Zitron has become the distorted reflection of the very AI boosters he criticizes and mocks.
I think the worst thing that happened to him was AI skepticism becoming a political position. This gave him a captive audience - as long as he says what they want to hear, which means that he can never ever concede that he might have been wrong or that AI might actually be progressing or having successes.
This is not conducive to good prediction long-term - rather it leads one to a state of cognitive dissonance where one's chosen enemies must be simultaneously terrifyingly powerful and incompetent dunces. The propagandist's disease.
How? AFAIK, his arguments based around the economics remains the same, he just seems increasingly dramatic and exacerbated, which is understandable when you realize industry + ecosystem (politics/reporting) is tulip mania delulu and insists 1+1=100, or 30 trillion, or whatever. His position isn't based on AI progress - it's based on AI economics, at this point he can be an obnoxious rationalist slamming flat earthers - just because he's annoying/smug doesn't mean he's less right on fundamentals which if anything is more clear now.
At first I thought you were referring to Umberto Eco's laws of fascism: "Fascist societies rhetorically cast their enemies as at the same time too strong and too weak."
but it's subtly different, because incompetence is not weakness.
He has built a following of people that want to hear his extra skeptical views. And even if he changed his mind about some things, he cannot admit it, as that is not what his followers want to hear from him.
It's rare that people make the news and build a following by saying a very balanced, down to earth opinions... unfortunately.
I almost wonder if it's even possible now that so many of us get our information through algorithmic feeds.
I listened to one Zitron interview on YouTube and my home page was immediately crammed full of similarly foamy-mouthed AI critics. (As well as plenty more Zitron.) And it's suggested some people with un-nuanced pro-AI takes, too. But what the algorithm has never, not even once, given me is a sober voice that calls attention to the nuances.
> And even if he changed his mind about some things, he cannot admit it, as that is not what his followers want to hear from him.
I don't think that's true - over the years he's changed his mind from "LLMs are useless slop machines" to "LLMs can be useful when applied wisely".
For instance in "The AI Hater's Manifesto" he says:
> It just came to me — the problem that I have with most people using LLMs is the delineation between outsourcing work and outsourcing thought. Those using LLMs to write little scripts or BQL code on a Bloomberg Terminal are inoffensive. [...] A tool being used as a tool to do tool things — in many cases involving the LLM writing a little 30-line Python script! — is not a problem, though it’s also not a trillion-dollar industry that needed to steal everybody’s art and writing.
Similarly, in "The More You Buy, The More You Lose":
> Sidenote: The only truly useful use case I’ve found is on the Bloomberg Terminal’s ASKB feature, which takes natural language and turns it into BQL code to make requests of Bloomberg’s datasets. It’s genuinely useful!
You can perhaps say that he underestimates what the technology is capable of (or, conversely, that other people overestimate LLMs) - but that's a different kind of conversation.
right, and look at current American politics. One side tried to tailor normal, routine and rational POVs.
The other...
EDIT: I do find it amusing when I write these types of comment, then suddenly realize the irrational man childs of the far right nationalist republic ethnostatists think they're the rational ones.
There are plenty of people on the far right whose positions are rational provided that you agree with their views. Conversely, there are plenty of people on the far left whose positions remain irrational despite that you might agree with their views. It is a serious cognitive error both to fail to see the irrationality of those you agree with as well as to fail to see the rationality of those you disagree with.
> I think the worst thing that happened to him was AI skepticism becoming a political position.
It is a political issue in the sense that the discussion around AI can't avoid material and cultural issues. Ed Zitron definitely has an ax to grind and I'm personally turned off by his hyperbole, but I don't think something being a political issue means it's not worth discussing. I've also noticed the pro-AI crowd pivot to accusing people of not having actual reasons for hating AI, being victims of Chinese propaganda, etc as a way to avoid actually talking about specific issues that people have about AI and DCs.
You're not wrong but for a lot of AI boosters it's also a political position - remember Anthropic and half of SV at this point is run by wide eyed effective altruists.
Ultimately one cannot separate technology or science from politics, it's inherently political
I'm not sure I have the force of will to not succumb to it. I think the only way to avoid it is to be so sure of the thing you are doing that the audience reaction is not the key metric by which you measure your success.
Ed Zitron’s job is to convince people to pay him money to read what he writes, of course he’s going to preach to the choir, they’re paying him to do that and he knows it.
This is why I always consider the agenda of an author, Ed Zitron’s agenda is to make money from subscribers who read his writing.
Its pretty clear if you listen to him now he's just (re)playing the hits for his audience. Its like MSNBC/Fox News for people who think they're too smart to fall for that.
I used to think he was just early on some of this stuff but the sheer amount of content he produces its clear he's just cashing a check.
Being thorough and accurate might make you a lot of money in the stock market, but it's not a good way to get any media presence, because that demands being in front of people quite often, and basically nobody can be insightful and well researched in all topics of the day. Once you become a pundit, whether on politics or tech, and rely on eyeballs to feed you, you are going to be throwing stinkers. And at that point, you might as well just align with an audience and not care too much about whether you are predicting anything accurately.
We have people telling us the next recession being imminent all the time. Others told us that NFTs were key to the future of art. That's the pundit way. If you want accuracy, you become like Charlie Munger, have maybe 2, 3 really good insights througout your career, and hope do to well using the insights yourself, not by being a pundit
This is exactly right. Now, that does mean something about Zitron: he’s a pundit, not an expert or a forecasting genius. You could point to any number of analogous booster types. Twitter/X somehow loves pushing these people onto my recommended feed. I remember reading breathless threads about how o3 was going to single-handedly end white collar work. There are just more of that sort of person, so none of them in particular gets the same amount of attention as Zitron, who seems to be the only person willing to go on the record against AI. Maybe his overall worldview is sound, and maybe it isn’t. But he’s not really making confident, specific predictions about the future.
Which leads me to a criticism of the piece: several assertions are described as “Wrong,” with no explanation or citation, which are not obviously wrong to my mind. For example, the assertion that “DeepSeek has commoditized the [LLM]” is at least debatable. It is a prospect that the major labs seem to have at least considered.
In my experience, people who make fun of AI's ability to eliminate white-collar work are exactly the same people who are white-knuckling it, hoping they can make another $300k next year to buy that Rivian.
People who don't need a salary look at the situation more objectively and, in general, can see that a lot of white-collar work is in peril.
They haven’t allowed a recession to happen since ~2009 when they massively inflated their way out of the worst of the last one. Learned to have the cake and eat it too.
The only problem is after a few rounds of this the currency becomes worthless, and we’re well on our way. Inflation is a major component of those numbers rising.
And that's when we pay off the national debt for pennies on the worthless dollar. The pro move would be to stop lending the US money, but that's not going to happen.
> First, the favorable impact of the artificial intelligence investment boom on economic activity and earnings will likely diminish significantly in 2027. That’s because what’s relevant for growth is how much investment is increasing, not its level. The increase in investment in 2026 will almost certainly be the peak. There aren’t sufficient resources — construction workers, electrical generation capacity, or chip manufacturing capacity - to increase investment by the same magnitude in 2027. Nor are the dominant hyperscalers likely to have the free cash flow and balance sheet capacity to sustain a bigger increase in investment in 2027 compared with 2026.
> Second, as the growth of investment spending slows, the growth in earnings of hyperscaler suppliers will falter, profit expectations will diminish and price-earnings ratios will shrink. The “picks and shovels” providers will suffer a double whammy - slower demand growth and profit margin compression. On the way up, higher demand leads to wider profit margins that sustain equity market valuations. On the way down, the outlook for earnings deteriorates quickly as the shortfall of demand relative to expectations is exacerbated by a collapse in profit margins.
Third, as the investment cycle matures, the focus will shift to the returns that the hyperscalers are expected to earn on their massive investments. I suspect it will be difficult for the AI hyperscalers to generate sufficient revenue ($2 trillion or more per year) to generate the returns needed to justify an AI capital base that is likely to reach $5 trillion.
> Third, as the investment cycle matures, the focus will shift to the returns that the hyperscalers are expected to earn on their massive investments. I suspect it will be difficult for the AI hyperscalers to generate sufficient revenue ($2 trillion or more per year) to generate the returns needed to justify an AI capital base that is likely to reach $5 trillion.
(I'd encourage you to read the entire piece, it was written by Bill Dudley, a former president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York)
I mean I wish you a lot of fun playing this discussion game online, but I kinda fail to see the point of it.
Someone could now of course say "hey, but are your sure that these are really the metrics we should be looking at?", which could then be countered with a "well of course! This is how one measures a recession, no?"
And that could go on forever, achieving absolutely nothing.
> We have people telling us the next recession being imminent all the time. Others told us that NFTs were key to the future of art.
That's quite the conflation, and a very subtle way to tie a claim that's still unresolved to one that is to try and make the first one seem wrong with no evidence. Recessions are almost guaranteed in our system, they're a part of a cycle. Unless you think that the Great Recession was the last one in history, saying the next one is 'imminent' would be correct for any other viewpoint. We just don't know when it'll officially start.
> Given how fast these companies are growing (in terms of revenue and profit), it doesn't seem that AI is, as Zitron implied, some kind of desperation move they're reaching for because "they don't know how to grow" and are all out of ideas
Growth isn't a valid rebuttal, unless we can also sus out how much of that growth is tied up in circular financing of AI projects. We have a pretty good idea how much of Nvidia's valuation is tied up in the AI craze, it's a bit harder to tell with the megascalers....
Can you provide any examples of any of the megascalers publishing any detailed financials that touch on their AI spend or revenue or profit? The only one I’m aware of that comes close is Microsoft and they have still buried it in barely related line items which still leave us making assumptions.
There’s speculation on both sides and certainly Zitron is on the extreme end of the anti-AI side with the most cynical speculation but it is indisputable that none of the megascalers are open about their AI financials. Hence, we are all speculating endlessly. If only there were published financials then the speculation could end!
The obfuscation of financials doesn’t necessarily mean something bad is happening, it could be a competitive advantage for Google to be secretive about how cost effective their TPUs are or for Microsoft to hide how much revenue uplift they’ve experienced by adding AI to 365.
They don't publish their AI spending, revenue, and profit - but they do tend to break out other non-AI segments of their companies which can demonstrate that at least part of their growth isn't relevant to AI.
> For any of his posts that I read, while there are numbers thrown around, the numbers don't actually connect to a coherent argument. In many cases, as we saw above, the numbers don't even really support his argument (such as an MAU decline in Facebook causing Meta financial problems which would then cause Meta to spuriously insert AI in places it doesn't belong). I suspect he's relying on people's eyes glazing over when they see numbers and just not thinking about what the numbers mean.
A frustrating thing about Ed Zitron is that he sometimes breaks news - gets hold of leaked numbers that nobody else has, for example - but he then wraps those numbers in his own extremely biased commentary. This makes it much harder to evaluate how credible the new information is.
Yes, and his post about the exact same data was noticeably more confusing and less illuminating than theirs because he was primarily concerned to point to whatever the biggest number was and go "Ooh, big number!"
There was a major material difference between the FT and Ed's post: FT explicitly noted that OpenAI has $billions in cash on hand (which is relevant if you are analyzing data about solvency), while Ed's post obfuscated that data point.
As someone else mentioned, ignore Ed’s personality and look solely at the balance sheets and capital analysis. Regardless of delivery, the math doesn’t math.
It's wild to me how much Ed is criticized while pathological liars like Musk and Altman are glossed over.
(Disclosure: I pay for Zitron's publication for the capital figures and exclusives he gets his hands on, I do not pay attention to his interviews, we are fact finding, if he wants to perform, I am not bothered, I've seen the performers on the other side, just keep the facts coming for ground truth)
I posted here a while ago when his bubble prediction lapsed and plenty of his fans were here. Telling me how I was wrong and the Q2 reports weren't complete yet because it was still early July and blah blah
Criticized as being poor human beings, or as being poor executives?
Because the former, as P.T. Barnum pointed out, is just free advertising. And I see far more of that than the latter. Now, if and when their various empires collapse there will be no shortage of people pointing back and saying "all the signs were there", but in my everyday life (obviously just a single point of anecdata), it feels like I see a lot more coverage of them as "bad people" than as "bad at what they claim to be experts on".
HN has a fairly complex user footprint, it's not everyone of course and I do not mean to paint too broadly, but there is a strong contingent of those pro in a cluster.
Would you like a list of pro Musk and Altman users based on their comment and submission history? I'm unsure if that violates the site guidelines, and I prefer not to have my subthreads detached or stern reprimands by mods (it makes me feel bothersome in a host's home).
I certainly believe there are some Musk and Altman glazers on this site. There are also certainly Ed Zitron glazers.
The point is not a few users you can point out, it wouldn't prove anything. The point is that you claimed that Musk and Altman are "Pathological liars like Musk and Altman are glossed over". I would say that requires at least sentiment analysis that an extremely high percentage(90+%) of hackernews users match that description. And that is simply not what I observe when I use this site. My feeling is that sentiment for Musk is generally negative and for Altman is neutral at best.
The bubble you’re talking about exists, it is SF and the rest of the tech industry. It’s literally where the AI leaders are located, where they overhype each others
I am a realist, I understand the cult of personality, etc. Just like I wouldn't spend a moment trying to talk a Catholic out of their faith. I have no feelings on the topic, this can only last so long based on capital trajectories.
For me, HN ist rather some kind of counterweight/counterbubble where not everybody is insanely critical and cynical about Elon Musk and Sam Altman. :-)
FWIW I think you spend too long on this site. I'm not trying to be mean but I see you much too often here having strong opinions thinly sourced and think that perhaps your time would be better spent elsewhere. I, too, spend more time than is healthy for myself on this site but think I spend a fraction of what you do.
I realize we've both been in this community for a long time but I think one of the things I find about participating in Reddit and HN communities over time is that, I stop both being able to separate the truth of a matter from the argument itself and I stop being able to conceptualize the people in the thread as people and not mouthpieces for argument. There's a special toxicity that arises on these sites, where the argument becomes the main issue at hand and I see a conversation as a large conflict between world views. I may be projecting my own feelings here, but think it's worth contemplating these hot button issues elsewhere and responding in a lower temperature forum more conducive to actual discourse.
