[jamiequint]

Ed Zitron also said that consumers were losing interest in ChatGPT in January 2024, that AI models were reaching their upper possible limits in Feburary 2024, that ChatGPT and similar products were "not particularly useful for anything", that hallucinations could not possibly be reduced in models, etc.

He's a churlish AI skeptic that isn't worth listening to.

[solenoid0937]

There's a huge crowd of "wishful thinkers" that want to see AI collapse and will cling to any rationalization that it will do so. This is Zitron's audience.

[VCFundedGenYer]

How exactly is AI "succeeding?" By the numbers, every AI company is on a fast track to going bankrupt at record speeds. All while burning the planet down and making electronics unavailable to literally everyone. This is not sustainable.

Keep a close eye on the "Is AI Profitable Yet?" website. The numbers will open your eyes. Please, enlighten me on how AI is successful.

[dumberquestions]

AI would be profitable today if all companies weren't constantly racing to train the next biggest model, that's the whole reason the numbers look whack.

This is basically the first time we're seeing true competition between massive tech companies, the previous state had each one of them clinging on to their own separate monopoly.

[danaris]

And if the training stops, the existing LLM models will fairly quickly decay in usefulness.

There's no free steady-state of high-quality current models for this; it's either keep investing forever or deal with models that stopped gaining new information in 202X.

[wookmaster]

What do you mean? Why would new information be important ? Most models know how to search and summarize information

[dumberquestions]

Why would they decay in usefulness?

[solenoid0937]

Anthropic's Q2 was allegedly profitable, and OpenAI is allegedly pretty close to profitability.

Spending way more money than you earn is pretty common for startups anyways, "going bankrupt" is a silly thing to say when the whole point is to spend more than you earn

[tristanj]

Anthropic is profitable, running at ~$75B ARR, and has 80+% gross margin on their API products.

OpenAI is not yet profitable, but is running at ~40B ARR and their revenue is growing rapidly at >200% YoY.

[gizmodo59]

People still believe that the model intelligence has plateaud and I feel like they live under the rocks. I get the insane capex spend, I get the hype, I even get certain company will go under but to ignore the capability jump in a year is absurd.

[kyriakos]

It hasn't plateaud but the generational leaps are definitely getting smaller.

[gaigalas]

The only honest benchmark is "has it cured cancer yet?". It has not, nor moved close to doing so.

People are doing great at marketing the diminishing returns as breakthroughs though.

[gizmodo59]

That’s a very narrow view. So non of the fields of science and engineering matter but just cancer?

[gaigalas]

I would accept something on the same magnitude in other areas.

AI companies promised a lot of things in the beginning. "Cure cancer", "no one works anymore", "intelligence as cheap as electricity".

Any of those would do. If the investment is sized on that, but the result is not there yet, you're being scammed.

[baal80spam]

> The only honest benchmark is "has it cured cancer yet?".

Says who?

[gaigalas]

AI companies themselves pitched this. It's their word.

Now no one talks about it (obviously), but I remember.

[InsideOutSanta]

He's been mostly wrong about the potential for AI, but mostly right about the financials. Don't listen to him for opinions, but don't discount his factual reporting because his opinions are off.

[chairmansteve]

I am very impressed with LLMs, but.....

I don't think we are seeing productivity gains due to LLMs in the general economy yet.

Even in software development, are we seeing an increase in the number of products or features shipped?

[InsideOutSanta]

I agree. I think LLMs do make specific tasks much faster (like typing code), but these tasks usually make up a small amount of people's actual work.

What I mostly meant was that Ed's view on LLMs is that they won't get much better than they are now, which—so far—has been incorrect every time he made the point. I also think he puts too much weight on things like hallucinations, which aren't much of an issue for many applications of LLMs.

[dwaltrip]

For someone like Ed, it feels like way too much effort to wade through the muck.

I personally can't stand anything that whiffs of "outrage content" . Doubly so if they are stupendously wrong on a regular basis. Triply so if they never own up to those bad calls.

If someone else wants to get their hands dirty, more power to them. I'll wait for anything useful to filter through other sources.

Life is short, and there's so much other high quality material I'd rather give my limited attention to.

[nxc18]

Zed publishes usage metrics for AI and they are trending down:

https://zed.dev/agent-metrics

[flippant]

This is not a complete picture. I use Zed daily and I have the AI features enabled, but I never use the built in agent in Zed. I reach for an agent in a separate terminal session.

[joegibbs]

More people are probably using stuff like Claude Code, Codex etc from the CLI or desktop apps, meaning they’re actually using more AI and skipping Zed altogether

[woodruffw]

Anecdotally: I disabled Zed’s AI features, but I use LLMs more extensively than ever outside of my IDE. So the numbers may not paint a clear story here.

[barefootford]

I love zed but it’s become just a terminal and markdown editor. All of my LLM usage is outside of it.

[kzrdude]

It's summer vacation time.

[EA-3167]

If you're wondering why these "churls" are increasingly popular, it's the reality that far from being mobbed by skeptics, the entire market economy is being taken for a ride in the name of AI. It's very much like the febrile environment that developed about Crytpo, in which anyone who expressed concern that maybe this tech wasn't going to revolutionize money, programming, and society itself was a "churlish skeptic".

I certainly wouldn't credit Ed Zitron with timing his predictions very well, but that doesn't make them wrong, and it certainly doesn't support the AI maximalism we're all forced to endure.

[kyleweng]

Agree. I don't pay attention to people trying to call the top, but I do pay attention to profitability/sustainability concerns.

[sheepjumpmoons]

And you're an equity partner for a PE/VC that funds AI. And?

[sidibe]

Any YouTube video with him is filled with fawning comments. People love it when others tell them what they want to hear. He'll be able to do his schtick for a long time, well after it should be obvious to everyone the AI is going to change things. I'm not enthusiastic about AI and wish we could pump the breaks somehow but at some point you have to recognize there's something there. I don't think it's helpful that the face of AI criticism says a lot of nonsense.

[nearlyepic]

Hah, you know they feel threatened when capitalists have to whip out the classist insults.

[amazingamazing]

> that AI models were reaching their upper possible limits in Feburary 2024,

I’m curious, removing coding as a criterion what is more impressive about the current models than say gpt 4o? Give a prompt example. Keep in mind most consumers of AI are likely not using it for coding so this is relevant.

I doubt anyone could give a not coding example where it’s meaningfully better with current frontier than 4o.

Take humaneval. 4o gets 90, gpt 5.6 gets 94%. So what?

https://openai.com/index/hello-gpt-4o/

If an iPhone had a 4o quality model that could run locally frontier models would be finished.

[heaney-555]

Exactly. In all facets of life, it's amazing that people continue to listen to those with a strong track record of confidently wrong predictions.

[xnx]

Relevant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_predictions_for_autono...