There is a lot of hype right now about AGI destroying the economy, replacing workers, or even ending the world. Companies are embellishing as they run up to IPO. But there’s a lot of unhealthy counter-beliefs trying to take it the opposite extreme. Keeping up with AI news is about avoiding the hype monsters at either end of the spectrum.
I dunno, I guess I just don't like him.
I agree that he is very one-sided, but I doubt his hit-rate is much worse than other pundits in the industry.
I don't think that's necessarily a bad argument style (at this point it's by far the easiest way to argue that a Musk project won't work for example), but you have to be careful with it.
In this case, there are only two previous predictions being considered. Suppose the author would have been right 75% of the time given their available information; there was still a >6% chance of those predictions not working out. That's a pretty rough bound for ruling them out just on principle in a world where they do actually know a lot about how AI will progress. There isn't enough "track record" to confidently say much about the author's predictions.
Track record is not relevant if it is a prediction with all the arguments laid out in the open.
Which is our situation closer to?
>Anthropic Is Bleeding Out ...Anthropic is very likely losing money on every single Claude Code customer, and based on my analysis, appears to be losing hundreds or even thousands of dollars per customer. (Ed, 10 months ago) https://www.wheresyoured.at/anthropic-is-bleeding-out/
vs
>Mind-Blowing Growth Is About to Propel Anthropic Into Its First Profitable Quarter The startup expects a 130% revenue surge to $10.9 billion in the June quarter and its first operating profit, defying skeptics of the AI boom (wsj, yesterday)
If you look at Ed's piece there the facts are correct but he just moans about costs and ignores the growth. Most of his stuff is kind of like that.
Is bearing a lot load here.
It is a press release with a goal to create hype.
I.e. it has no relation to “facts”
… unless they would also share underlying numbers (e.g. cost/profit per customer, and why they think some things will increase)
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Edit: Especially please don't cross into personal attack.
AI is a neat tool, but I think it becomes a race to the bottom. Who can provide the minimum viable product at the lowest price. And that price has to be pretty darn low for it to make sense for companies and essentially free for it to make sense for consumers.
Ed Zitron is an analyst. His viewpoint is that AI is bad for whatever reasons and he does his job by trying to uncover those reasons and does a solid work. He presents a lot of insider knowledge that would otherwise be left unheard.
What are his alternatives? To stop claiming that AI is bad and pivot to "AI is good" writing? To quit writing entirely? To continue writing but in the beginning of each article list the things that he was wrong about in the past? What if it's too early for the things that seem to have been predicted incorrectly by him to materialize and in the end he will appear correct?
I think it's a benefit for society to hear the other side. There are plenty of pro-AI advocates.
It's a bad combination. There are better AI skeptics to follow. Endorsing Zitron, though, has become a "tell".
A pundit starts from a pre-declared conclusion and works backwards to generate the argument. An analyst lets the conclusion be dictated by the analysis.
Providers have been hitting limits and growing backlogs -- i.e. real money customers had committed to paying them but could not be realized due to lack of capacity -- to triple-digit billions EACH for multiple quarters now.
People are only just noticing the capacity crunch now because they're being directly impacted by Claude crapping out so much. But a superficial glance at the quarterly earnings of any of the hyperscalers shows that the AI compute crunch and revenues have only been growing pretty much since the AI boom took off. That alone should have raised questions about the bubble narrative.
Yet commentators like Zitron have been crying "bubble" all that time. I guess there's real money... er... engagement to be farmed by playing up the AI backlash. The backlash is real and understandable, but these narratives only serve to muddle useful discourse in exchange for some cheap rage-views.
Scroll back not too far and he was publishing criticisms that no one wants to spend actual money AI. Anthropic has shattered all notions of that since then.
Then there was the idea that even if people want it, we have way too much GPU capacity to ever be saturated. Now almost all providers are hitting limits.
Now, its the next iteration that even if people want to spend money and GPU's are at capacity, its just never going to be profitable. This may or may not be true, especially with more capable open source models that can be served at cost. But at this point, he mostly just brings up anything possible to downplay AI