I'm just hear to shoot the shit and observe, what else would I do when I don't need more, chase status? I'd rather write, share, and be curious. Concern is noted, but I don't ever have to work again if I don't want to, I have a loving family, I am here for the brain tickles. My comments and the predictions within are me competing with my past self. Was I right? Easy to check the append only comment ledger. I have enough, I'm just here for fun, to learn, to grow, and be curious. I don't take this place seriously, and neither should you, it's not meant to be serious. Take value from what you can, discard from that which you cannot. And be polite whenever possible, to the best of your ability.
> and think that perhaps your time would be better spent elsewhere
I'm not financially literate enough to trust my own analysis of the numbers. Ideally I'd like commentary from someone like Bloomberg's Matt Levine, a genuine expert in financial matters who is also extremely good at explaining them in terms non-finance-professionals like me can understand.
I didn’t even see the OP comment as a criticism of his analyses, just that he likes to do this rhetorical trick of dropping in numbers that are, at best, tangential to his point to prop up the argument’s credibility. Sometimes he does this in the middle of a real financial analysis which is even more maddening and confusing.
Fair, if you’re looking for reliable financial commentary Matt Levine is indeed the goat. Zitron is more like an old school blogger, with a very aggressive and corrosive style. My approach for internal documents leaked by Zitron is just to wait to see if Bloomberg picks up on the info or not.
No, you can't. The numbers are genuinely confusing, and Zitron actively works to make them more confusing rather than explaining what they mean because he needs them to sound as bad as possible. He also buries the numbers in thousands of words of prose!
The problem is that some numbers genuinely require a critical eye. If a source tells you that the OpenAI CFO told employees July ARR exceeded the Q2 total, there are a number of serious questions to be raised on how these numbers were calculated and what the point of such a confusing comparison is supposed to be. (I think the answer has to be that ChatGPT wrote the CFO’s script, no human financial expert would think to compare an annualized figure to the sum of three specific months.) But it’s hard to analyze the facts appropriately when they’re relayed by a guy who tells you that it’s all a giant scam and infers the worst possible answer to all the questions.
You're broadly right but I think you're dead wrong about the CFO statement — I think "July revenue alone exceeded all of Q2" is an extremely normal thing to say when revenue is going up at an insane rate. For example, if it was not true that June revenue exceeded March-May revenue, the point would be to show how their revenue growth has accelerated.
Zitron sells anti-hype and AI-hate. AI is not good for a lot of people and he's telling them what they want to hear. He's great at talking and making entertaining facial expressions. That's actually a real skill I admire but it has nothing to do with predicting markets correctly. He's in the business of selling entertainment views not predicting markets. He even admits he doesn't short AI.
I don't think Zitron is wrong, exactly. He's just early. There are a lot of analysts who have faced the same criticism over the past 10-15 years. IMO the issue is that they fail to understand the staggering size and scope of the government fiscal + monetary interventions across those years. Essentially, the government has jammed all the risk into the future to repeatedly rescue near-term results.
I think something similar is happening with e.g. Amodei's predictions of mass unemployment due to AI. It won't happen in the immediate term, because deficit spending removes the economic incentive for firms to pare down their workforces.
All that said, I don't think these people are "wrong," per se. They're just early. When the sh*t hits the fan on all this, it's going to be a big problem. And, for example, companies whose primary business is collecting money for Internet ads will come face to face with the reality of how low value their products are. I have some insight into this, as I work for such a firm, and I know the true extent of the bot traffic out there.
- "artificial intelligence has three quarters to prove itself before the apocalypse comes" — Mar 2024
- "If OpenAI doesn’t either reduce their $8.5bn operating costs to $1bn or less and raise at least $5bn in the next year, they will die." — Jul 2024 2025 costs: $34B
- Generative AI “isn’t getting much more efficient” (Jul 2024 ). OpenAI’s frontier-model API price fell from $30/$60 per million input/output tokens for GPT-4 to $4/$20 for GPT-5.6 Sol, alongside major capability gains.
- “I would be shocked if [Musk’s] wealth doesn’t return to something more like he had in 2019 or 2020” (Dec 2022 ). Musk is now worth approximately $873 billion , several times his wealth when Zitron wrote this.
I think it's fair to call his specific predictions "early." I'm saying his timelines are too short. Like almost all bearish market commentators, he doesn't understand the scope of the government stimulus. This is a systemic problem in market commentary. But, don't kid yourself. If the US stops massive deficit spending, a lot of what Zitron's saying moves forward on the timeline.
What predictions would you say he is not wrong, but just early about?
If his issue is that he is accurate on something shady going on with the finances of AI companies but the effects are mitigated due to government intervention, he should say.
Your explanation gives him more credit than I think he deserves. He has been unambiguously incorrect many times over the past years in the time scales over which he makes predictions.
In general, claiming that a prediction is just early in an unfalsifiable claim. It allows no admission of being incorrect whether you are correct or incorrect in a given moment. If you are right, then good, you've made a correct claim. If you're wrong, just claim there are clandestine corrective forces keeping the disaster you are predicting at bay. Either way you make it out clean and still have some sense of legitimacy.
You can make that claim for the general case that genAI capabilities will plateau or fishy financing in the sector will cause trouble at some point, but not for the specific talking heads that haven't constrained themselves to that sort of "broad future trajectory" prediction.
FTA:
> Note that I didn't attempt to catalogue statements that are nonsensical or were simply factually incorrect statements at the time, such as his December 2024 claim that “Generative AI's products have effectively been trapped in amber for over a year.” January 2026 claim that "[models are] basically the same as they were a year ago. They have the same efficacy". Zitron has not only made forward-looking statements that AI capabilities will not improve, he's also consistently made backwards-looking statements that capabilities have not improved which, while obviously false at the time, seem to play well to his base (along with his other false statements). If you connect all his statements together, it's implied that AI had the same capabilities in January 2026 as they did in December 2023 (and if you connect later statements, it's actually implied that capabilities in August 2026 are the same as in December 2023, though to be fair to Zitron he frequently contradicts himself and has also admitted to limited improvement at times).
Yes. I was specifically referring to Zitron's circular-financing complaints. I can't defend his separate claims that AI just isn't that useful. If he were involved in the tech industry, he'd know how preposterous those claims are.
Macrofinance expert Nathan Tankus has an excellent post on why the financing situation around the AI boom is just not big enough to mess up the financial system.
I agree that the specific amounts invested in AI aren't enough to cause a calamity directly.
The problem is you have the vise of a stock-market decline on one side (something basically everyone thinks is impossible), and AI-induced unemployment on the other side (something a lot of commentators, including Zitron sometimes, seem to think won't happen). Those two things in tandem would be worse than 2009 by a multiple. I doubt the US government will be able to bail it out.
P1. AI is useful powerful and (P1a) will continue to get more useful and powerful at the same rapid pace it's been improving
2. AI companies are very profitable, and (P2a) will be wildly profitable (eg $30T TAM) in the next few years
These are completely separate. But in practice people seem to be either proAI (both true) or anti AI (both false). P1 is clearly true and I find it hard to take anybody seriously who says otherwise. P1a... Who knows, gotta hit a wall sometime. P2 I'm way more uncertain about (especially P2a) but it seems like people like Zitron reason backwards from hating AI.
Over the past few years, I had helped Ed with some difficult nuances around the obscure technical aspects of serving LLMs (e.g. benchmarks and model caching); he has also shouted myself and Simon Willison out positively multiple times. I stopped assisting him because he repeatedly misused said advice to the most cynical interpretation ("how can this be interpreted to make AI boosters sound crazy?) and often made it misleading at best. Nowadays I suspect he views me as one of those crazy AI boosters.
Not challenging him was a mistake in hindsight, and I own it. Going forward I will no longer be helping writers/journalists with a clear anti-AI bias.
This reads slightly weird and more like a pledge of alignment than a statement from the heart.
But apart from that, I guess that's always the learning? Journalists (or people labeling themselves as such) often have their own story they want to tell, and usually do so by building it out of little blocks of reality stacked together to form the desired picture.
I would predict a similarly frustrating experience being equally probable even without the "clear anti-AI bias" attribute set.
To commit fraud you have to lie, deceive, or conceal. All of this bonkers financing is happening in broad daylight, announced to the markets, and met with rave reviews. I tend to agree with Zitron that the whole thing is a castle made of sand - not because the tech is bad or useless but because the financing, in its scope and structure, is so outlandish - but you can build a castle made of sand as long as you don’t tell anyone it’s made of steel.
So far NVIDIA has been very careful, it’s not actual fraud, at least based on public information. It’s a very unstable and extremely risky bet, that is very likely to blow in the face face of AI companies, but it’s not fraud
I think a lot of people (myself included) would love for it to be fraud. Because even if it's not fraud what is being done between NVidia, OAI, Anthropic, Microsoft, Meta, Musk and Google is funny accounting at the very least. It's hard to take any part of what's going on seriously in the US at this point and I feel like the bigger downside to all of this is that if/when they get away with this, and there are no repurcussions for any of the big names involved, then it erodes consumer trust that much further, pushing us deeper into a state of "doesn't matter anyway, why try".
Yes, you can include me too. I’m aware enough of the details to know we don’t have any proof of anything fraudulent, but that whole situation is just so disgusting
There is no evidence of fraud that I have seen beyond complete speculation from the likes of Zitron. He basically just says "Look how big the numbers are! It's so big it must be fraud!"
> If you are going to look at this and say “actually it didn’t” because of its Enrontastic accounting treatment, I also need to warn you — that identical guy in the bathroom is actually a thing called a “mirror,” a reflective surface that is showing you a reflection of you, not another person who is dressed like you and copies everything you do. I can’t imagine how scared you’ve been, and hope this has helped.
That’s his weird writing style, so I’m not 100% sure, but I don’t think he literally means that OpenAI is committing Enron style fraud. More of a stylistic way to say it’s a mess
>What follows may be an Enron-Lehman Brothers hybrid, one that leaves unbelievable destruction in its wake, an avoidable systemic risk empowered and enabled by a kneecapped media industry and sell-side analysts incapable of seeing further than two quarters in the future.
He also mocks the financial statements from the companies in a way that alludes to them being fraudulent (from the OP):
> February 2025: Anthropic making $34.5B in revenue 2027 is "is laughable on many levels, chief of which is that OpenAI, which made around twice as much revenue as Anthropic did in 2024, barely made a billion dollars from API calls in the same year."
Wrong (whether or not they make that in 2027, their 2026 ARR greatly exceeding that makes the 2027 estimate non-laughable)
> Oct 2024: OpenAI's forecast of $3.7B revenue in 2024 and $11.6B in 2025 and $100B in 2029 are absurd, "a statement so egregious that I am surprised it's not some kind of financial crime to say it out loud"
Wrong (2025 goal exceeded, 2029 TBD but not an egregious financial crime level of implausible)
I'm realizing that he is very good at alluding to gross financial crimes without outright accusing them of it (probably as a hedge against libel or something)
I haven't read every word but I don't recall him saying AI is bad or useless ever either. His refrain is that they cannot keep up with their endless spending on training and they're not reaching new markets.
I look at the rapid rise and decline of OpenClaw and get the impression AI has not really found any foothold among average people.
August 2024: "generative AI is a dead-end technology that has peaked”
July 2024: "Generative AI models aren’t getting more energy-efficient, nor are they getting more “powerful” in a way that would increase their functionality"
Nov 2025: "the fact we're running out of high quality training data and we're hitting the walls of scaling laws, in the training paradigm, these models aren't getting better. What we're seeing today is pretty much what they're always gonna be like"
There are other examples too from his prose of talking about how they are barely useful but I don't want to dig it up
> I don't recall him saying AI is bad or useless ever either.
He does say that pretty often in interviews. That doesn’t change his thesis but that‘s one reasonable reason people dismiss him, he has often said that AI is useless when considering the externalities. And he will sometimes take a shortcut and just say „it’s useless, doesn’t do anything well“, which is of course way too simplified.
I think he's constantly trying to time the peak (of AI improvement, of compute capabilities, of profitability) and keeps having to readjust his predictions every time it's proven wrong. Timing the peak is a fool's errand unless you have extremely hard and unavoidable data that everyone will have to face by a deadline. But contrary to what AI boosters often imply in response to skeptics being wrong, failing to time the peak doesn't mean the peak doesn't exist. So far it has existed for every new technology.
If we sample from Zitron’s claims, a lot of them are wrong. Probably most of them.
I think his contribution to the discourse is the bigger picture. These companies are going into potentially economy-wrecking debt over a speculative future that looks much foggier than the last two previous technological booms.
I found this in two minutes via a search engine, but the star blogger Dan Luu apparently cannot handle that. I'm not a regular Zitron reader, but incidentally this blog post that came up in the search is several levels above Luu's post.
> Although Zitron's past predictions have generally been wrong, maybe he'll be right about something in the future. Perhaps some of these companies will have valuations decline for some reason. But, even if there's some kind of massive AI crash and OpenAI and Anthropic go to zero, in terms of the societal impact, if on top of that, some other event occurs that prevents further progress in models beyond whatever AI labs have internally right now, that's still going to result in a fair amount of change. Which companies are successful will change who gets rich, but particular companies failing won't stop changes that fall out of current or next generation model capabilities from happening; it just moves around who benefits the most.
> If Zitron ends up being right about some company or other collapsing, that's pretty uninteresting to me compared to how capabilities have developed and will develop, where he's been wrong to date. It also happens that he's been wrong about the financial predictions he's made to date, but that doesn't really interest me, though I included a number of financial predictions for completeness.
Not sure how you can "get the big picture right" while having many egregiously wrong predictions.
So your guru Luu preemptively excludes evidence and you follow him? I'm not going to fact check all purported refutations from that blowhard Luu either.
I've been doubting him myself (his recent articles just hedge on data centers more than anything else) but then I want to ask, are there any valid critics of AI? Not a "code is bad but it'll get better" but actual criticism in the nature of the financing, politics, etc. I think separating AI as a tool and it's capabilities and AI as product that needs to make a profit is helpful, however most people are really hedging in one camp or the other in their takes.
