Comment by dofm
8 hours ago
> After looking at Nvidia's orderbook, it's a reasonable conclusion that nothing bad will happen for at least another year. In which case Ed Zitron is off by at least a year.
Zitron is fairly clear that nothing is going to happen for a year or so — he says himself that he thinks there's another round of funding possible for both OpenAI and Anthropic.
Idk about that. A bunch of his wrong predictions were predicated on things turning sour sooner than a "year or so" than now.
Right, but you know the thing. The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent. Predicting the medium future is hardest.
Markets don't just pre-plan their behaviour three years earlier and act it out lock-step. Other circumstances can change. By now, the world's financial press has covered some of the scariest aspects of this, and the situation has evolved.
There are other moves (the OpenAI/Blackrock AI debt securitization idea for one) that could delay it even further.
Zitron, I get the impression, has moved on to talking about the horsemen of the bubble apocalypse — talking about banner events that would need to happen for his predictions to be true. This is safer ground for a forecaster, because every forecast affects the future.
His shorter term predictions have not all failed by any means: he described Oracle's woes before the ratings agency downgraded them specifically because of OpenAI.
But most of his predictions will be irrelevant if the insane securitization plan happens. Because it will stop being about an AI bubble then; the worst risk will be the collapse of the entire US economy. It will need a different kind of analyst.
Me, I don't really care either way. I'm not on the cloud AI hype train, I don't work for a YC company, I'm not an American taxpayer so I will not be directly on the hook, and as Americans like to point out, the UK economy is behind on the whole AI thing so (unlike Ireland, which the USA will 100% leave to fail) we are ironically insulated. Maybe a couple of small British investment banks will fail and a pension fund or two will default.
For the most part we'll just watch the flames.
I do enjoy watching a Brit — albeit an ex-pat — upset a bunch of po-faced AI evangelists. It’s like “Itanic” all over again.
I think he is directionally correct. My own impression is that the bubble will burst at the worst time, and so my assessment is that, given the way this is entangled with the functioning of the USA as an economic power and with the future of the US political hard right, it will therefore darkly but poetically burst sometime around Labor Day 2028, which is the worst possible time.
I agree he is directionally correct, or at least is a vessel to raise important points and valid criticisms.
But predictions need to be specific and falsifable. If not, its just rag-chewing over a beer (luv that shit, but i aint predicting on taco tuesday). If they arent falsifable, then its not a prediction.
I think a lot of the HN comments generally can be described as one camp which cares about and enforces the rigor of predictions and trying to direct limited ear-time to voices which tend to get predictions right, vs the other camp that puts more weight towards directional accuracy.
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