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Comment by sarjann

11 hours ago

I think one important distinction is at least they have some humility to admit they were wrong. I think Ed Zitron has rarely, if ever acknowledged he was wrong.

15 comments

sarjann

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achompas  11 hours ago

I actually think you’ve got it backwards

I think one of Zitron’s problems is that his moral righteousness has blinded him to how embarrassingly incorrect he is about the AI space.

It’s similarly hubristic with the benefit of shielding from his adversarial framing.

  • pfdietz  11 hours ago

    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.

  • cduzz  10 hours ago

    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.

    • taberiand  8 hours ago

      Seems to me it's a reasonable position that runs face first into the irrational market.

      Like they're digging a gigantic hole and Ed's up the top saying if you keep digging the hole will collapse (+ a whole lot of unnecessary swearing), and then a bunch of people jump into the hole to brace it and say "nuh uh, see we can keep digging" but really it's just postponing the inevitable and increasing the number of people who will be destroyed when it all crashes down

iLoveOncall  11 hours ago

> I think one important distinction is at least they have some humility to admit they were wrong.

I'd be amazed to see a source proving that statement. There's never been a retraction around the AGI claims for example as far as I'm aware.

greekrich92  11 hours ago

Humility? I don't think they know what the word means let alone possess the capacity to demonstrate it.

  • CamperBob2  11 hours ago

    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.