Cal Newport has been interesting on the topic. But it’s also possible to read Zitron and skip his personal opinions and just follow the discussion of financing, that’s what I personally do. I don’t understand why anyone would take the commentary of an internet pundit as a set of predictions to evaluate as gospel
I enjoy Newport myself, he's probably the most level-headed take I've come across. Everyone else has some agenda (or product) they're trying to get at and very much ruins the messaging (ex the agent 'civilization' piece is extremely overblown especially since..that's how multi agent systems coordinate already. Nothing happened that is unprecedented and isn't how the system is designed to work.
The data center growth questions he raised have been where I found him interesting. I could never find any other articles to corroborate his predictions though. My question is when will the AI bubble burst?
I didn't know he'd had a long history of mispredicting AI quality and growth of companies like Microsoft and Google.
Water usage, sure. But emissions has plenty of reasonable concern.
There are the various xAI data centers have/are running using mobile gas turbines.
In general, the extreme amount of power is going to put pressure on the grids. I hope this leads to the world doubling down on renewables to offset it all, but is that going to happen? Hell, the US actively paid [0] to stop a turbine project.
Here's what I find invalid about environment angle.
I fundamentally don't think it is wrong to increase emissions as long as you consider the tradeoffs and externalities. Every single action you do in life has externalities - if you start opposing all of them then what really is your point? You just hate people doing stuff.
If you think emissions are so harmful, try putting a number to it. I implore you to do the exercise and convince yourself or me or others and suggest that the pros don't outweigh the cons. I'm half predicting that the conversation will end in dubious claims about tail risks and world itself collapsing (I hope you don't do that).
I don't think AI is uniquely harmful for the environment given the value it provides. Hell, it can even contribute to accelerating renewable resources and increasing efficiencies overall. There's way more to lose by slowing down AI because of emission control than to gain by reducing emissions.
You are making claims for why you think the emissions are worth it but I don't see how this makes concerns about emissions invalid. Even water usage, while blown out of proportion, can be a rational concern if you have a fossil fuel power station.
You can just flip this around and ask why is slowing down AI to control emissions harmful? What numbers that don't make tail risk claims are you providing for this?
I think the three valid criticisms you listed are valid, but there are other quite a few other IMO-valid criticisms of AI. Here are a few as I see them:
- AI centralizes power in the hands of capital, rendering those who can afford compute hardware vastly more capable than those who cannot and thus increasing social stratification
- AI is generally trained on the creative output of humanity without those who train it giving back proportionally (copyright "rules for thee, not for me")
- AI breaks social processes built around the idea that TRYING something is inherently a cost in time or effort, such as filing a legal claim or sending someone a threatening letter. We haven't made the social changes to punish or charge people for using every appeal/option/application, so this makes asymmetric-effort tasks like applying for a job really bad in the interim
- AI use makes it harder to develop the ability to critically think for yourself, especially among those who most need to develop that ability
- AI produces large amounts of mid-tier content, making it harder to discover exceptional human-created creative content produced after AI started to exist
- AI leads to distrust in remote communication, increasing cynicism and breaking social bonds generally. This is NOT your point about "AI spreads misinformation" - no matter whether it's true or not that AI can be used to produce misinformation, having people doubt each other is a harm
- AI demand crunches hardware and time availability for other adjacent markets, such as computer gaming, construction, 3D graphics production, etc. This harms both hobbies and professions in those fields having to cope with rising prices and lower availability of materials
- Everyone is using the same or similar AI, leading to a homogenization of culture and process across humanity. This is perhaps a mixed blessing, because humans are capricious, but less variety can be viewed as a harm
I will also say I personally hate seeing "job loss" said to mean "wealth loss" or "people starving". The goal of life isn't to have a job, it's to be well and happy. If you can be well and happy without a job, great, so it's really painful to me how people don't even see those things are not the same.
> - AI centralizes power in the hands of capital, rendering those who can afford compute hardware vastly more capable than those who cannot and thus increasing social stratification
Looks to me like I can run Claude Code without being able to afford my own datacenter.
> - AI produces large amounts of mid-tier content, making it harder to discover exceptional human-created creative content produced after AI started to exist
That it does, but I think the real social evil is bad recommender systems. eg YouTube is basically on a mission to drive me insane because it literally only recommends me a) reviews of espresso machines b) video essays by autistic people about Mario 64 c) PBS scienceslop about how quantum physics is super mysterious. None of these are even what I watch, but they're also not what I want to watch.
> Looks to me like I can run Claude Code without being able to afford my own datacenter.
Until Anthropic bans you from using their data centers, at which point you cannot run Claude Code at all. Welcome to being a have-not (at least in a world where only genAI-assisted coding is acceptable).
Those are two very different things, and the former should be a serious concern. If AI does indeed become a double-digit percentage of electricity usage as the AI labs themselves predict, then it becomes a significant contributor to emissions, full stop.
Zitron is just a rage farmer that tells angry people what they want hear while selling them subscriptions.
Maybe he is well meaning, but it's pretty common these types are just milking an audience that they dialed in on with zero regard for integrity or honesty.
I don't really care what Zitron says or pay attention to him because it seems clear to me has some kind of agenda.
But this article is not nearly as impartial as it claims to be. It interprets all Zitron's claims in a narrow and overly-literal way. Missing the point and refuting a technicality.
For example, looking at the last 3 year's revenue/profit growth. This tells us nothing without looking at a larger context. Has revenue growth slowed down? Have profit margins compressed? What makes up the income and has that changed? Etc.
I think anyone being intellectually honest understands that these tables alone don't refute Zitron's claims that big tech are "dying and thrashing around" which is something that could take many years and easily hide under these kind of top line / bottom line numbers. (Maybe further analysis would refute the claim, but that analysis is not present here.)
Or Zitron's claims that AI capabilities are "reaching the upper limits" back in 2024. I don't think even Zitron would disagree that AI capabilities have grown since then, but that doesn't refute his point. How long the "reaching" takes and how wide the "upper limits" are is completely up to a subjective interpretation, which this post makes no attempt to even explore.
By all means dunk on futurists. But at least steelman their positions or you look just as biased as them. (Although maybe I am off base and this bias is meant to be clear from the start by admitting to pro-AI predictions all the way back in 2015.)
I think lot of people including Ed are mixing 2 things the AI tech itself and the economic viability with the inflated values of companies building it currently. Me personally I am optimistic about the tech itself but don't see the current AI companies valuations being realistic or even the economic systems they are building around AI/LLM. As it will all be comoditised down to cost of compute + cost of electricity in the end.
I think the most enjoyable part of this is to have written it in the characteristic long-form Zitron wall of text style while still managing to pack almost the whole text with meaning, which is entirely the opposite of Zitron style.
Ed gets hard because of the love the anti-ai people give him and seeing him as the voice of anti-ai... If you listen to his arguments though he lacks knowledge of what these companies even do. He's been on so many shows discussing the negatives but he admitted to not even using the models for anything
Fair enough on Zitron being wrong, but I think the opening argument about Meta, Google, and Microsoft misunderstands his point.
Zitron is saying that the hyperscalers had no genuine growth opportunities, so they're using the AI bubble to achieve growth. The fact that they've continued to grow for a few years doesn't contradict his point, and Meta's steadily decreasing profit margin certainly doesn't look healthy.
Seconding that observation. The IT folks in charge of the compute direction have been quietly raising those concerns for over a decade (“and what happens to those alleged lower costs when their attention diverts to a new industry or pumping margins for shareholders?”), and the major enterprises or customers had all but migrated wholesale into public CSPs - and been eyeing the exit when they finally opened those eye-watering bills IT had kept forwarding to stakeholders. The industry wasn’t going to collapse so much as right-size, and that would turn into an inevitable cycle of churn (higher prices to drive margins, leading to more customers leaving in part or in whole, which would drive up costs higher to continue delivering positive results, ad infinitum).
The current AI build and boom has done wonders to their bottom lines in the immediate, but even Wall Street has its limits, and it sounds like there’s decreasing appetite for such CAPEX builds without associated proven revenue. That might kill some companies outright, but more likely it’ll force the major CSPs into the churn cycle that much faster.
This entire genre of pundit is just a person who has figured out that you can sell copium to the masses. Once upon a time this was a decentralized "this is how Ron Paul can win" thing on Reddit, but it was inevitable that slowly it would coalesce around these kinds of engagement bait people. Every subculture has its own such figureheads who DESTROYS opponents with FACTS and REASONING or whatever, but really it's just a reality TV show. The Alex Jones, Gary Marcus, and so on of the world are mostly just selling an entertainment product.
It's just a question of what the entertainment is. Some people feel good about being told "we were being hoodwinked; there are lizard people" and others feel good about being told "you'll be 100x healthier and good looking if you take these supplements" and others feel good about being told "these people are evil demons who are stealing your water" and others feel good about being told "these idiot rich people are going to lose their shirts" and so on and so forth. It's like how I like slice of life shows and hate horror movies and my wife likes horror movies.
In a sense, the misinformation gambit of LLMs did not come fully to fruition in the West (as much as it has in 3rd world WhatsApp forward land) because the locals were already a fertile ground of poor epistemic hygiene and well served by human providers of misinformation. Hacker News itself only has some hundred thousand commenters or so and even this requires a practice of aggressive information curation to prevent unrepentant misinformation repetition nodes from polluting one's belief set.
I knew him personally years ago and can't take a word he says seriously, speaking from my own experience, he is not a trustworthy person. He wants to be popular not accurate. He writes to make bank, not to be a diligent reporter that cares about the subject matter.
Luu kinda has a reputation for knowing his shit, for over a decade now. He's not a checks notes games journalist larping as economist, but he does all right.
> For example, with a style that could be described as the opposite of clickbait, Simon Willison has written what I suspect is the most widely read blog among programmers for the past 3-4 years (in the same way that, at various times in the past, Joel Spolsky or Jeff Atwood or Steve Yegge seemed to be the most widely read programmer among programmers). Among programmers and other serious users of AI, I would guess that Willison has a larger audience than Zitron.
I have no idea Simon Willison is the most widely read blog among programmers. I truly have no idea, and I've been programming for just a decade.
A lot of Simon's blogs posted here are when new LLM models are released, on how good are these LLM models create pelican riding a bike using SVGs. Nothing particularly interesting to me.
I truly have no idea why would people be interested in blogs about LLM creating pelican riding a bike svgs every single time a new model is released. Maybe its a proof of AGI/ASI for some?
I guess to me, Simon Willison will always be the "create-a-pelican-riding-a-bike-using-svg-dude".
I used to read his posts about Django years ago (a little strange in itself as I'm not a Python guy) and it took me a while to realise he was the same person!
I used to pay attention to Ed Zitron, exactly because he seemed to be someone who did the research, and looked at numbers. Until one day, I realized that seems to only look at numbers as long as it serves his agenda. When it doesn't, he looks away or makes the case for why the numbers are wrong, and shields himself from these "incorrect" numbers - or people who would point to anything suggesting that AI is not a total fad.
In April 2025, Zitron wrote [1] "I am sick and tired of everybody pretending that generative AI is the next big thing." This was at the time when AI coding tools had already gone "mainstream" with devs, and pretty much everyone was using tools like GH Copilot, Cursor, or something similar.
So I replied with this observation, saying how, at least within software engineers, AI is being adopted faster than any technology before [2]. To stay objective, obviously I brought receipts: sharing how, based on an older survey I ran, ~75% of devs in that survey said they used AI coding tools. Zitron made fun of the small sample size (216 people), blocked, and pretended like AI had zero PMF anywhere in the world.
I stopped taking him seriously since then. And I'm wondering ever since: does he deliberately only look at numbers and facts that he can tell the AI doomer story around? Or is it more that he finds that there's not many people who are "informed sceptics", and decided to play this role?
Ed's right about OpenAI being out over its skis, he's right about the numbers for everything being wildly optimistic and he's right about the circular financing/leverage aspect of a bubble. He hates AI though so he can't acknowledge its usefulness, it was pretty clear to see on his DOAC interview, Stephen kept bringing up real wins and clear progress, and Ed wouldn't engage in a substantive way.
Yes, his thesis is pretty much correct, his personal opinions aren’t too relevant or valuable. It’s a mistake to take his predictions as the important thing, it’s pretty much irrelevant, the whole field is very dynamic and complex, and he obviously isn’t an oracle who can predict the future. The only thing that matters is the thesis
Looking at it from an objective/historical perspective, when he first got on his high horse agents weren’t a thing, MCP was in its infancy at best, and half the code generated didn’t compile from frontier models.
From there everything split into two factions, which I’ll dub as believers and non-believers. From there, it has entirely been a cult following despite the evidence showing that models and agents have legs for software development.
FWIW my post history would show my extreme skepticism, and to an extent I still am. I think the real power of models isn’t the model at all but the harnesses.
Either way I think he lost the plot and runs on vibes himself. I also think this whole AI movement is going to have their 2000/2008 moment before the phoenix rises from the ashes.
what's it with people who think a bubble is literally destined to happen because of some religious belief that history repeats itself? I find it fascinating to understand the theory of mind of such people. So much confidence.
Just speaking from a gambling/odds perspective: the odds that a bubble never pops again in the history of mankind is a 1 out of 100, where the odds of a bubble popping again are 99/100. Your religious finger-pointing cracks me up.
He's part of the professional political / social media class now. He makes his money through engagement. I've stopped trusting people of this ilk. I listen to people who make most of their money not via the media ecosystem.
I knew him personally years ago and he broke my trust, my own opinion is that Ed wants to be popular and make money. He couldn't care less about being a diligent reporter that cares about the subject matter, he's a hype merchant jumping on one side of the band wagon to get clicks.
I made the account to make the comment because I feel strongly about him being untrustworthy. You can take it at face value or assume I'm lying, that's your call.
I just remembered that before AI, I knew Zitron from ranting about IoT and consumer tech. He just appeared one day in my Twitter Timeline, claiming to be the "man on the ground" at CES (or so my memory at least)
So from that standpoint, I guess it would make sense that a personality like that would now have ended up at the AI topic.
I would like to see a comparison with predictions of the pro-AI bubble and their hit rates though. This writing feels as selective as it tries to paint Zitron as.
I cannot shake the feeling that his two failed marriages suffuse his extreme negative outlook on everything that is not Ed Zitron, especially AI. His comments about photo shoots and men resenting his emotional honesty speak of narcissism and perhaps why those marriages didn't work out. Good luck convincing a narcissist to change their mind about anything, I speak from unfortunate experience.
