How accurate have Ed Zitron's AI skeptic predictions been? (danluu.com)

549 pointsby jatins11 hours ago638 comments

achompas 6 hours ago

One thing I’m observing in these comments is a willingness of folks to project their own predictions onto Ed’s statements when validating their plausibility. Eg. “I think he’s wrong about the timing but I do expect AI companies to go to zero.”

You can do that, but then you’re no longer discussing his predictions. You’re discussing your predictions, and your own positioning.

Those differ from Dan’s essay, which engages with the literal text of Ed’s numerous predictions during 2024 and 2025 which are demonstrably invalidated by their measurable outcomes.

overfeed 6 hours ago

On the flip side, I also see many people taking this thread as an opportunity to shit on Zitron as a person, and not "discussing his prediction". Incompetent/ blow hard/ dishonest are ones I remember off the top of my head.

AI by itself, is surprisingly polarized; Ed Zitron even more so.

dyarosla 2 hours ago

Not sure why you see it as such;

Incompetent and dishonest are characteristics that follow from this professional work, adequately describing an individual who continues to make poor predictions, analyses and false statements refuted by past events.

Far from “shitting on” Zitron

emp17344 6 hours ago

Why is Zitron’s repute evaluated entirely on the basis of failed predictions? Predictions are incredibly hard. AI enthusiasts and thought leaders have made so many demonstrably incorrect predictions it’s hard to keep track. Based on this metric, Altman and Amodei should never be taken seriously again.

mvdtnz 5 hours ago

Have you ever listened to Zitron speak? He's not exactly the type to hedge his predictions behind careful language about how hard predictions are. He makes every one of these predictions with absolute confidence and conviction.

emp17344 5 hours ago

So does everyone else, including prominent AI enthusiasts and tech CEOs. And most of those predictions are wrong, because predictions are really hard.

hgoel 2 hours ago

And we're used to insulting and making fun of the prominent members of those circles too, see: "Scam Altman", the large variety of jokes about Musk's timelines, comments about Dario waking up in a cold sweat whenever a powerful new open weight model drops, the "AGI achieved" meme etc.

jakeydus an hour ago

Hyperbolic as those descriptions are, it’s not like they’re not sourced from reality. Sam Altman’s reputation in SV is well-established; Musk promised the roadster what, a decade ago? These guys preach a promised land of milk and honey and so many hear lap it up like dogs.

s1artibartfast 2 hours ago

Both can be bad, and I think people take issue with intentionally projecting false or irresponsible confidence (lying).

Zitron twists and misreports a lot of facts where they should know better.

CEO hypemen knowingly conflate Ambitions for certainty

3RTB297 an hour ago

He speaks with all the conviction of a classic "Fire and Brimstone" preacher. Someone for whom the only metric is stirring emotion, not accuracy of statement.

aetherson an hour ago

What else would his repute be based on? Maybe telling retrospective truth? Per the article, he does terribly by that metric as well.

rtpg 4 hours ago

Here's two possible set of predictions:

- a list of predictions that are entirely wrong, from A-to-Z, and are not even resembling what ends up happening

- a list of predictions that are wrong, but where the underlying points are in fact interesting and have some predictive value, and it's just the "last step" that is wrong

For example, one person might say "oh it's raining in Dallas therefore I should buy some TI stock". And we'll say for sake of argument that they say that even though it's nice and sunny in Dallas at the moment.

Another person says "Oh its raining a lot in Idaho and that is going to increase potato yields and therefore I will buy McDonalds stocks cuz fries will be cheaper". In this hypothetical it turns out McDonalds buys all their potatoes from ... Kansas or something instead (and it's a specific kind of potato in a completely separate market)... but Idaho potato yields _did in fact go up_.

An even more straightforward point: the iphone 3GS comes out in 2010, people are very hyped, someone looks at how RIM _still_ hasn't gotten its shit together and declares "RIM isn't going to to be able to stay profitable 18 months from now, they're gonna have their lunch eaten".

