Comment by tcp_handshaker
9 hours ago
No AGI on the horizon and that ROI horizon approaching fast is going to make Ed Zitron a superstar.
If Demis Hassabis got a Nobel prize for being a Project Manager, is Zitron up for the Nobel on Economy for excellence in economic forecast?
I don't understand any of the praise for Zitron. He is saying very obvious things and gets timelines wrong all the time. What's special about that?
> If Demis Hassabis got a Nobel prize for being a Project Manager
His accomplishments are far beyond project manager. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demis_Hassabis
Nobel was awarded due to project management work. There are many thousands of scientists with work much much better than what Demis has done.
Ed Zitron has predicted 16 of the last 0 AI bubble bursts...
But more seriously, this has to do with DeepMind falling way behind the frontier in intelligence and cost per task. There's basically no reason to use a Gemini model today.
Tbf, he only has to get it right once.
Being right at the wrong time is indistinguishable from being wrong.
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A stopped clock is also right twice a day.
Public warning: please don't trade on Ed's idiotic analyses. Or if you do, look at his track record so far, and apply the Kelley Criterion to your bet sizing.
Superstar? This Ed Zitron?
"Based on estimates of their burn rate and historic analyses, I hypothesize that OpenAI will collapse in the next 12-24 months unless it raises more funding than in the history of the valley and creates an entirely new form of AI."
-July 29, 2024
https://x.com/edzitron/status/1817955630784917548
And they did raise new funding as he predicted...Since July 2024, OpenAI has raised or secured roughly $170 billion in new capital. Numbers never see before. So yes its the one, and remarkably right so far.
Notice how he didn't say "I predict they will raise new funding", he predicted collapse, with the implicit retort that there's no way they will raise more funding than has ever been done before and invent a whole new AI. He was mocking the supposed things that would need to happen. He strongly assumed collapse.
2 years these charlatans have had their "imminent collapse" predictions repeatedly wrong, meanwhile all valuations, AGI progress in unsolved problems, and frontier leadership have been repeatedly vindicated that we are beginning ASI / the singularity.
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You can't imagine OpenAI being a multi-trillion dollar company?
Open weights will drop costs, but distribution matters. OpenAI has that.
Costs will come down. Deep entrenchment will not.
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As it stands, the leaked financials prove him correct. Given their losses (not counting restructuring) they are going to need enough funding to buy any of the bottom 300-400 of the F500 companies outright just to keep the lights on for the next year.
To say that’s an outrageous amount isn’t overstating in the slightest.
Given they are already being forced to drop inference prices in an attempt to compete with Chinese providers, I don’t know if billionaire investors will be willing to hand out that much money this time around if they can’t generate enough value to break even despite the hype.