I think the AI industry needs intelligent skeptics that keep the hype in check and ground us in reality.

But Ed Zitron is not it. Here's an example [1] of him fumbling on simple arithmetic. He's also perpetually bearish without any sense of principles on his message.

This is what he wrote in 2024 [2]

> You can fight with me on semantics, on claiming valuations are high and how many users ChatGPT has, but look at the products and tell me any of this is really the future.

I think the industry really needs someone better with principles.

[1] https://x.com/binarybits/status/2034376359909130249

[2] https://www.wheresyoured.at/never-forget-what-theyve-done/

Edit: here's another example https://x.com/blader/status/2031216372169191678

I get that people make mistakes but it really does seem like there are no principles behind the guy. It seems like he can write whatever.

> It seems like he can write whatever.

Not incidentally, he's a PR guy by trade--who still runs his own PR firm! And that firm has done PR for AI companies!

https://archive.ph/2025.10.27-195752/https://www.wired.com/s...

I'm firmly on the skeptic side of the AI skeptic/booster divide, but I wish we had better mouthpieces on the skeptic side. I get the feeling that Zitron is more concerned with getting his newsletter numbers up than anything else.

I'll plug my own content as a response to Ed. I have worked in engineering for a while now. I did code and continue to. How a PR guy has become the face of this story is beyond me https://youtu.be/cJYAK6csXso

FWIW I have been trying to interview Ed about this for ages but he has ignored all of our requests.

I've had to reread the first tweet a bunch, but I don't think Ed is wrong there.

As far as I can tell, in February Anthropic projected their 2026+ annual revenue at $14 billion dollars, based on a month long period. If you added the numbers presented together for the 3 years of time, you would end up at $6 billion dollars of revenue.

But, a month later in a court document they only mention "exceeding $5 billion dollars". For the entire time the company has been in business.

Additionally, the month long period with ~1B would account for a fifth of the total revenue. That's eyebrow raising.

I briefly listened to one of his podcasts, but the over-the-top, worst-interpretation-possible coverage was just... bleh.

His articles conflate quality with quantity. An aggressive edit with a more coherent structure would improve the message and sound less like a stream of consciousness rambling. Advertising his newsletter as "over 7000 words" is like bragging about LOC, it's an impressive number but doesn't itself indicate whether it's a necessary amount or if it's useful.

Unfortunately though I can't really find anyone else looking at this same information, so for now I have to wade through these newsletters to pick the gold from the shit

Ed can come across as agitated and shrill, and I never stop picturing him as exactly like Jude Law's character in Contagion. But. He's still an important counterpoint to the unexamined mainstream junk, which says more about the world than about him or his style. As we've seen play out with other areas of discourse, the middle shrinks, we're forced into a dialectic tug of war between absurdly polarized extremes, and it all comes to crisis. We might rediscover caution, epistemic humility, compromise and middle-ground, but only after rising absurdity and then some kind of punishment

I personally think the fact that it's an indie reporter like Ed Zitron diving into this says a lot about the state of tech media broadly. Reminds me a bit of how sports journalism works nowadays: nobody wants to call out industry leaders for fear of losing access, because losing access is career suicide.

I've listened to his podcast a couple of times. I never use this term but for Ed I make an exception: he is a hater. He is making a living out of being a hater.

I think you should focus on the claims in this article. There are plenty of principles espoused within.

Smearing his character without directly addressing those just stinks the place up.

I have been burned in the past by siding with people who give kitchen-sink type of arguments. So I would not bet my money on things he says.

That being said. Since COVID there seems to be an ongoing and worsening DOS attack. Everybody who have access to media are lying. And we know they are lying! The craziest part is not only that they are getting away with it (so far at least), but this is becoming embraced, standardized and legalized. Which is fucking crazy.

I like listening to Ed's interviews, mainly because he is DOSing back.