which they are completely incapable [of]."
Can you produce a human that is infallible? I'll wait.
My hot take is AI is increasingly less unprofitable as the cost of serving tokens drops and Nvidia's ongoing offers to guarantee profitability is a sign that it isn't stopping anytime soon.
You either believe in the underlying science and technology or you don't. But in a world where AI is a fad like cabbage patch kids and beanie babies, what's next?
> But in a world where AI is a fad like cabbage patch kids and beanie babies
AI will almost certainly not be a fad for software developers, or at the very least for web developers, but it's certainly possible that other industries will look back on "experimental AI days" and chuckle.
Even if there is a financial bubble (that pops), the technology is still not going away.
As for what's next, I dunno. I've heard people talking about similar tech that doesn't use neural nets/etc, but that is out of my wheelhouse.
The possibility of AI sticking around is apparently pretty threatening to the Zitron cult or what seemed like an innocuous response wouldn't be in such negative territory so quickly.
But I think AI is here to stay and it has already proven useful. And sure, we will look back on today's models like we look back upon Gordon Gekko and his giant early cell phone. And I cannot fathom how one can not separate AI the science and technology from AI tech bros and CEOs. I agree the latter are going to go through some things as the AGI fails to arrive on their schedule, but IMO there's no turning back on the technology nor should there be.
> But I think AI is here to stay and it has already proven useful.
Yes, I said as much. I've said this is two other places in this thread, but when they are talking AI being useful, they aren't just talking about for software development. The software industry is seeing far more AI adoption, by a very large margin, than any other industry, and the success of the current companies hinges on it being heavily adopted everywhere. I don't really care to defend Zitron because he does speak out of his lane far too much, especially when it comes to software, and those are the points the HN crowd latches onto. But that's not the bulk of what he talks about.
This but instead it's people insisting that AI will replace my job (been three months out for at least 3 years now) because they know it involves words.
To be fair he has a background in technology PR and Marketing (which he’s been very critical of) which I would count as more worthwhile when assessing the actual value of the product.
I mean you can say he’s not a “science guy” but he’s undeniably “smart”.
While I don't really care one way or another, Zitron isn't arguing AI as a technology is going to fail and go away, but that the numbers of the American companies make no sense and there is a good chance they, or at least some of them, will go away. He does argue that there are large amounts of people who just don't care enough about "AI," and this is likely true. The thing to keep in mind though is that he is not talking about software developers here. What is evident about some of the comments in this thread (and HN comments in general) is that many people on this site seems to think that whenever anyone says anything along the lines of "AI doesn't work for me" that they automatically assume they are talking about "in software development" when they aren't.
the pro-AI side on the other hand has poured billions into ads and marketing and CEOs are forcing it on people due to a combo of FOMO, personal investments in AI (CEO, board, investor), etc
I think AI discourse is revealing some new contours to the information bubbles that we all live in.
folks in the US have been pretty aware that bubbles based on political opinions -- we're all surrounded by news from "our side" yet we know the other side exists in some other bubble. but for AI, we're all either surrounded by pro- or anti- opinions and its a little shocking to learn that theres a parallel internet with the opposite stance. especially shocking when you find somebody that lives in teh same political bubble but opposite AI bubble.
Both can be true. AI is very, very polarizing. The entire Internet is also filling up with AI generated content, some slop, some okay. There is also a very pro-AI managerial class that wants to replace everyone and everything with a Claude project so they can "just ask Claude!"
I find it weird/funny you are getting so many hate responses towards Ed, still no counter-arguments at all. When asked why he is wrong, they vanish. From the outside it looks like a coordinated campaign to try to discredit him.
Happy to read why is he wrong, and change my mind, as long as the arguments provide the same level of analysis he provides.
The vast majority of what I see out there is relentlessly negative about AI. It is kind of absurd to call this the "alternative" unless the implication is that the rest of AI skeptical writing is not "well-argued."
A resolute anti-AI perspective is a breath of fresh air compared to the middle-of-the-road "AI made me 10x more productive BUT"-style comments.
My professional opinion is that LLM technology doesn't work very well for software development and I'm not interested in hemming and hawing over its supposed benefits any longer.
Talking with a friend of mine who's been in development for some time and I had been talking a little bit about the skill required to wield AI effectively and that people were expecting it to be something that required less skill than it does.
He said his version of this observation is "your agents are only as good as you are." I think he's right, and the key is to practice and build the skill.
that doesn't sound like a net benefit at all. I think mostly people just enjoy playing with these toys, and good developers are still good with them, bad developers still bad
I'm generally pretty accepting of trust me bro style arguments where we some claims presented without evidence. Especially for AI, sure some model just rm -rf ed your home directy bro sounds bad. It works fine for online discourse.
This is less agreeable. You kind of just made statements without even having claims (even without requirement of evidence or details) to back them up.
this whole argument is illusory. nobody is arguing in good faith based on repeatable experiments. this debate is 100% based on how this technology makes one feel, and whether one is speculating for or against future economic returns from the technology
As I mentioned in this thread the other day, it's not worth debating AI skeptics anymore in 2026, with step changes like Fable and Sol. Maybe it was the case in 2025 and before but the field has improved rapidly that it doesn't make sense to listen to people with AI experiences prior to that who haven't touched it since. Does AI make mistakes, sure, but increasingly fewer.
Well that's my personal opinion. You might have a different one but I largely found it to be a waste of my own time, because it's just based on personal experiences.
My dude. People like you have been making this same claim for literally years now. We've been getting it for every single model that came out ever since 2023. It's never yet been true. Don't act like it's the fault of your interlocutors when they are skeptical of a claim you make, instead pay attention to the fact that you are following up many people who falsely claimed the same thing. It's perfectly rational to be skeptical under those conditions.
I don't know about "people like me" but I personally only felt the change myself in early 2026, before that I was like many people quite skeptical. Hence why I have the opinion I do, if it could change my mind I'm sure others could too. And anyway the state of affairs is not the same as 2023 so it always bears repeating one's experiences with the topic every year for an actually accurate assessment. Otherwise it's just he said she said as we're engaging in right now.
I swear I’ve seen this exact same thing said every few months for the last couple of years. You’ll keep repeating it when the next model is released too.
Some developers work better with LLMs in their workflows than others. Some problems are easier for LLMs to generate a reasonable solution for than others. Some folks prompt minimally and see what the vibes bring. Others start with a detailed architecture and implementation plan.
The individual results will depend quite a lot on the person, the problem, and the approach. It's not a guaranteed winning formula for everyone.
I don’t think people like Linus Torvalds or Stephen Wolfram feel like language models beat them, just they’ve managed to find specific cases where flawed brainless workhorses serve their needs.
While that's true - it does not impute Ed's position with greater accuracy or authority. I don't know if Ed is wrong, but I get this vague sense that he is being led on by his emotions.
I am sympathetic to some of his criticisms that the enthusiasm and financial commitment has run far ahead what can be delivered. But I don't quite share his intensity over the doom and gloom. There probably will be a correction. It will probably sting. But I don't expect it to be the near wipe-out that Ed's passionate voice seems to steer towards.
Ed may be right about some of his claims, but he is 100% a crank, and he makes so many incoherent claims I'd say that if he's right, it's in the nature of a broken clock.