But I get that he speaks to an audience that needs to hear his take and that's their call. I don't have time and I won't make the time for podcasts and sitting through the worldview of anyone for hours at a time, 2 to 5 times weekly. No one is that interesting IMO.
Hate on him all you want (he's gotten very repetitive for the sake of subscribers and reads), but the basic premise that the modern AI industry is a circular-dealing, point-of-diminishing-returns grift still holds. The bubble is here and the longer it inflates, the worse the pop will be. Sure the goalposts have moved, but the basic numbers don't math.
The current cross-deals aren't purely circular; quite a bit of revenue is, in fact, flowing into the AI industry from the outside (you know, via customers). What's more notable is the shared risk, as the deals tie multiple companies across the chain to a set of shared bets.
If the frontier labs suddenly found themselves unable to compete with cheap open weight models running on widely available compute, then one might expect the frontier labs to be the only ones exposed to that risk, while a chip-manufacturer like nvidia could thrive in either environment. A partnership or commitment from the chip manufacturers to the frontier labs could change that. Whether that kind of inescapable connection exists is hard to predict without a lot of specific modeling, and at this point I'm inclined to think that neither chip nor datacenter demand is going to drop any time soon, and that the commitments would be unwound before a company like nvidia is threatened.
Zitron implied 2 years ago that OpenAI would collapse by now. How's that bubble popping going? All NVDA+memory co+frontier lab numbers are accelerating
Comparing to other bubbles in the past, this one could still have something like 2 years left. Patrick Boyle has a video on the topic, in which he's also very careful to point out he could easily be wrong.
The thing about bubbles is that everyone who thinks they’re going to pop look crazy until they pop.
And to be clear, a bubble popping doesn’t mean that AI goes away forever.
What it does mean is that we’ll see some kind of economic crash or recession, and we’ll probably see at least one big company fail or go bankrupt/restructure.
OpenAI is the company in most obvious peril.
I happen to think that Nvidia is in a more perilous position than they appear. Their hardware advancement pace is relatively weak and they’re in a crypto-like hardware bubble where they’re one technology breakthrough away from a complete collapse in demand for their AI data center solutions. They’re also doing a lot of sketchy hardware financing schemes.
By all means, keep betting on this being a wild success and we'll see who's right in a little while. If you don't think this is a bubble then you're in for a ride.
Zitron in general is representative of the conspiratorial thinking that has infected all spectra of the political space. Zitron obviously occupies more of the left space.
Good critique of LLMs & the companies behind them is hard to find, and it is harder when people gravitate towards this sort of thinking.
Zitron has staked his bear position and isn't budging, so regardless if he's been wrong and wrong again, he'll be remembered for calling the bubble if/when it pops, if only because so few in the media have done so without equivocation.
Zitron is providing a service: he's running the train for those who want to believe, or sincerely believe, AI is a bubble. His interviews are apocalyptical one sided rants that confuse what is with what Zitron thinks should be. I'm not sure he's wrong, by the way. As LLM performance is becoming more and more commoditized I fail to see how spend catches up to expectations to keep running this market as it does, but that's beside the point.
One annoying side effect is that YouTube's algorithms will always try to force feed you more of the things you last searched, to amplify your biases and send you down the doomscroll rabbit hole. So if you search for Zitron, next time you visit you'll be flooded senselessly with naysayers, contrarians and skeptics from all courses of life.
I think it would be naive to believe Zitron is unaware of what he's doing.
He's created a huge following (and is presumably making a lot of money) from pushing a hardcore AI-skeptic narrative, and I can't blame him for seeing that opportunity and running with it. We're ultimately all responsible for recognising these people and weighting their advise as necessary.
Additionally, from a public reputational perspective making bad predictions simply doesn't matter. In finance we're all aware of perma-bears who will predict the sky is about to fall, and when it doesn't just argue that the disaster is still coming, but is taking longer than expected, or that some unforeseeable thing happened which has compounded the risk but has for now kicked the can down the road.
So ultimately, it will be very hard to say Zitron is wrong unless he starts time-boxing his predictions, which I don't believe Zitron has done for obvious reasons.
That said I don't listen to him much at all. I've tried to listen to him a few times, but it's become evident very quickly that he doesn't understand the technical details enough to be making the predictions he's making and seems way too emotionally invested in the arguments he's pushing without good reason. I have strong personal filters for low-quality sources like Zitron – if someone raises enough flags I avoid them like the plague.
If anyone who predicts the future was reliably right, they could easily shut the hell up and become a billionaire on stock picks. But they don't do that, because nobody can predict the future. You can say what may happen, but not for certain, and definitely not exactly when. All predictions without insider knowledge are idle musings.
Also consider that the economy isn't rational. Our economy should have tanked several times by now. AI should have fallen apart by now. Meta, Google, Microsoft should have declined. Instead it's record profits. So don't try to make predictions by being rational.
It is funny to see mainstream media finally catching up to how much of a grifter this guy really is. I believe I was the first at least on HN to make a list of his horrible predictions over the time [1]. Since then Kelsey Piper [2] also wrote about it and got some traction.
I knew that somewhere in the future, something has to give because you can't just go around saying anything without losing some credibility. You still have some ardent followers in his cult of a subreddit.
But just to be clear: Ed is part of a bigger problem in tech journalism which is characterised by extreme pessimism and excessive skepticism. It is not correct to view Ed in isolation rather to see it as a part of the culture in which he can thrive.
Only recently came across this guy and if u ignore the standard social media hyper hype hype he has, I dont think he is wrong even his 2024 predictions.
US has 1.5x the money supply since Covid. This means everything has to go up 1.5x to reach the same parity from before. eg inflation. All corporate earnings are going to inflate as 1b yesterday is 1.5b today.
There is no whete for these mega corps to go. They dont know how to grow. meta becoming well meta with the vr crap is case and point. meta blowing billions on a few hyped AI people is the nail.
Other than cloud, microsft/google aimt doing anything. xbox? nope, hardware? nah. It is all attention economy or selling the pick axes for it.
the only mega corp that still seems to be moving the needle is apple which i think speaks volumes.
Eds point is that AI tam or expectations are insane full stop and he admits coding has a use just not as big of a tam. Gen ai in art, music, etc did not take off at all esp compared to code. this makes sense, no one pays an artist 500k/year. their time is worth little compared to coding.
Where he is wrong tho is that this is not new. there is always a hype cycle of nonsense that screws the little people. what is new is the level of polarization. it feels like ai psychosis right now in ways that remind me of crypto but worse because ai is actually useful so people are even more insufferable.
I appreciate someone picking apart Zitron in a constructive way. He’s been an easy recommend to folks in my circles who just want to be angry, but there’s a reason I don’t read his stuff on the regular or in detail: I don’t want to be angry, I want to do something.
And I say this as someone who started as a doomer, and is increasingly a pessimistic pragmatist (“LLMs have value as tools, but not nearly as much monetary value as the main players believe they do”).
I get it though: for those of us who grew up alongside the net and tech sector, who loudly decried M$ greed for ME/Vista/8/11 but celebrated them at XP/7/10, who remembered when Google’s “Don’t Be Evil” was spoken with serious reverence, the current era of tech feels toxic and nauseating. Current AI is a prime target for that discontent, as are the companies whose motives very clearly aren’t societal progress so much as reality authoring and authoritarianism. In that vein, Zitron is magnetic because his entire position is “you’re right to be mad and they’re all going to die from hubris without you having to actually do anything”, which itself panders to the human desire for personally preferential outcomes sans individual effort.
Properly picked apart though, and he has as much substance to offer as the ardent boosters: a handful of “trust me bros” with a smattering of distractions to wind you up, but never actually address your concerns or questions.
I don't know about Chegg, but the fundamental problem with Duolingo is their product does nothing to teach people a foreign language. The nasty reality of that product is if you go through their entire learning tree in a language, you might be at a CEFR level A1 for that language. And, you spent 10x the time and 10x the money you would have spent via something like Lingoda to get the same outcome.
This claim is just not true. And gets tiresome. You roughly end up where those courses claim to be in reading and listening - depending on language it can be over B1. (No course finishes B2, some do have B2 content). I ended up being able to watch some (not all) netflix series in foreign langue and I was in early B1 section. I clearly learned.
Posting revenue numbers as an example of a company not dying seems rather foolish. Microsoft's gaming side is floundering and dying and Linux has been growing at an unprecedented rate as a result of Microsoft's decisions. Not to mention the geopolitical aspects at play here as countries make a serious consideration to drop Windows.
These companies are all heavily buoyed by their investments in AI which is essentially an oroboros of money.
i relate to zitron cuz of how much he seems to genuinely hate the people in charge of this AI bubble. he, like me, seems to wish that when this all falls apart they get proportionate harm to go.
that'll obviously never happen. it's wishful thinking and venting tbh. that's why i like listening to his stuff.
it's better than reading the wholly AI slop docs my CEO keeps sending out
As always, shooting down commentary asking for more and more evidence is very simple.
Zitron has a somewhat ranting style. Luu's passage on Google search for example just nitpicks on the person that Zitron allegedly named as responsible for the decline of Google search.
The real issue of course is that search quality clearly has gone down. What does Luu want? A "study"? Everyone can see that. The person is not the issue.
This is a highly selective analysis of Zitron's writings that focuses on a couple of mistakes. People need to understand that any normie will understand the difference between rants, numbers and speculation in Zitron's essays. They are not written for autists who talk of "priors" and "evidence".
"This is a highly selective analysis of Zitron's writings that focuses on a couple of mistakes"
While reading this I was thinking it would be interesting to see just a few examples of Zitron predictions that he got right. Since you appear to follow his work, do you know of any?
Zitron has become the distorted reflection of the very AI boosters he criticizes and mocks.
I think the worst thing that happened to him was AI skepticism becoming a political position. This gave him a captive audience - as long as he says what they want to hear, which means that he can never ever concede that he might have been wrong or that AI might actually be progressing or having successes.
This is not conducive to good prediction long-term - rather it leads one to a state of cognitive dissonance where one's chosen enemies must be simultaneously terrifyingly powerful and incompetent dunces. The propagandist's disease.
How? AFAIK, his arguments based around the economics remains the same, he just seems increasingly dramatic and exacerbated, which is understandable when you realize industry + ecosystem (politics/reporting) is tulip mania delulu and insists 1+1=100, or 30 trillion, or whatever. His position isn't based on AI progress - it's based on AI economics, at this point he can be an obnoxious rationalist slamming flat earthers - just because he's annoying/smug doesn't mean he's less right on fundamentals which if anything is more clear now.
Did you read the article?
>one's chosen enemies must be simultaneously terrifyingly powerful and incompetent dunces
I've got some bad news for you.
At first I thought you were referring to Umberto Eco's laws of fascism: "Fascist societies rhetorically cast their enemies as at the same time too strong and too weak."
but it's subtly different, because incompetence is not weakness.
I have the exact same feeling about him.
He has built a following of people that want to hear his extra skeptical views. And even if he changed his mind about some things, he cannot admit it, as that is not what his followers want to hear from him.
It's rare that people make the news and build a following by saying a very balanced, down to earth opinions... unfortunately.
I almost wonder if it's even possible now that so many of us get our information through algorithmic feeds.
I listened to one Zitron interview on YouTube and my home page was immediately crammed full of similarly foamy-mouthed AI critics. (As well as plenty more Zitron.) And it's suggested some people with un-nuanced pro-AI takes, too. But what the algorithm has never, not even once, given me is a sober voice that calls attention to the nuances.
> It's rare that people make the news and build a following by saying a very balanced, down to earth opinions... unfortunately.
Just gets you disliked by both sides, "certainty sells".
Some folks would prefer a confident wrong/simple answer over a "well it depends/is nuanced" answer.
> And even if he changed his mind about some things, he cannot admit it, as that is not what his followers want to hear from him.
I don't think that's true - over the years he's changed his mind from "LLMs are useless slop machines" to "LLMs can be useful when applied wisely".
For instance in "The AI Hater's Manifesto" he says:
> It just came to me — the problem that I have with most people using LLMs is the delineation between outsourcing work and outsourcing thought. Those using LLMs to write little scripts or BQL code on a Bloomberg Terminal are inoffensive. [...] A tool being used as a tool to do tool things — in many cases involving the LLM writing a little 30-line Python script! — is not a problem, though it’s also not a trillion-dollar industry that needed to steal everybody’s art and writing.
Similarly, in "The More You Buy, The More You Lose":
> Sidenote: The only truly useful use case I’ve found is on the Bloomberg Terminal’s ASKB feature, which takes natural language and turns it into BQL code to make requests of Bloomberg’s datasets. It’s genuinely useful!
You can perhaps say that he underestimates what the technology is capable of (or, conversely, that other people overestimate LLMs) - but that's a different kind of conversation.
right, and look at current American politics. One side tried to tailor normal, routine and rational POVs.
The other...
EDIT: I do find it amusing when I write these types of comment, then suddenly realize the irrational man childs of the far right nationalist republic ethnostatists think they're the rational ones.
There are plenty of people on the far right whose positions are rational provided that you agree with their views. Conversely, there are plenty of people on the far left whose positions remain irrational despite that you might agree with their views. It is a serious cognitive error both to fail to see the irrationality of those you agree with as well as to fail to see the rationality of those you disagree with.
> I think the worst thing that happened to him was AI skepticism becoming a political position.
It is a political issue in the sense that the discussion around AI can't avoid material and cultural issues. Ed Zitron definitely has an ax to grind and I'm personally turned off by his hyperbole, but I don't think something being a political issue means it's not worth discussing. I've also noticed the pro-AI crowd pivot to accusing people of not having actual reasons for hating AI, being victims of Chinese propaganda, etc as a way to avoid actually talking about specific issues that people have about AI and DCs.
You're not wrong but for a lot of AI boosters it's also a political position - remember Anthropic and half of SV at this point is run by wide eyed effective altruists.
Ultimately one cannot separate technology or science from politics, it's inherently political
Audience capture is a terrible thing.
I'm not sure I have the force of will to not succumb to it. I think the only way to avoid it is to be so sure of the thing you are doing that the audience reaction is not the key metric by which you measure your success.
