I've been so Zitron'd that I find this just funny

Ed Zitron is the most objectively and confidently wrong human re: anything going on in AI, competing only with the likes of Gary Marcus and, on his bad days, Yann LeCun.

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VCFundedGenYer 2 days ago | parent [-]

Explain, precisely, how he is wrong? Everything he's spoken about has come true so far. Are you made that he's good at prediction?

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Eisenstein 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

https://danluu.com/zitron/

Some highlights:

Feb 2024: "I believe we're reaching the upper limits about what generative AI can do and how accurate its outputs can be."

July 2024: "Generative AI, as I said back in March, is peaking, if it hasn't already peaked. It cannot do much more than it is currently doing, other than doing more of it faster with some new inputs"

July 2024: "Generative AI models aren’t getting more energy-efficient, nor are they getting more “powerful”

August 2024: "generative AI is a dead-end technology that has peaked”

Dec 2024: "I also warned you in March that generative AI had already peaked.”

Jan 2025: "I believe we’re at peak AI"

February 2025: "Sam Altman deputizing Orion from GPT-5 to GPT-4.5 suggests that OpenAI has hit a wall with making its next model, requiring him to lower expectations"

April 2025: "It also, at this point, is pretty obvious that generative AI isn't going to do much more than it does today."

August 2025: "These models have clearly hit a wall where training is hitting diminishing returns"

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"

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reducesuffering 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

"Based on estimates of their burn rate and historic analyses, I hypothesize that OpenAI will collapse in the next 12-24 months unless it raises more funding than in the history of the valley and creates an entirely new form of AI." - Ed Zitron (Jul 29, 2024)

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1986 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

I'm not Zitron pilled, but hasn't OpenAI raised more funding than in the history of the valley?

	▲	reducesuffering 2 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Yes, but clearly that's not what Zitron was implying. The rest of his thread's commentary makes that clearer. He's saying: OpenAI is going to implode soon. They would have to raise an unfathomable amount of money, it's literally never been done and is so much it won't happen. That's why they're going to collapse. He could have predicted that OpenAI would raise an unprecedented amount of money and are not going to collapse. He clearly believed differently.
	▲	borzi 2 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Yes, he was right. Like always, the market can overwhelm you with its irrationality.

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mabini 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

[dead]

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asp_hornet 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Genuine question, what is it about Ed Zitron that makes him credible in your opinion?

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anhyz 2 days ago | parent [-]

Honestly he's a bit over the top, but the thing he gets right is that he's constantly hammering on the insane financial incentives that everyone in the AI industry has to keep the music going.

Despite the ridiculous amount of capital being spent, the AI industry is still essentially in its startup phase, incubated in the fake-it-till-you-make-it Silicon Valley startup culture. The entire economy has been taken along for the ride. Failure is not an option.

So when the big AI players make extraordinary claims with limited evidence, or when things don't quite add up (like the HuggingFace incident), yet everything somehow seems to lead to "AI is even more powerful than we thought!", I think it's sensible to be skeptical until proven otherwise.

Zitron consistently presents the skeptic case, and many cases the hypotheses he's putting out there seem more plausible than the "official" AI narrative. Simple as that.

	▲	asp_hornet 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		Thank you for your perspective.