Comment by Terr_
4 hours ago
> He would begin somewhere–statistics on AI demand, say–and then walk the calculations carefully over to the next step–maybe revenue needed for profitability by AI companies–and you could follow the argument.
Which of the hyperlinks provided at the beginning sounded like what you wanted, and after you clicked it* how did it disappoint you?
The information you are describing is stuff I would not expect anybody to repeatedly duplicate across periodic blog-posts.
* (Yes, I'm being sardonic, but if you did bother to click them, then I'm legitimately interested in your answer.)
He's right that its all going to pop dramatically and catastrophically for some. But having read a bunch of his stuff, there are two things he's just plain wrong about and they make his martyrdom tone too grating.
- His own objectivity - he consistently throws shade (rightfully) at the pro-AI side being financially 'required' to hold a certain world view, but is completely blind to his own claim to fame effecting him similarly.
- He consistently claims AI can't be made to work, and tries to prove this by calculating with the bubble prices. Its like saying tulips could never be profitable in the middle of the mania because ships were too expensive as proven by their current price to use for shipping tulips.
Add in the semi regular instance downplaying AI's usefulness contradicting my own experience and I mostly dont bother reading him anymore.
Its not like I'll be surprised that shit hits the fan, and he's not going to call the 'when' any better than wallstreetbets or an octopus.
Yeah, to be honest I think his take is a bit nonsense because it's so historically inaccurate.
Most hugely transformational technologies in the past also resulted in giant bubbles that burst, because investors piled into lots of companies in the hope that their particular company would win out. Railroads, automobiles, telecommunications networks, the Internet, etc. etc. were all hugely important, transformational technologies that all caused giant bubbles that burst.
But Ed Zitron seems hellbent on saying AI is a nothing burger, and that's why the bubble will burst. But the latter doesn't necessarily follow from the former, and indeed the examples I gave show that the exact opposite is often true.
I believe that the AI bubble will burst precisely because it is such a transformational technology. AI may not live up to the ways its biggest cultists like to shout ("Feel the AGI flow through you!!!"), but similarly in the .com boom/bust there was tons of nonsense about how we'd do absolutely everything online, we were in a new "eyeball economy", whatever that meant, yada yada, yet I'd argue that in some ways the Internet was actually a bigger impact than originally envisioned, just not necessarily in the way that late 90s boosters envisioned it.