"Your boos mean nothing, I've seen what makes you cheer"
Ed Zitron’s job is to convince people to pay him money to read what he writes, of course he’s going to preach to the choir, they’re paying him to do that and he knows it.
This is why I always consider the agenda of an author, Ed Zitron’s agenda is to make money from subscribers who read his writing.
That’s level 0 analysis, you’re supposed to go to the next steps and not stop here…
Sometimes it really is sufficient to say "This person is a grifter and from that all else follows".
It’s fine if you do not want to engage with the person‘s work, but source of revenue is just one component to evaluate if someone is grifting
and sometimes it isn't.
"audience capture"
Its pretty clear if you listen to him now he's just (re)playing the hits for his audience. Its like MSNBC/Fox News for people who think they're too smart to fall for that.
I used to think he was just early on some of this stuff but the sheer amount of content he produces its clear he's just cashing a check.
Being thorough and accurate might make you a lot of money in the stock market, but it's not a good way to get any media presence, because that demands being in front of people quite often, and basically nobody can be insightful and well researched in all topics of the day. Once you become a pundit, whether on politics or tech, and rely on eyeballs to feed you, you are going to be throwing stinkers. And at that point, you might as well just align with an audience and not care too much about whether you are predicting anything accurately.
We have people telling us the next recession being imminent all the time. Others told us that NFTs were key to the future of art. That's the pundit way. If you want accuracy, you become like Charlie Munger, have maybe 2, 3 really good insights througout your career, and hope do to well using the insights yourself, not by being a pundit
This is exactly right. Now, that does mean something about Zitron: he’s a pundit, not an expert or a forecasting genius. You could point to any number of analogous booster types. Twitter/X somehow loves pushing these people onto my recommended feed. I remember reading breathless threads about how o3 was going to single-handedly end white collar work. There are just more of that sort of person, so none of them in particular gets the same amount of attention as Zitron, who seems to be the only person willing to go on the record against AI. Maybe his overall worldview is sound, and maybe it isn’t. But he’s not really making confident, specific predictions about the future.
Which leads me to a criticism of the piece: several assertions are described as “Wrong,” with no explanation or citation, which are not obviously wrong to my mind. For example, the assertion that “DeepSeek has commoditized the [LLM]” is at least debatable. It is a prospect that the major labs seem to have at least considered.
In my experience, people who make fun of AI's ability to eliminate white-collar work are exactly the same people who are white-knuckling it, hoping they can make another $300k next year to buy that Rivian.
People who don't need a salary look at the situation more objectively and, in general, can see that a lot of white-collar work is in peril.
> We have people telling us the next recession being imminent all the time.
Yeah uhm so I'm not sure if you've like seen the world recently, but uh.
Yea
S&P 500 - All time high
DJIA - All time high
Unemployment rate - Near all time low (for last 20 years)
Number of US small businesses - All time high
US GDP - All time high
[Sources]
https://www.bls.gov/charts/employment-situation/civilian-une...
https://www.sellerscommerce.com/blog/small-business-statisti...
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/GDP
They haven’t allowed a recession to happen since ~2009 when they massively inflated their way out of the worst of the last one. Learned to have the cake and eat it too.
The only problem is after a few rounds of this the currency becomes worthless, and we’re well on our way. Inflation is a major component of those numbers rising.
And that's when we pay off the national debt for pennies on the worthless dollar. The pro move would be to stop lending the US money, but that's not going to happen.
How well I remember people pointing to the scoreboard in early 2008...
Bloomberg: It Won’t Take Much to Burst the Stock Market Bubble - https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2026-08-20/us-sto... | https://archive.today/O9sQE - August 20th, 2026
> First, the favorable impact of the artificial intelligence investment boom on economic activity and earnings will likely diminish significantly in 2027. That’s because what’s relevant for growth is how much investment is increasing, not its level. The increase in investment in 2026 will almost certainly be the peak. There aren’t sufficient resources — construction workers, electrical generation capacity, or chip manufacturing capacity - to increase investment by the same magnitude in 2027. Nor are the dominant hyperscalers likely to have the free cash flow and balance sheet capacity to sustain a bigger increase in investment in 2027 compared with 2026.
> Second, as the growth of investment spending slows, the growth in earnings of hyperscaler suppliers will falter, profit expectations will diminish and price-earnings ratios will shrink. The “picks and shovels” providers will suffer a double whammy - slower demand growth and profit margin compression. On the way up, higher demand leads to wider profit margins that sustain equity market valuations. On the way down, the outlook for earnings deteriorates quickly as the shortfall of demand relative to expectations is exacerbated by a collapse in profit margins. Third, as the investment cycle matures, the focus will shift to the returns that the hyperscalers are expected to earn on their massive investments. I suspect it will be difficult for the AI hyperscalers to generate sufficient revenue ($2 trillion or more per year) to generate the returns needed to justify an AI capital base that is likely to reach $5 trillion.
> Third, as the investment cycle matures, the focus will shift to the returns that the hyperscalers are expected to earn on their massive investments. I suspect it will be difficult for the AI hyperscalers to generate sufficient revenue ($2 trillion or more per year) to generate the returns needed to justify an AI capital base that is likely to reach $5 trillion.
(I'd encourage you to read the entire piece, it was written by Bill Dudley, a former president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York)
Nearly 25% of U.S. workers are functionally unemployed, economic analysis finds - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49403381 - August 2026 (7 comments)
42% of adults rely on their parents for financial support - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48937288 - July 2026
49% of young adults live at home, up 12 points since 2019. An economist says the fallout will reshape marriage, kids, and home-buying - https://fortune.com/2026/07/09/half-young-adults-live-home-f... | https://archive.today/1uB8d - July 9th, 2026 (Federal Reserve survey: https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/2026-economic-we...)
The housing crisis is pushing Gen Z into crypto and economic nihilism - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46079617 - November 2025
Why millennials feel hopeless about the economy - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46062082 - November 2025
Most Americans don't earn enough to afford basic costs of living, analysis finds - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44119317 - May 2025 (Report: https://www.lisep.org/mql)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lies,_damned_lies,_and_statist...
I mean I wish you a lot of fun playing this discussion game online, but I kinda fail to see the point of it.
Someone could now of course say "hey, but are your sure that these are really the metrics we should be looking at?", which could then be countered with a "well of course! This is how one measures a recession, no?"
And that could go on forever, achieving absolutely nothing.
I believe the saying goes:
> We have people telling us the next recession being imminent all the time. Others told us that NFTs were key to the future of art.
That's quite the conflation, and a very subtle way to tie a claim that's still unresolved to one that is to try and make the first one seem wrong with no evidence. Recessions are almost guaranteed in our system, they're a part of a cycle. Unless you think that the Great Recession was the last one in history, saying the next one is 'imminent' would be correct for any other viewpoint. We just don't know when it'll officially start.
> Given how fast these companies are growing (in terms of revenue and profit), it doesn't seem that AI is, as Zitron implied, some kind of desperation move they're reaching for because "they don't know how to grow" and are all out of ideas
Growth isn't a valid rebuttal, unless we can also sus out how much of that growth is tied up in circular financing of AI projects. We have a pretty good idea how much of Nvidia's valuation is tied up in the AI craze, it's a bit harder to tell with the megascalers....
As public companies, the megascalers publish pretty detailed financial reports.
Can you provide any examples of any of the megascalers publishing any detailed financials that touch on their AI spend or revenue or profit? The only one I’m aware of that comes close is Microsoft and they have still buried it in barely related line items which still leave us making assumptions.
There’s speculation on both sides and certainly Zitron is on the extreme end of the anti-AI side with the most cynical speculation but it is indisputable that none of the megascalers are open about their AI financials. Hence, we are all speculating endlessly. If only there were published financials then the speculation could end!
The obfuscation of financials doesn’t necessarily mean something bad is happening, it could be a competitive advantage for Google to be secretive about how cost effective their TPUs are or for Microsoft to hide how much revenue uplift they’ve experienced by adding AI to 365.
They don't publish their AI spending, revenue, and profit - but they do tend to break out other non-AI segments of their companies which can demonstrate that at least part of their growth isn't relevant to AI.
Page 24 of Amazon's 2025 report for example https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1018724/000101872426... separates AWS from the rest of the company.
Or Google/Alphabet's 2025 report https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1652044/000165204426... page which breaks out search revenue and YouTube revenue.
They actually do not, they do not share details on their AI revenue and investments
Reports which are (un)surprisingly light on actual financial details regarding their AI ‘investments’ and any profits therein.
> For any of his posts that I read, while there are numbers thrown around, the numbers don't actually connect to a coherent argument. In many cases, as we saw above, the numbers don't even really support his argument (such as an MAU decline in Facebook causing Meta financial problems which would then cause Meta to spuriously insert AI in places it doesn't belong). I suspect he's relying on people's eyes glazing over when they see numbers and just not thinking about what the numbers mean.
A frustrating thing about Ed Zitron is that he sometimes breaks news - gets hold of leaked numbers that nobody else has, for example - but he then wraps those numbers in his own extremely biased commentary. This makes it much harder to evaluate how credible the new information is.
Didn’t the FT both vet his numbers and also publish on the same leak?
Yes, and his post about the exact same data was noticeably more confusing and less illuminating than theirs because he was primarily concerned to point to whatever the biggest number was and go "Ooh, big number!"
https://www.wheresyoured.at/exclusive-openai-financials/
https://www.ft.com/content/e15b0d7e-ff6b-4f16-ba7a-4068feddb... (https://archive.ph/pAIEa)
There was a major material difference between the FT and Ed's post: FT explicitly noted that OpenAI has $billions in cash on hand (which is relevant if you are analyzing data about solvency), while Ed's post obfuscated that data point.
“Because Danny had a mortgage and a boss to answer to … The guilty don't feel guilty, they learn not to“
As someone else mentioned, ignore Ed’s personality and look solely at the balance sheets and capital analysis. Regardless of delivery, the math doesn’t math.
It's wild to me how much Ed is criticized while pathological liars like Musk and Altman are glossed over.
(Disclosure: I pay for Zitron's publication for the capital figures and exclusives he gets his hands on, I do not pay attention to his interviews, we are fact finding, if he wants to perform, I am not bothered, I've seen the performers on the other side, just keep the facts coming for ground truth)
I posted here a while ago when his bubble prediction lapsed and plenty of his fans were here. Telling me how I was wrong and the Q2 reports weren't complete yet because it was still early July and blah blah
Are we living in the same universe? Musk and Altman are glossed over and not criticized?
Criticized as being poor human beings, or as being poor executives?
Because the former, as P.T. Barnum pointed out, is just free advertising. And I see far more of that than the latter. Now, if and when their various empires collapse there will be no shortage of people pointing back and saying "all the signs were there", but in my everyday life (obviously just a single point of anecdata), it feels like I see a lot more coverage of them as "bad people" than as "bad at what they claim to be experts on".
HN has a fairly complex user footprint, it's not everyone of course and I do not mean to paint too broadly, but there is a strong contingent of those pro in a cluster.
https://hackernewstrends.com/?q=Musk&q=Altman&from=151234560...
I don't see any sentiment in that data.
Would you like a list of pro Musk and Altman users based on their comment and submission history? I'm unsure if that violates the site guidelines, and I prefer not to have my subthreads detached or stern reprimands by mods (it makes me feel bothersome in a host's home).
Profiling Hacker News users based on their comments - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47473086 - March 2026 (86 comments)
(simonw's work I cribbed off of)
I certainly believe there are some Musk and Altman glazers on this site. There are also certainly Ed Zitron glazers.
The point is not a few users you can point out, it wouldn't prove anything. The point is that you claimed that Musk and Altman are "Pathological liars like Musk and Altman are glossed over". I would say that requires at least sentiment analysis that an extremely high percentage(90+%) of hackernews users match that description. And that is simply not what I observe when I use this site. My feeling is that sentiment for Musk is generally negative and for Altman is neutral at best.
I will return with data.
> while pathological liars like Musk and Altman are glossed over.
You seem to live in a bubble where these people are worshipped ... :-(
The bubble you’re talking about exists, it is SF and the rest of the tech industry. It’s literally where the AI leaders are located, where they overhype each others
gestures broadly at HN and the tech industry
https://www.ycombinator.com/blog/ai-startupschool
I am a realist, I understand the cult of personality, etc. Just like I wouldn't spend a moment trying to talk a Catholic out of their faith. I have no feelings on the topic, this can only last so long based on capital trajectories.
> gestures broadly at HN and the tech industry
For me, HN ist rather some kind of counterweight/counterbubble where not everybody is insanely critical and cynical about Elon Musk and Sam Altman. :-)
I respect the bubble here for what it is. You've found your people, I hope it helps. I am a polite guest in this tribe's town square.
Edit: I am not asking for anyone to be overly critical of those I mention. Facts and evidence are objective, feelings are subjective.
Find Your People - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44074017 - May 2025 (283 comments)
FWIW I think you spend too long on this site. I'm not trying to be mean but I see you much too often here having strong opinions thinly sourced and think that perhaps your time would be better spent elsewhere. I, too, spend more time than is healthy for myself on this site but think I spend a fraction of what you do.
I realize we've both been in this community for a long time but I think one of the things I find about participating in Reddit and HN communities over time is that, I stop both being able to separate the truth of a matter from the argument itself and I stop being able to conceptualize the people in the thread as people and not mouthpieces for argument. There's a special toxicity that arises on these sites, where the argument becomes the main issue at hand and I see a conversation as a large conflict between world views. I may be projecting my own feelings here, but think it's worth contemplating these hot button issues elsewhere and responding in a lower temperature forum more conducive to actual discourse.
I'm just hear to shoot the shit and observe, what else would I do when I don't need more, chase status? I'd rather write, share, and be curious. Concern is noted, but I don't ever have to work again if I don't want to, I have a loving family, I am here for the brain tickles. My comments and the predictions within are me competing with my past self. Was I right? Easy to check the append only comment ledger. I have enough, I'm just here for fun, to learn, to grow, and be curious. I don't take this place seriously, and neither should you, it's not meant to be serious. Take value from what you can, discard from that which you cannot. And be polite whenever possible, to the best of your ability.