Turns out that RIM still made a healthy profit in 2010. and 2011. And 2012. 2013 was their first loss in a while... and then it wasn't until 2014 that they really got kicked in the face.

The prediction was early, overestimated how long of a tail RIM would experience, but how wrong was it? Was the prediction of some utility?

I'm saying this... it would be helpful if _some_ more AI companies flamed out. In some sense he does himself no favors by focusing on the corps with the biggest war chest instead of the various AI companies that spend a bunch to go nowhere fast and then have just disappeared.

dosisking 25 minutes ago

AI companies will never go to zero because AI is part of the Military Industrial Complex now. All the money is coming from the military and government for surveillance and power and war.

wmf 20 minutes ago

Speaking of wrong predictions... the entire US military budget would have to be spent on OpenAI/Anthropic to keep the bubble from bursting.

layoric 2 hours ago

This critique is leaning really hard on their interpretation of "dying". They take the literal company is going to fail type of dying where as I have always taken it the same way he has presented it in his "rot-economy" context. They can remain financially "successful", but more and more people hate their products, their products are getting worse, their products are "dying". Google Search is still a good example, the old Google search is "dead" if you like, a know many people, including myself who no longer use it. More people hate and getting off Facebook. More people are jumping from Windows to macOS or Linux.

These tech giants need AI to continue to grow, and that growth at the moment seems to be coming from just two AI companies who are burning a record about of investments. OpenAI has raised nearly $200B, that is more money than Australia's tax revenue.. and they are getting further from being profitable as Chinese models are getting better and much cheaper.

The article linked seems right, but you have to take these morbid analogies in a very specific way, and assume that the only way to measure these companies is revenue/profits/money rather than their products.

I wish people would hold actual professional media economists to the same standards, along with journalists who just repeat press releases without actually challenging statements. His main argument has been the numbers don't make sense, and can't see how this won't end badly for a lot of people.

pocksuppet an hour ago

If I have a billion trillion dollars but 20% of the population hates me, but I get to live in a giant solid gold mansion with an army of servants keeping the 20% away from me, have I really failed?

ghostk an hour ago

type shit Louis the XVI would ponder about

jakeydus an hour ago

Let them generate studio ghibli profile pictures of themselves

kshri24 an hour ago

Still a failure because it is propped up by an inflated US dollar. Those trillions would mean nothing when the US economy collapses due to a cumulative effect of massive national debt, unending wars and inflation.

At least if you have the population by your side, you wouldn't have "guns, gold, potassium iodide, antibiotics, batteries, water, gas masks from the Israeli Defense Force, and a big patch of land in Big Sur I can fly to" [1]

They are all willing to risk everything to see if their bet on achieving "singularity" fructifies. I don't see us getting anywhere close (at least with the current tech).

[1]: https://futurism.com/the-byte/openai-ceo-survivalist-prepper

domador an hour ago

It'd depend on what specifically that 20% of the population hates that hypothetical you for. Maybe their hate in this scenario turns out to be an accurate signal that you are an awful human being. In that case, you'd be a very rich, awful human being.

Have you really failed in this case? Not at making money and living a decadent, hedonistic life, if that was your goal, but yes at being a good human being, one who is good to others and is worthy of their respect, admiration, and support.

LucasOe an hour ago

Yes.

dosisking 18 minutes ago

That depends. Do you think that H itler was successful?

jxcole an hour ago

If many people hated their products, they wouldn't use them. If they didn't use them they would not be financially successful. Google is not dying just because you personally have a feeling the results are worse than before and there is no definition of dying that would be consistent with Google's current state. If Google were to die they would die the way Yahoo did, because a competitor was demonstrably better than them and everyone switched off. There is no realistic evidence that this might occur in the near future.

j2kun an hour ago

You must not talk to a lot of retired people, for whom every tech product is a bewildering nightmare.

Zetaphor 6 minutes ago

They're the ones who are dying. Gen Z grew up on the cloud

layoric an hour ago

> If many people hated their products, they wouldn't use them. If they didn't use them they would not be financially successful.

