Comment by eloisant
1 month ago
I feel like too many people have a binary vision of the world, i.e. you're either "pro AI" or "anti AI".
Ed Zitron doesn't say that AI doesn't work, that its impact on the world will not increase. He's basically saying that (1) the current data center investments are based on unrealistic revenue projections and (2) hyperscalers are using accounting tricks to move around "money" in a circular way to make it look like more money is already flowing to AI.
You can believe all of that and still believe that AI (as in "LLM based services") work, are useful and will probably see their usefulness grow even more. Just not in the magnitude necessary to make the current investments make sense.
If you ever listen to more than a couple of Zitron interviews, it's clear that he's not the "reasonable centrist" viewpoint on AI. He's the doom-and-gloom guy.
Maybe there is someone out there positive on AI itself and calling out reasonable objections to some of the extreme things. But that's not Zitron.
The center is not always the reasonable viewpoint. And sometimes the doom-and-gloom guy is correct.
Right, but as the article linked lays out in detail, Zitron has been repeatedly and consistently objectively incorrect.
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Not this time.
As someone who's strongly anti-AI, i find Zitron to be absolutely too much pro-AI for my taste. He defends AI that's not LLMs. He barely touches on ecological impacts of AI, and barely mentions the enshittification of things. He's only really against the LLM craze, OpenAI/Anthropic over-evaluation (because Deepseek and local models will do the same for nearly free), and the crazy speculative bubble around datacenters.
If you find him very negative about AI, and i find him very positive about AI, he might just be this reasonable centrist.
Out of curiosity, what would you like to hear him saying about non-LLM AI?
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> Ed Zitron doesn't say that AI doesn't work, that its impact on the world will not increase
He's said variants of both of these things before! That's the point OP makes too, people say "He doesn't say that" or "But what about this" when he's said a million, sometimes contradictory things.
Ed's whole cornerstone thesis is that "AI doesn't work." Like, if I had to sum him up in a short sentence, that's what it'd be
that or "Angry but doesn't know much"
I think when cornered, he does say it works for coding and some other tasks. But to be honest it also makes a lot of bugs when writing code.
I don't agree with everything he thinks, but I think I agree with him more than I do Sam Altman or Jensen.
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No, the cornerstones of his thesis are:
- LLM’s potential and capability are dramatically overstated
- Business leaders are either driven by the Emperor’s New Clothes effect, or the legitimate fear of stock price or valuation drops, to admit it.
- The amount of money being dumped into this industry will never pay off.
He’s snide and condescending, to the detriment of his message. I can completely understand why people aren’t interested in listening to him. However, straw-manning his stances by oversimplifying or flat-out making uninformed assumptions about them isn’t a useful response to what he’s saying.
Frankly, this industry squirts out enough bullshit to smother an active volcano every single day. If you think Ed isn’t credible, I sure hope you dismiss the industry leaders just as readily.
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After looking at some of his recent interviews, he's acknowledged his previous predictions that 1. He was naive enough to think the investment won't keep coming despite lack of profitability and 2. He acknowledges that AI in it's current form is a billion dollar industry, not a trillion dollar one, but also not zero.
Definitely less extreme than he used to be.
> Ed Zitron doesn't say that AI doesn't work
Ive seen him say it does work pretty consistently? He also talks about other things that are more interesting, but he still says it doesnt work
If you watch his latest interviews you can see him talking about how he finds it useful for simple cases like in the Bloomberg terminal for generating code for queries, but it still has fundamental limitations for doing anything autonomously.
As someone who has used LLMs heavily at work and at home in various serious experiments, I agree. It still requires heavy babysitting and a lot of its limitations wrt context length are fundamental, not something that’s going to be easy to overcome.
I also agree but the autonomous part comes from coding. We build autonomous systems with code, so it AI is really good at writing code (it is), we increase automation. Not with the AI itself, but with what it produces.
Which is good, for many reasons:
- environmental costs go down. Algorithms are cheap, LLM inference and training is not.
- code is deterministic
- code can be read and understood by professionals
- code can be deployed trivially, whereas deploying an LLM costs huge infrastructure
So using an LLM to help write code is the best of both worlds. You get velocity increase from the LLM, with none of the hallucination or environmental downsides at deployment time.
From anything i read/watched of him, the shorthand is "it doesn't work". When taking more than a few words to explain, it means it's not replacing humans altogether, because the output is low-quality and needs human quality control. In the end, he's not arguing LLMs are not working (as in returning 500 in your browser), but that the promise of autonomous agents replacing humans for increased productivity is a lie and doesn't work.
I overall agree with his interpretation, but i'm afraid he might be wrong in the conclusion that noone is going to replace human labor with shittier agent slop. As long as we humans don't really have regulations and choice for proper quality of service, companies might just in fact enshittify everything with slop and make more profits while we suffer from lower-quality products and support.
To be fair he is nothing more than a talking head who historically has had some pretty negative AI pieces. Sure nothing is binary but more than ever it feels like there are talking heads on both sides that have some pretty extreme views.
> You can believe all of that
You can believe all of that (I do) and see that Zitron is a liar and an influencer.