> and think that perhaps your time would be better spent elsewhere
Open to ideas, propose where.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49336958
Seek Wealth, Not Money or Status - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21586855 - November 2019
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otrovert
Erdemli, A., Audrin, C. & Sander, D. An Integrative Appraisal Model of Epistemic Curiosity. Affec Sci 6, 714–725 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42761-025-00328-7
(its also cheaper and more healthy than a recreational drug habit, while still hitting the same reward center)
I don’t understand the issue, cannot you ignore his commentary and just look at the numbers?
I'm not financially literate enough to trust my own analysis of the numbers. Ideally I'd like commentary from someone like Bloomberg's Matt Levine, a genuine expert in financial matters who is also extremely good at explaining them in terms non-finance-professionals like me can understand.
I didn’t even see the OP comment as a criticism of his analyses, just that he likes to do this rhetorical trick of dropping in numbers that are, at best, tangential to his point to prop up the argument’s credibility. Sometimes he does this in the middle of a real financial analysis which is even more maddening and confusing.
Fair, if you’re looking for reliable financial commentary Matt Levine is indeed the goat. Zitron is more like an old school blogger, with a very aggressive and corrosive style. My approach for internal documents leaked by Zitron is just to wait to see if Bloomberg picks up on the info or not.
No, you can't. The numbers are genuinely confusing, and Zitron actively works to make them more confusing rather than explaining what they mean because he needs them to sound as bad as possible. He also buries the numbers in thousands of words of prose!
The problem is that some numbers genuinely require a critical eye. If a source tells you that the OpenAI CFO told employees July ARR exceeded the Q2 total, there are a number of serious questions to be raised on how these numbers were calculated and what the point of such a confusing comparison is supposed to be. (I think the answer has to be that ChatGPT wrote the CFO’s script, no human financial expert would think to compare an annualized figure to the sum of three specific months.) But it’s hard to analyze the facts appropriately when they’re relayed by a guy who tells you that it’s all a giant scam and infers the worst possible answer to all the questions.
You're broadly right but I think you're dead wrong about the CFO statement — I think "July revenue alone exceeded all of Q2" is an extremely normal thing to say when revenue is going up at an insane rate. For example, if it was not true that June revenue exceeded March-May revenue, the point would be to show how their revenue growth has accelerated.
If he meant that he would've said July revenue, not ARR. ARR means it's multiplied by twelve.
Zitron sells anti-hype and AI-hate. AI is not good for a lot of people and he's telling them what they want to hear. He's great at talking and making entertaining facial expressions. That's actually a real skill I admire but it has nothing to do with predicting markets correctly. He's in the business of selling entertainment views not predicting markets. He even admits he doesn't short AI.
I don't think Zitron is wrong, exactly. He's just early. There are a lot of analysts who have faced the same criticism over the past 10-15 years. IMO the issue is that they fail to understand the staggering size and scope of the government fiscal + monetary interventions across those years. Essentially, the government has jammed all the risk into the future to repeatedly rescue near-term results.
I think something similar is happening with e.g. Amodei's predictions of mass unemployment due to AI. It won't happen in the immediate term, because deficit spending removes the economic incentive for firms to pare down their workforces.
All that said, I don't think these people are "wrong," per se. They're just early. When the sh*t hits the fan on all this, it's going to be a big problem. And, for example, companies whose primary business is collecting money for Internet ads will come face to face with the reality of how low value their products are. I have some insight into this, as I work for such a firm, and I know the true extent of the bot traffic out there.
No, hes been extremely wrong multiple times, he should not be treated seriously
Its silly to say hes just early, when his predictions give specific timelines that don't work at all
- "so egregious that I am surprised it's not some kind of financial crime to say it out loud" — on OpenAI forecasting $11.6B for 2025 (https://www.wheresyoured.at/exclusive-openai-financials/) actual: $13.07B. source is his own scoop (https://www.wheresyoured.at/exclusive-openai-financials/)
- "artificial intelligence has three quarters to prove itself before the apocalypse comes" — Mar 2024
- "If OpenAI doesn’t either reduce their $8.5bn operating costs to $1bn or less and raise at least $5bn in the next year, they will die." — Jul 2024 2025 costs: $34B
- Generative AI “isn’t getting much more efficient” (Jul 2024 ). OpenAI’s frontier-model API price fell from $30/$60 per million input/output tokens for GPT-4 to $4/$20 for GPT-5.6 Sol, alongside major capability gains.
- “I would be shocked if [Musk’s] wealth doesn’t return to something more like he had in 2019 or 2020” (Dec 2022 ). Musk is now worth approximately $873 billion , several times his wealth when Zitron wrote this.
sauce https://x.com/pitdesi/status/2093783287097602052
I think it's fair to call his specific predictions "early." I'm saying his timelines are too short. Like almost all bearish market commentators, he doesn't understand the scope of the government stimulus. This is a systemic problem in market commentary. But, don't kid yourself. If the US stops massive deficit spending, a lot of what Zitron's saying moves forward on the timeline.
What predictions would you say he is not wrong, but just early about?
If his issue is that he is accurate on something shady going on with the finances of AI companies but the effects are mitigated due to government intervention, he should say.
Your explanation gives him more credit than I think he deserves. He has been unambiguously incorrect many times over the past years in the time scales over which he makes predictions.
In general, claiming that a prediction is just early in an unfalsifiable claim. It allows no admission of being incorrect whether you are correct or incorrect in a given moment. If you are right, then good, you've made a correct claim. If you're wrong, just claim there are clandestine corrective forces keeping the disaster you are predicting at bay. Either way you make it out clean and still have some sense of legitimacy.
You can make that claim for the general case that genAI capabilities will plateau or fishy financing in the sector will cause trouble at some point, but not for the specific talking heads that haven't constrained themselves to that sort of "broad future trajectory" prediction.
FTA:
> Note that I didn't attempt to catalogue statements that are nonsensical or were simply factually incorrect statements at the time, such as his December 2024 claim that “Generative AI's products have effectively been trapped in amber for over a year.” January 2026 claim that "[models are] basically the same as they were a year ago. They have the same efficacy". Zitron has not only made forward-looking statements that AI capabilities will not improve, he's also consistently made backwards-looking statements that capabilities have not improved which, while obviously false at the time, seem to play well to his base (along with his other false statements). If you connect all his statements together, it's implied that AI had the same capabilities in January 2026 as they did in December 2023 (and if you connect later statements, it's actually implied that capabilities in August 2026 are the same as in December 2023, though to be fair to Zitron he frequently contradicts himself and has also admitted to limited improvement at times).
Yes. I was specifically referring to Zitron's circular-financing complaints. I can't defend his separate claims that AI just isn't that useful. If he were involved in the tech industry, he'd know how preposterous those claims are.
Being early is being wrong.
Macrofinance expert Nathan Tankus has an excellent post on why the financing situation around the AI boom is just not big enough to mess up the financial system.
https://www.crisesnotes.com/sigh-no-ed-zitron-ai-bond-issuan...
I agree that the specific amounts invested in AI aren't enough to cause a calamity directly.
The problem is you have the vise of a stock-market decline on one side (something basically everyone thinks is impossible), and AI-induced unemployment on the other side (something a lot of commentators, including Zitron sometimes, seem to think won't happen). Those two things in tandem would be worse than 2009 by a multiple. I doubt the US government will be able to bail it out.
Consider two propositions:
P1. AI is useful powerful and (P1a) will continue to get more useful and powerful at the same rapid pace it's been improving
2. AI companies are very profitable, and (P2a) will be wildly profitable (eg $30T TAM) in the next few years
These are completely separate. But in practice people seem to be either proAI (both true) or anti AI (both false). P1 is clearly true and I find it hard to take anybody seriously who says otherwise. P1a... Who knows, gotta hit a wall sometime. P2 I'm way more uncertain about (especially P2a) but it seems like people like Zitron reason backwards from hating AI.
Over the past few years, I had helped Ed with some difficult nuances around the obscure technical aspects of serving LLMs (e.g. benchmarks and model caching); he has also shouted myself and Simon Willison out positively multiple times. I stopped assisting him because he repeatedly misused said advice to the most cynical interpretation ("how can this be interpreted to make AI boosters sound crazy?) and often made it misleading at best. Nowadays I suspect he views me as one of those crazy AI boosters.
Not challenging him was a mistake in hindsight, and I own it. Going forward I will no longer be helping writers/journalists with a clear anti-AI bias.
This reads slightly weird and more like a pledge of alignment than a statement from the heart.
But apart from that, I guess that's always the learning? Journalists (or people labeling themselves as such) often have their own story they want to tell, and usually do so by building it out of little blocks of reality stacked together to form the desired picture.
I would predict a similarly frustrating experience being equally probable even without the "clear anti-AI bias" attribute set.
Thanks for putting this together, his writing really aggravates me and it was nice to see all of his predictions put together in one spot.
It's interesting how he has pivoted from denying that LLMs are useful to accusing frontier labs of Enron-scale fraud.
I suppose it's the natural pivot you have to make when your whole business is an anti-AI newsletter that costs $7 per month.
The fraud is there. Whether it surpasses Enron or not will be revealed in the future.
To commit fraud you have to lie, deceive, or conceal. All of this bonkers financing is happening in broad daylight, announced to the markets, and met with rave reviews. I tend to agree with Zitron that the whole thing is a castle made of sand - not because the tech is bad or useless but because the financing, in its scope and structure, is so outlandish - but you can build a castle made of sand as long as you don’t tell anyone it’s made of steel.
So far NVIDIA has been very careful, it’s not actual fraud, at least based on public information. It’s a very unstable and extremely risky bet, that is very likely to blow in the face face of AI companies, but it’s not fraud
I think a lot of people (myself included) would love for it to be fraud. Because even if it's not fraud what is being done between NVidia, OAI, Anthropic, Microsoft, Meta, Musk and Google is funny accounting at the very least. It's hard to take any part of what's going on seriously in the US at this point and I feel like the bigger downside to all of this is that if/when they get away with this, and there are no repurcussions for any of the big names involved, then it erodes consumer trust that much further, pushing us deeper into a state of "doesn't matter anyway, why try".
Yes, you can include me too. I’m aware enough of the details to know we don’t have any proof of anything fraudulent, but that whole situation is just so disgusting
There is no evidence of fraud that I have seen beyond complete speculation from the likes of Zitron. He basically just says "Look how big the numbers are! It's so big it must be fraud!"
Zitron himself doesn’t call it fraud and doesn’t compare it to Enron (he said no, with his reasoning when asked in interviews, multiple times)
I was thinking of this article where he compares OpenAI to enron: https://www.wheresyoured.at/what-happens-if-openai-dies/
Do you mean this section?
> If you are going to look at this and say “actually it didn’t” because of its Enrontastic accounting treatment, I also need to warn you — that identical guy in the bathroom is actually a thing called a “mirror,” a reflective surface that is showing you a reflection of you, not another person who is dressed like you and copies everything you do. I can’t imagine how scared you’ve been, and hope this has helped.
That’s his weird writing style, so I’m not 100% sure, but I don’t think he literally means that OpenAI is committing Enron style fraud. More of a stylistic way to say it’s a mess
He also alludes to it here:
>What follows may be an Enron-Lehman Brothers hybrid, one that leaves unbelievable destruction in its wake, an avoidable systemic risk empowered and enabled by a kneecapped media industry and sell-side analysts incapable of seeing further than two quarters in the future.
He also mocks the financial statements from the companies in a way that alludes to them being fraudulent (from the OP):
> February 2025: Anthropic making $34.5B in revenue 2027 is "is laughable on many levels, chief of which is that OpenAI, which made around twice as much revenue as Anthropic did in 2024, barely made a billion dollars from API calls in the same year."
> Oct 2024: OpenAI's forecast of $3.7B revenue in 2024 and $11.6B in 2025 and $100B in 2029 are absurd, "a statement so egregious that I am surprised it's not some kind of financial crime to say it out loud" I'm realizing that he is very good at alluding to gross financial crimes without outright accusing them of it (probably as a hedge against libel or something)He LITERALLY said it is not like Enron. And repeated it.
I was thinking of this article where he compares OpenAI to Enron twice: https://www.wheresyoured.at/what-happens-if-openai-dies/
You're right that he doesn't explicitly say enron-scale fraud, that's just what I came away with from reading the article a while back.
I haven't read every word but I don't recall him saying AI is bad or useless ever either. His refrain is that they cannot keep up with their endless spending on training and they're not reaching new markets.
I look at the rapid rise and decline of OpenClaw and get the impression AI has not really found any foothold among average people.
From the OP:
August 2024: "generative AI is a dead-end technology that has peaked”
July 2024: "Generative AI models aren’t getting more energy-efficient, nor are they getting more “powerful” in a way that would increase their functionality"
Nov 2025: "the fact we're running out of high quality training data and we're hitting the walls of scaling laws, in the training paradigm, these models aren't getting better. What we're seeing today is pretty much what they're always gonna be like"
There are other examples too from his prose of talking about how they are barely useful but I don't want to dig it up
> I don't recall him saying AI is bad or useless ever either.
He does say that pretty often in interviews. That doesn’t change his thesis but that‘s one reasonable reason people dismiss him, he has often said that AI is useless when considering the externalities. And he will sometimes take a shortcut and just say „it’s useless, doesn’t do anything well“, which is of course way too simplified.
> February 2025: "I will keep writing this stuff until I’m proven wrong." Wrong (Zitron continues to write despite repeatedly being proven wrong)
Lol, I appreciate the sprinkling of well timed humor in an article that is mostly straightforward facts and analysis.
I think he's constantly trying to time the peak (of AI improvement, of compute capabilities, of profitability) and keeps having to readjust his predictions every time it's proven wrong. Timing the peak is a fool's errand unless you have extremely hard and unavoidable data that everyone will have to face by a deadline. But contrary to what AI boosters often imply in response to skeptics being wrong, failing to time the peak doesn't mean the peak doesn't exist. So far it has existed for every new technology.
If we sample from Zitron’s claims, a lot of them are wrong. Probably most of them.
I think his contribution to the discourse is the bigger picture. These companies are going into potentially economy-wrecking debt over a speculative future that looks much foggier than the last two previous technological booms.
Yeah well, why not focus on Zitron's Oracle predictions? Article from May 27, 2025, when ORCL was skyrocketing.
https://www.wheresyoured.at/measures/
Now ORCL is back to $140.
