Comment by kev009
4 hours ago
I think he's just locked in to this performance. He raises a lot of interesting points in his articles, but gets a little over his skis when he conflates the absurdity of particulars with long term death of the entire industry (people thought the same thing about .COM and look where we ended up). The applications of this technology are both more immediately applicable and relatable versus some recent bubbles.
Textbook audience capture: once you've built your entire brand on "AI is a scam", you can't back down even if the facts change, because your paying customers are there for that take— the demand for "AI is a scam" takes is almost as frenzied as the demand for AI compute right now— and going back on it literally threatens your ability to pay the mortgage.
This is a big reason why I'm none too happy about the rise of individual-authors-as-brands via Substack replacing traditional journalism: once people are following and paying you specifically for a specific opinion, you're locked in. A very small number of individual bloggers have a brand of "I'll say the truth no matter what" and actually mean it, but the overwhelming majority are like Ed.