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Comment by awakeasleep

2 hours ago

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.

12 comments

awakeasleep

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rdedev  1 hour ago

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

  • JumpCrisscross  37 minutes ago

    > 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.

    [1] https://bsky.app/profile/peark.es/post/3mmhtcib3622i

PaulRobinson  2 hours ago

Can you provide evidence of where he's been wrong?

  • tim333  22 minutes ago

    An example of him in July 2024: https://www.wheresyoured.at/pop-culture/

    >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.

Jackpillar  2 hours ago

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)