I found this in two minutes via a search engine, but the star blogger Dan Luu apparently cannot handle that. I'm not a regular Zitron reader, but incidentally this blog post that came up in the search is several levels above Luu's post.
Zitron gets the big picture right.
From the blog:
> Although Zitron's past predictions have generally been wrong, maybe he'll be right about something in the future. Perhaps some of these companies will have valuations decline for some reason. But, even if there's some kind of massive AI crash and OpenAI and Anthropic go to zero, in terms of the societal impact, if on top of that, some other event occurs that prevents further progress in models beyond whatever AI labs have internally right now, that's still going to result in a fair amount of change. Which companies are successful will change who gets rich, but particular companies failing won't stop changes that fall out of current or next generation model capabilities from happening; it just moves around who benefits the most.
> If Zitron ends up being right about some company or other collapsing, that's pretty uninteresting to me compared to how capabilities have developed and will develop, where he's been wrong to date. It also happens that he's been wrong about the financial predictions he's made to date, but that doesn't really interest me, though I included a number of financial predictions for completeness.
Not sure how you can "get the big picture right" while having many egregiously wrong predictions.
So your guru Luu preemptively excludes evidence and you follow him? I'm not going to fact check all purported refutations from that blowhard Luu either.
I've been doubting him myself (his recent articles just hedge on data centers more than anything else) but then I want to ask, are there any valid critics of AI? Not a "code is bad but it'll get better" but actual criticism in the nature of the financing, politics, etc. I think separating AI as a tool and it's capabilities and AI as product that needs to make a profit is helpful, however most people are really hedging in one camp or the other in their takes.
Check out the writing of Baldur Bjarnason. There are a lot of blog posts and a book outlining the risks and tradeoffs.
https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2023/ai-position/ https://illusion.baldurbjarnason.com/
Cal Newport has been interesting on the topic. But it’s also possible to read Zitron and skip his personal opinions and just follow the discussion of financing, that’s what I personally do. I don’t understand why anyone would take the commentary of an internet pundit as a set of predictions to evaluate as gospel
I enjoy Newport myself, he's probably the most level-headed take I've come across. Everyone else has some agenda (or product) they're trying to get at and very much ruins the messaging (ex the agent 'civilization' piece is extremely overblown especially since..that's how multi agent systems coordinate already. Nothing happened that is unprecedented and isn't how the system is designed to work.
The data center growth questions he raised have been where I found him interesting. I could never find any other articles to corroborate his predictions though. My question is when will the AI bubble burst?
I didn't know he'd had a long history of mispredicting AI quality and growth of companies like Microsoft and Google.
I ended up on this comment after looking through the linked article and realizing the words "data center" never come up in it.
Valid criticisms of AI
- safety critics who think AI can take over the world like Yud (I find this the least credible but still valid)
- Bernie type of critics who think AI can cause widespread job losses
- Ruxandra Teslo who thinks AI can remove meaning which I feel is the most serious one [1]
What are not valid
- environmental like emissions and water usage
- AI is useless and it will take the economy with it because it is a bubble
- AI spreads misinformation and causes societal damage
- AI is trained on copyright (are we really on this side of the debate ?!)
[1] https://substack.com/@ruxandrabio/p-213699661
> - environmental like emissions and water usage
Water usage, sure. But emissions has plenty of reasonable concern.
There are the various xAI data centers have/are running using mobile gas turbines.
In general, the extreme amount of power is going to put pressure on the grids. I hope this leads to the world doubling down on renewables to offset it all, but is that going to happen? Hell, the US actively paid [0] to stop a turbine project.
[0]: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c1e1vg0gjl5o
What is invalid about the environmental angle? (aside from the dubious water claims)
Here's what I find invalid about environment angle.
I fundamentally don't think it is wrong to increase emissions as long as you consider the tradeoffs and externalities. Every single action you do in life has externalities - if you start opposing all of them then what really is your point? You just hate people doing stuff.
If you think emissions are so harmful, try putting a number to it. I implore you to do the exercise and convince yourself or me or others and suggest that the pros don't outweigh the cons. I'm half predicting that the conversation will end in dubious claims about tail risks and world itself collapsing (I hope you don't do that).
I don't think AI is uniquely harmful for the environment given the value it provides. Hell, it can even contribute to accelerating renewable resources and increasing efficiencies overall. There's way more to lose by slowing down AI because of emission control than to gain by reducing emissions.
You are making claims for why you think the emissions are worth it but I don't see how this makes concerns about emissions invalid. Even water usage, while blown out of proportion, can be a rational concern if you have a fossil fuel power station.
You can just flip this around and ask why is slowing down AI to control emissions harmful? What numbers that don't make tail risk claims are you providing for this?
Another one: data centers making electricity more expensive while not contributing much to the local economy.
I think the three valid criticisms you listed are valid, but there are other quite a few other IMO-valid criticisms of AI. Here are a few as I see them:
- AI centralizes power in the hands of capital, rendering those who can afford compute hardware vastly more capable than those who cannot and thus increasing social stratification
- AI is generally trained on the creative output of humanity without those who train it giving back proportionally (copyright "rules for thee, not for me")
- AI breaks social processes built around the idea that TRYING something is inherently a cost in time or effort, such as filing a legal claim or sending someone a threatening letter. We haven't made the social changes to punish or charge people for using every appeal/option/application, so this makes asymmetric-effort tasks like applying for a job really bad in the interim
- AI use makes it harder to develop the ability to critically think for yourself, especially among those who most need to develop that ability
- AI produces large amounts of mid-tier content, making it harder to discover exceptional human-created creative content produced after AI started to exist
- AI leads to distrust in remote communication, increasing cynicism and breaking social bonds generally. This is NOT your point about "AI spreads misinformation" - no matter whether it's true or not that AI can be used to produce misinformation, having people doubt each other is a harm
- AI demand crunches hardware and time availability for other adjacent markets, such as computer gaming, construction, 3D graphics production, etc. This harms both hobbies and professions in those fields having to cope with rising prices and lower availability of materials
- Everyone is using the same or similar AI, leading to a homogenization of culture and process across humanity. This is perhaps a mixed blessing, because humans are capricious, but less variety can be viewed as a harm
I will also say I personally hate seeing "job loss" said to mean "wealth loss" or "people starving". The goal of life isn't to have a job, it's to be well and happy. If you can be well and happy without a job, great, so it's really painful to me how people don't even see those things are not the same.
> - AI centralizes power in the hands of capital, rendering those who can afford compute hardware vastly more capable than those who cannot and thus increasing social stratification
Looks to me like I can run Claude Code without being able to afford my own datacenter.
> - AI produces large amounts of mid-tier content, making it harder to discover exceptional human-created creative content produced after AI started to exist
That it does, but I think the real social evil is bad recommender systems. eg YouTube is basically on a mission to drive me insane because it literally only recommends me a) reviews of espresso machines b) video essays by autistic people about Mario 64 c) PBS scienceslop about how quantum physics is super mysterious. None of these are even what I watch, but they're also not what I want to watch.
> Looks to me like I can run Claude Code without being able to afford my own datacenter.
Until Anthropic bans you from using their data centers, at which point you cannot run Claude Code at all. Welcome to being a have-not (at least in a world where only genAI-assisted coding is acceptable).
He who controls the GPUs controls the world.
> - environmental like emissions and water usage
Those are two very different things, and the former should be a serious concern. If AI does indeed become a double-digit percentage of electricity usage as the AI labs themselves predict, then it becomes a significant contributor to emissions, full stop.
This sounds completely reasonable:
> - AI spreads misinformation and causes societal damage
Agreed. And so are the other two, if stated reasonably instead of as strawmen.
Zitron is just a rage farmer that tells angry people what they want hear while selling them subscriptions.
Maybe he is well meaning, but it's pretty common these types are just milking an audience that they dialed in on with zero regard for integrity or honesty.
I don't really care what Zitron says or pay attention to him because it seems clear to me has some kind of agenda.
But this article is not nearly as impartial as it claims to be. It interprets all Zitron's claims in a narrow and overly-literal way. Missing the point and refuting a technicality.
For example, looking at the last 3 year's revenue/profit growth. This tells us nothing without looking at a larger context. Has revenue growth slowed down? Have profit margins compressed? What makes up the income and has that changed? Etc.
I think anyone being intellectually honest understands that these tables alone don't refute Zitron's claims that big tech are "dying and thrashing around" which is something that could take many years and easily hide under these kind of top line / bottom line numbers. (Maybe further analysis would refute the claim, but that analysis is not present here.)
Or Zitron's claims that AI capabilities are "reaching the upper limits" back in 2024. I don't think even Zitron would disagree that AI capabilities have grown since then, but that doesn't refute his point. How long the "reaching" takes and how wide the "upper limits" are is completely up to a subjective interpretation, which this post makes no attempt to even explore.
By all means dunk on futurists. But at least steelman their positions or you look just as biased as them. (Although maybe I am off base and this bias is meant to be clear from the start by admitting to pro-AI predictions all the way back in 2015.)
I think lot of people including Ed are mixing 2 things the AI tech itself and the economic viability with the inflated values of companies building it currently. Me personally I am optimistic about the tech itself but don't see the current AI companies valuations being realistic or even the economic systems they are building around AI/LLM. As it will all be comoditised down to cost of compute + cost of electricity in the end.
I think the most enjoyable part of this is to have written it in the characteristic long-form Zitron wall of text style while still managing to pack almost the whole text with meaning, which is entirely the opposite of Zitron style.
Ed gets hard because of the love the anti-ai people give him and seeing him as the voice of anti-ai... If you listen to his arguments though he lacks knowledge of what these companies even do. He's been on so many shows discussing the negatives but he admitted to not even using the models for anything
Fair enough on Zitron being wrong, but I think the opening argument about Meta, Google, and Microsoft misunderstands his point.
Zitron is saying that the hyperscalers had no genuine growth opportunities, so they're using the AI bubble to achieve growth. The fact that they've continued to grow for a few years doesn't contradict his point, and Meta's steadily decreasing profit margin certainly doesn't look healthy.
Seconding that observation. The IT folks in charge of the compute direction have been quietly raising those concerns for over a decade (“and what happens to those alleged lower costs when their attention diverts to a new industry or pumping margins for shareholders?”), and the major enterprises or customers had all but migrated wholesale into public CSPs - and been eyeing the exit when they finally opened those eye-watering bills IT had kept forwarding to stakeholders. The industry wasn’t going to collapse so much as right-size, and that would turn into an inevitable cycle of churn (higher prices to drive margins, leading to more customers leaving in part or in whole, which would drive up costs higher to continue delivering positive results, ad infinitum).
The current AI build and boom has done wonders to their bottom lines in the immediate, but even Wall Street has its limits, and it sounds like there’s decreasing appetite for such CAPEX builds without associated proven revenue. That might kill some companies outright, but more likely it’ll force the major CSPs into the churn cycle that much faster.
This entire genre of pundit is just a person who has figured out that you can sell copium to the masses. Once upon a time this was a decentralized "this is how Ron Paul can win" thing on Reddit, but it was inevitable that slowly it would coalesce around these kinds of engagement bait people. Every subculture has its own such figureheads who DESTROYS opponents with FACTS and REASONING or whatever, but really it's just a reality TV show. The Alex Jones, Gary Marcus, and so on of the world are mostly just selling an entertainment product.
It's just a question of what the entertainment is. Some people feel good about being told "we were being hoodwinked; there are lizard people" and others feel good about being told "you'll be 100x healthier and good looking if you take these supplements" and others feel good about being told "these people are evil demons who are stealing your water" and others feel good about being told "these idiot rich people are going to lose their shirts" and so on and so forth. It's like how I like slice of life shows and hate horror movies and my wife likes horror movies.
In a sense, the misinformation gambit of LLMs did not come fully to fruition in the West (as much as it has in 3rd world WhatsApp forward land) because the locals were already a fertile ground of poor epistemic hygiene and well served by human providers of misinformation. Hacker News itself only has some hundred thousand commenters or so and even this requires a practice of aggressive information curation to prevent unrepentant misinformation repetition nodes from polluting one's belief set.
I knew him personally years ago and can't take a word he says seriously, speaking from my own experience, he is not a trustworthy person. He wants to be popular not accurate. He writes to make bank, not to be a diligent reporter that cares about the subject matter.
Examining Dan Luu's predictions would be harder since he doesn't even date his articles.
Was this hit piece prompted by Zitron being mentioned in the tech scene lately?
https://lwn.net/Articles/1091245/
I don't know. If you post walls of text and ramble on like Luu, perhaps you are sitting in a glass house?
Luu kinda has a reputation for knowing his shit, for over a decade now. He's not a checks notes games journalist larping as economist, but he does all right.
He may be a good programmer, but I have never seen any interesting article from him. Also, making predictions is different from being knowledgeable.
It is ironic that Zitron is accused of having a cult following whereas Luu clearly has one, here at least.
His biggest error was the blanket rage against "AI" when it should have been focused on LLMs and data centers.
AI is a big field. Hating on AI is like hating food because you don't like broccoli.
Robotics AI that replaces high risk labor and even low risk repetitive stress labor is nothing but a win for humanity.
Off topic:
> For example, with a style that could be described as the opposite of clickbait, Simon Willison has written what I suspect is the most widely read blog among programmers for the past 3-4 years (in the same way that, at various times in the past, Joel Spolsky or Jeff Atwood or Steve Yegge seemed to be the most widely read programmer among programmers). Among programmers and other serious users of AI, I would guess that Willison has a larger audience than Zitron.
I have no idea Simon Willison is the most widely read blog among programmers. I truly have no idea, and I've been programming for just a decade.
A lot of Simon's blogs posted here are when new LLM models are released, on how good are these LLM models create pelican riding a bike using SVGs. Nothing particularly interesting to me.
I truly have no idea why would people be interested in blogs about LLM creating pelican riding a bike svgs every single time a new model is released. Maybe its a proof of AGI/ASI for some?
I guess to me, Simon Willison will always be the "create-a-pelican-riding-a-bike-using-svg-dude".
I used to read his posts about Django years ago (a little strange in itself as I'm not a Python guy) and it took me a while to realise he was the same person!
