Comment by solid_fuel

I'm convinced all of Kurzweil's predictions through the years can be simplified as (and originate from) "whatever least-implausible dream scenario allows a man of Ray Kurzweil's exact age and health to barely avoid the hitherto-universal icy grip of mortality."

Luu's piece linked his analysis! Kurzweil scores 7% accuracy.

If you scroll to the appendix he grades individual predictions.

https://danluu.com/futurist-predictions/

Ed Zitrons wild claims might be for entertainment value, but Altman’s are for his own valuation. He’s bringing in hundreds of billions of dollars off those claims.

Without reference to either person, I think this is essentially a misunderstanding of Frankfurt’s analysis: On Bullshit is about expressing sentiments without caring about their truth value, i.e. the concept of a “bull session.”

Both Altman and Zitron are the opposite of Frankfurt’s bullshitter, because they both appear to evince genuine care for the truth value of their position.

(Frankfurt is very subtle about this, in that he distinguishes the kind of performative lying you’re suggesting as distinct in moral and rhetorical content from bullshitting. The liar wants you to believe a specific thing; the bullshitter wants to regale you.)

I think it’s appropriate in this day that people have to really shout and lament on and on about their thing just to get a few people to listen and/or consider parts of their argument. Nobody listens if you’re just casually proselytizing your grift.

I don't care whether he believes his own predictions, only that they're so frequently incoherent and false.

> his strategy for manipulating human attention has been correct.

"Correct" is not the word you're looking for here. More like "very effective". His strategy for manipulating human attention is very effective, but the correctness of his strategy isn't relevant here, so I'm not sure why you're bringing that up.

It’s linked in the article. The 85% accuracy is just shameless self promotion.

https://danluu.com/futurist-predictions/#:~:text=flowing%20i...

I'm going to need some evidence that Kurzweil was right in 80%+ of his predictions with several more on track.

What? no human in history has gotten anything 80% right. You're doing exactly what this piece complains about.

Anthropic's ARR is reportedly now above $60 billion. OpenAI's is reportedly above $40 billion. Countless people and businesses are using AI to create tangible value and reduce costs.

We can debate whether the level of investment in AI is excessive and what any malinvestment will eventually cost when the market has to recognize it.

But Zitron is selling you a $70/year subscription to a newsletter that constantly reminds you that AI is a bubble and the technology is worthless. The AI people aren't selling you the same thing Ed is.

And let's be honest here: it's not like Zitron has any credentials of substance that are relevant. He's not an accountant and constantly demonstrates that he can't read a balance sheet or financial statement, doesn't understand basic account principles, etc. He's not a technologist, so he can't speak credibly to AI tech and how it's being used. He never worked in AI, even in a non-tech role, so he has no first-hand experience that's unique.

Basically, he's a former PR shill who, from what I can tell, saw an opportunity to profit by hitching himself to the AI zeitgeist as a naysayer.

I'm sure his grift is keeping his bills paid, but anyone taking action based on his doom and gloom thesis has missed out on one of the biggest investment opportunities in history. And just to be clear: this is not to say that stocks will go up forever, that valuation concerns aren't legitimate, or that there aren't aspects to AI infrastructure financing that are a bit concerning. But if you had ignored Ed from the minute he started whining and sold all of your AI investments tomorrow, you'd be much wealthier.

What specifically was he wrong about in either of those? I.e, something that can be falsified.

> Altman claimed that AGI could be achieved in 2025 during an interview for Y Combinator, declaring that it is now simply an engineering problem. He said things were moving faster than expected and that the path to AGI was "basically clear."

"AGI" isn't a useful term because - as noted in the article you linked - people disagree about what it means. Also his actual claim here seems to have been that the path to AGI was "basically clear."

That isn't a prediction that can be falsified.

I see this so much. "This shouldn't work, therefore it won't work." It's like the world is imagined to run on a moral causal framework rather than uncaring quantum mechanics.

I have watched many of his screeds; I think he undercuts his thesis with excess bile.

His core observation is that the unit economics of openAI and anthropic don't actually yield enough profit to pay off the huge debts that these two companies have incurred, and that as a result all the debt they've taken on will have to be written off which will trigger "the hyperscalers" to themselves suffer huge losses (likely wounding google and microsoft and destroying oracle).

He is rather more negative about the utility of LLMs than lots of other people (myself included); but his overall view of

  1. they're not completely trustworthy
  2. they're really expensive to train
  3. it isn't obvious that anyone's willing to pay the full freight for the resulting product
  4. lots of large orgs "that should know better" have gone far down the LLM "AI" road because they're looking for "the next big thing" when they should be pivoting to "mature, stable" companies instead of "hypergrowth" companies.
  5. there's lots of debt and obligations and no obvious way for all of it to be paid off from revenues from openai / anthropic.

seems pretty reasonable. There seem to have been lots of bets placed on the hope that this stuff will continue scaling as it has in the past, if it is given more compute and data, and that bet is one that has yet to have demonstrated itself as correct.

Elsewhere, people have pointed out that many of the "FAANG" companies have shed lots of people and driven lots of profits, largely on the back of internal use of LLM tools. That doesn't necessarily contradict the skepticism that anthropic and openAI will succeed, and given all their obligations, if they fail it'll be a big mess.

But again, big Z doesn't do himself any favors when he rants about "failsons" or whatever.

I can't find a counter to every statement they have made and not sure about your specific AGI claim but.

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/QMhtTO3u61A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_ueDUrkOlQ

Examples of acknowledging he was wrong

Altman has admitted that some things are taking longer than he expected, and has walked one or two things back (usually to keep people from throwing bombs at his house, but still...)

Zitron continues to boast of a predictive record entirely unblemished by accuracy.

This seems to be more a problem of your awareness than a lack of projects.

Apart from every software engineer I know building almost completely with AI now there have been numerous projects posted on HN that are AI coded.

There's also Claude desktop which is famously all AI built and very widely used.

It is all very unevenly distributed. SaaS and general web is basically on auto mode.

A lot of infra is vibe coded nowadays too.

Even prototypes are contributing to the speed of software development. Many people vibe code throwaway dashboards around the main platform which gives a lot of insights.

I guess the GP is joking. But on the current climate, it's really hard to be sure.

It does raise the question, what percentage of programmers are predominantly writing code by hand? Is it higher than 50%?

Do they also not trust their code review processes?

  > many industries that don't trust machine generated code in general.

Which ones? Why wouldn’t careful human code review and extensive test coverage suffice? I work in one of the most conservative and highly regulated industries in the country. My company and every single one of my peer companies I have knowledge of has transitioned to almost exclusively 100% LLM-generated code (with plenty of human review).

I don’t live on a coast and I have a large and broad social network. I don’t know anyone who still mostly codes by hand except the small amount needed to preserve some aspect of their skills. I’m sorry to say that if I did I’d consider them foolish. Even a very restrictive workflow where you used an LLM to specify granular edits you intend to make is vastly faster than doing it by hand. And the level of test coverage and depth you can achieve now is simply life-changing.

It’s much more likely that you are not a professional, or you are the one in a bubble.

The AGI that appeared mid 2023 and killed single every person in 8 months was neat!