I used to pay attention to Ed Zitron, exactly because he seemed to be someone who did the research, and looked at numbers. Until one day, I realized that seems to only look at numbers as long as it serves his agenda. When it doesn't, he looks away or makes the case for why the numbers are wrong, and shields himself from these "incorrect" numbers - or people who would point to anything suggesting that AI is not a total fad.
In April 2025, Zitron wrote [1] "I am sick and tired of everybody pretending that generative AI is the next big thing." This was at the time when AI coding tools had already gone "mainstream" with devs, and pretty much everyone was using tools like GH Copilot, Cursor, or something similar.
So I replied with this observation, saying how, at least within software engineers, AI is being adopted faster than any technology before [2]. To stay objective, obviously I brought receipts: sharing how, based on an older survey I ran, ~75% of devs in that survey said they used AI coding tools. Zitron made fun of the small sample size (216 people), blocked, and pretended like AI had zero PMF anywhere in the world.
I stopped taking him seriously since then. And I'm wondering ever since: does he deliberately only look at numbers and facts that he can tell the AI doomer story around? Or is it more that he finds that there's not many people who are "informed sceptics", and decided to play this role?
[1] https://x.com/edzitron/status/1916903519594156407?s=20
[2] https://x.com/GergelyOrosz/status/1916906481686921483?s=20
Ed's right about OpenAI being out over its skis, he's right about the numbers for everything being wildly optimistic and he's right about the circular financing/leverage aspect of a bubble. He hates AI though so he can't acknowledge its usefulness, it was pretty clear to see on his DOAC interview, Stephen kept bringing up real wins and clear progress, and Ed wouldn't engage in a substantive way.
Yes, his thesis is pretty much correct, his personal opinions aren’t too relevant or valuable. It’s a mistake to take his predictions as the important thing, it’s pretty much irrelevant, the whole field is very dynamic and complex, and he obviously isn’t an oracle who can predict the future. The only thing that matters is the thesis
Looking at it from an objective/historical perspective, when he first got on his high horse agents weren’t a thing, MCP was in its infancy at best, and half the code generated didn’t compile from frontier models.
From there everything split into two factions, which I’ll dub as believers and non-believers. From there, it has entirely been a cult following despite the evidence showing that models and agents have legs for software development.
FWIW my post history would show my extreme skepticism, and to an extent I still am. I think the real power of models isn’t the model at all but the harnesses.
Either way I think he lost the plot and runs on vibes himself. I also think this whole AI movement is going to have their 2000/2008 moment before the phoenix rises from the ashes.
what's it with people who think a bubble is literally destined to happen because of some religious belief that history repeats itself? I find it fascinating to understand the theory of mind of such people. So much confidence.
Just speaking from a gambling/odds perspective: the odds that a bubble never pops again in the history of mankind is a 1 out of 100, where the odds of a bubble popping again are 99/100. Your religious finger-pointing cracks me up.
He's part of the professional political / social media class now. He makes his money through engagement. I've stopped trusting people of this ilk. I listen to people who make most of their money not via the media ecosystem.
Zitron is the opposite of Jim Cramer. No Hype, no sales push, very cynical and conservative.
I knew him personally years ago and he broke my trust, my own opinion is that Ed wants to be popular and make money. He couldn't care less about being a diligent reporter that cares about the subject matter, he's a hype merchant jumping on one side of the band wagon to get clicks.
Says anonymous internet user with a 10 minutes old account.
I made the account to make the comment because I feel strongly about him being untrustworthy. You can take it at face value or assume I'm lying, that's your call.
Most surprising thing to me here is tech giants growing 50%+ in 2 years. What's up with that?
I just remembered that before AI, I knew Zitron from ranting about IoT and consumer tech. He just appeared one day in my Twitter Timeline, claiming to be the "man on the ground" at CES (or so my memory at least)
So from that standpoint, I guess it would make sense that a personality like that would now have ended up at the AI topic.
I would like to see a comparison with predictions of the pro-AI bubble and their hit rates though. This writing feels as selective as it tries to paint Zitron as.
I cannot shake the feeling that his two failed marriages suffuse his extreme negative outlook on everything that is not Ed Zitron, especially AI. His comments about photo shoots and men resenting his emotional honesty speak of narcissism and perhaps why those marriages didn't work out. Good luck convincing a narcissist to change their mind about anything, I speak from unfortunate experience.
But I get that he speaks to an audience that needs to hear his take and that's their call. I don't have time and I won't make the time for podcasts and sitting through the worldview of anyone for hours at a time, 2 to 5 times weekly. No one is that interesting IMO.
Hate on him all you want (he's gotten very repetitive for the sake of subscribers and reads), but the basic premise that the modern AI industry is a circular-dealing, point-of-diminishing-returns grift still holds. The bubble is here and the longer it inflates, the worse the pop will be. Sure the goalposts have moved, but the basic numbers don't math.
The current cross-deals aren't purely circular; quite a bit of revenue is, in fact, flowing into the AI industry from the outside (you know, via customers). What's more notable is the shared risk, as the deals tie multiple companies across the chain to a set of shared bets.
If the frontier labs suddenly found themselves unable to compete with cheap open weight models running on widely available compute, then one might expect the frontier labs to be the only ones exposed to that risk, while a chip-manufacturer like nvidia could thrive in either environment. A partnership or commitment from the chip manufacturers to the frontier labs could change that. Whether that kind of inescapable connection exists is hard to predict without a lot of specific modeling, and at this point I'm inclined to think that neither chip nor datacenter demand is going to drop any time soon, and that the commitments would be unwound before a company like nvidia is threatened.
> The bubble is here
Zitron implied 2 years ago that OpenAI would collapse by now. How's that bubble popping going? All NVDA+memory co+frontier lab numbers are accelerating
Comparing to other bubbles in the past, this one could still have something like 2 years left. Patrick Boyle has a video on the topic, in which he's also very careful to point out he could easily be wrong.
The thing about bubbles is that everyone who thinks they’re going to pop look crazy until they pop.
And to be clear, a bubble popping doesn’t mean that AI goes away forever.
What it does mean is that we’ll see some kind of economic crash or recession, and we’ll probably see at least one big company fail or go bankrupt/restructure.
OpenAI is the company in most obvious peril.
I happen to think that Nvidia is in a more perilous position than they appear. Their hardware advancement pace is relatively weak and they’re in a crypto-like hardware bubble where they’re one technology breakthrough away from a complete collapse in demand for their AI data center solutions. They’re also doing a lot of sketchy hardware financing schemes.
By all means, keep betting on this being a wild success and we'll see who's right in a little while. If you don't think this is a bubble then you're in for a ride.
The market can stay irrational for quite a while.
Zitron in general is representative of the conspiratorial thinking that has infected all spectra of the political space. Zitron obviously occupies more of the left space.
Good critique of LLMs & the companies behind them is hard to find, and it is harder when people gravitate towards this sort of thinking.
Ed Zitron is nothing more than a paid clown for people who just want to hear exactly that.
Zitron has staked his bear position and isn't budging, so regardless if he's been wrong and wrong again, he'll be remembered for calling the bubble if/when it pops, if only because so few in the media have done so without equivocation.
Zitron is providing a service: he's running the train for those who want to believe, or sincerely believe, AI is a bubble. His interviews are apocalyptical one sided rants that confuse what is with what Zitron thinks should be. I'm not sure he's wrong, by the way. As LLM performance is becoming more and more commoditized I fail to see how spend catches up to expectations to keep running this market as it does, but that's beside the point.
One annoying side effect is that YouTube's algorithms will always try to force feed you more of the things you last searched, to amplify your biases and send you down the doomscroll rabbit hole. So if you search for Zitron, next time you visit you'll be flooded senselessly with naysayers, contrarians and skeptics from all courses of life.
I think it would be naive to believe Zitron is unaware of what he's doing.
He's created a huge following (and is presumably making a lot of money) from pushing a hardcore AI-skeptic narrative, and I can't blame him for seeing that opportunity and running with it. We're ultimately all responsible for recognising these people and weighting their advise as necessary.
Additionally, from a public reputational perspective making bad predictions simply doesn't matter. In finance we're all aware of perma-bears who will predict the sky is about to fall, and when it doesn't just argue that the disaster is still coming, but is taking longer than expected, or that some unforeseeable thing happened which has compounded the risk but has for now kicked the can down the road.
So ultimately, it will be very hard to say Zitron is wrong unless he starts time-boxing his predictions, which I don't believe Zitron has done for obvious reasons.
That said I don't listen to him much at all. I've tried to listen to him a few times, but it's become evident very quickly that he doesn't understand the technical details enough to be making the predictions he's making and seems way too emotionally invested in the arguments he's pushing without good reason. I have strong personal filters for low-quality sources like Zitron – if someone raises enough flags I avoid them like the plague.
If anyone who predicts the future was reliably right, they could easily shut the hell up and become a billionaire on stock picks. But they don't do that, because nobody can predict the future. You can say what may happen, but not for certain, and definitely not exactly when. All predictions without insider knowledge are idle musings.
Also consider that the economy isn't rational. Our economy should have tanked several times by now. AI should have fallen apart by now. Meta, Google, Microsoft should have declined. Instead it's record profits. So don't try to make predictions by being rational.
It is funny to see mainstream media finally catching up to how much of a grifter this guy really is. I believe I was the first at least on HN to make a list of his horrible predictions over the time [1]. Since then Kelsey Piper [2] also wrote about it and got some traction.
I knew that somewhere in the future, something has to give because you can't just go around saying anything without losing some credibility. You still have some ardent followers in his cult of a subreddit.
But just to be clear: Ed is part of a bigger problem in tech journalism which is characterised by extreme pessimism and excessive skepticism. It is not correct to view Ed in isolation rather to see it as a part of the culture in which he can thrive.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48447549
[2] https://www.theargumentmag.com/p/ais-biggest-critic-has-lost...
Great article. I was waiting for someone to eventually do an assessment on this grifter.
Only recently came across this guy and if u ignore the standard social media hyper hype hype he has, I dont think he is wrong even his 2024 predictions.
US has 1.5x the money supply since Covid. This means everything has to go up 1.5x to reach the same parity from before. eg inflation. All corporate earnings are going to inflate as 1b yesterday is 1.5b today.
There is no whete for these mega corps to go. They dont know how to grow. meta becoming well meta with the vr crap is case and point. meta blowing billions on a few hyped AI people is the nail.
Other than cloud, microsft/google aimt doing anything. xbox? nope, hardware? nah. It is all attention economy or selling the pick axes for it.
the only mega corp that still seems to be moving the needle is apple which i think speaks volumes.
Eds point is that AI tam or expectations are insane full stop and he admits coding has a use just not as big of a tam. Gen ai in art, music, etc did not take off at all esp compared to code. this makes sense, no one pays an artist 500k/year. their time is worth little compared to coding.
Where he is wrong tho is that this is not new. there is always a hype cycle of nonsense that screws the little people. what is new is the level of polarization. it feels like ai psychosis right now in ways that remind me of crypto but worse because ai is actually useful so people are even more insufferable.
I appreciate someone picking apart Zitron in a constructive way. He’s been an easy recommend to folks in my circles who just want to be angry, but there’s a reason I don’t read his stuff on the regular or in detail: I don’t want to be angry, I want to do something.
And I say this as someone who started as a doomer, and is increasingly a pessimistic pragmatist (“LLMs have value as tools, but not nearly as much monetary value as the main players believe they do”).
I get it though: for those of us who grew up alongside the net and tech sector, who loudly decried M$ greed for ME/Vista/8/11 but celebrated them at XP/7/10, who remembered when Google’s “Don’t Be Evil” was spoken with serious reverence, the current era of tech feels toxic and nauseating. Current AI is a prime target for that discontent, as are the companies whose motives very clearly aren’t societal progress so much as reality authoring and authoritarianism. In that vein, Zitron is magnetic because his entire position is “you’re right to be mad and they’re all going to die from hubris without you having to actually do anything”, which itself panders to the human desire for personally preferential outcomes sans individual effort.
Properly picked apart though, and he has as much substance to offer as the ardent boosters: a handful of “trust me bros” with a smattering of distractions to wind you up, but never actually address your concerns or questions.
The simplest argument against AI is the fact no public company appears to be making money on it, minus revenue that contributes to AI infrastructure.
Would love to see broken down counter example of public company.
So far Chegg and Duolingo have been devastated. Surely they could cut costs drastically with AI?
I don't know about Chegg, but the fundamental problem with Duolingo is their product does nothing to teach people a foreign language. The nasty reality of that product is if you go through their entire learning tree in a language, you might be at a CEFR level A1 for that language. And, you spent 10x the time and 10x the money you would have spent via something like Lingoda to get the same outcome.
This claim is just not true. And gets tiresome. You roughly end up where those courses claim to be in reading and listening - depending on language it can be over B1. (No course finishes B2, some do have B2 content). I ended up being able to watch some (not all) netflix series in foreign langue and I was in early B1 section. I clearly learned.
You also dont have to pay.
Posting revenue numbers as an example of a company not dying seems rather foolish. Microsoft's gaming side is floundering and dying and Linux has been growing at an unprecedented rate as a result of Microsoft's decisions. Not to mention the geopolitical aspects at play here as countries make a serious consideration to drop Windows.
These companies are all heavily buoyed by their investments in AI which is essentially an oroboros of money.
i relate to zitron cuz of how much he seems to genuinely hate the people in charge of this AI bubble. he, like me, seems to wish that when this all falls apart they get proportionate harm to go.
that'll obviously never happen. it's wishful thinking and venting tbh. that's why i like listening to his stuff.
it's better than reading the wholly AI slop docs my CEO keeps sending out
As always, shooting down commentary asking for more and more evidence is very simple.
Zitron has a somewhat ranting style. Luu's passage on Google search for example just nitpicks on the person that Zitron allegedly named as responsible for the decline of Google search.
The real issue of course is that search quality clearly has gone down. What does Luu want? A "study"? Everyone can see that. The person is not the issue.
This is a highly selective analysis of Zitron's writings that focuses on a couple of mistakes. People need to understand that any normie will understand the difference between rants, numbers and speculation in Zitron's essays. They are not written for autists who talk of "priors" and "evidence".
"This is a highly selective analysis of Zitron's writings that focuses on a couple of mistakes"
While reading this I was thinking it would be interesting to see just a few examples of Zitron predictions that he got right. Since you appear to follow his work, do you know of any?