I think this incorrect diminishes the success of product lock-in and also doesn't consider that the world is moving more and more into concentrated wealth where consumers have less and less to offer. Google's financial success could be sustained or even continue to grow with fewer ad buyers targeting fewer people.

> Google is not dying just because you personally have a feeling the results are worse than before and there is no definition of dying that would be consistent with Google's current state.

Again, "dying" is being used as a proxy for financial success. I don't disagree that Google/Microsoft/Meta will continue to grow their revenue or even profit, but I do argue that their products are becoming worse for consumers. That may or may not lead to real competitors, but that is a whole other regulatory capture discussion.

> If Google were to die they would die the way Yahoo did, because a competitor was demonstrably better than them and everyone switched off.

I think you mean "die" here in a product/usage sense, which I think their current path seems to be going that way, but I think it will matter FAR less to Google/Alphabet than it did too Yahoo.

taurath an hour ago

> If many people hated their products, they wouldn't use them

You do understand how drugs work right?

agentultra an hour ago

> If many people hated their products, they wouldn't use them

This might be true in a true, free market without monopolistic collusion and the abandonment of antitrust regulation and enforcement in the US.

In many cases people don’t switch to something else because there isn’t an alternative. Or because they don’t know how to change the defaults that come installed on their computer. Or they get a big scary warning if they figure it out and try.

I would have a hard time believing anyone who said Google was competing fairly and not juicing their numbers with Gemini. Like with search and ads, they have a lot of vested interest in profits and little regard for much else. There’s no reason to. Almost all safeguards on corporate behaviour have been taken off in the last bunch of years.

Google jumped at renaming Lake Ontario.

Of course they’re going to shove AI mode as the default on search and claim every user loves it.

pixelatedindex 39 minutes ago

> If Google were to die they would die the way Yahoo did

This might be true 20 years ago where Google had one true product, Search. Since then, they have diversified and got their fingers a million pies.

I don’t think you can get true competition with the way MS,GOOG,AMZ have grown. You’ll get a duopoly, or maybe a triopoly.

oofbey an hour ago

Was Microsoft dying under Balmer? I think we’d say yes. Even if the SEC filings indicated otherwise.

loeg 38 minutes ago

Right. If we merely define "dying" to mean something other than dying, it's possible for a not-dying company to be "dying."

wmf 17 minutes ago

https://danluu.com/ballmer/

Joel_Mckay 24 minutes ago

>tech giants need AI to continue to grow

You mean increase the -$2.50 lost for every $1 in revenue, or the $2Tn in debt disclosed 60 pages into the reports as a footnote.

Let us be clear, the only "growth" is in the LLM ectoparasite living rent free in peoples imaginations. The fact is when (not if) the peak of inflated LLM use-case expectations corrects, a lot of the industry won't survive.

Facebook has a founders-syndrome problem, and a product line catering to creeps. Note most normal people aren't creeps, but the ones that are creepy will buy creep-ware at a rate necessary to sustain the founder creeps ego.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Founder%27s_syndrome

Google hasn't built a successful product in decades, and acquired most of its successes like YT. There are 3 reasons this occurs, and 2 are related to corporate cult culture. One would have to fire 70% of the company to fix that problem, and one day someone will have to do just that.

>wish people would hold actual professional media economists to the same standards

OpenAI will go public soon, and the hype-cycle can finally settle down.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gartner_hype_cycle

LLM do have basic utility in search and pattern recognition, but only the delusional believe it will hyper-scale unconstrained forever. =3

th0raway 9 hours ago

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

hypfer 9 hours ago

> 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

gryfft 9 hours ago

I believe the saying goes:

  Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.

hajile 7 hours ago

The markets may not be claiming a recession, but the real world certainly is.

jongjong 6 hours ago

I feel like I've been in a recession economy since the day I entered the workforce 14 years ago. The movement of the stock market has had no effect on my reality. It's like two different universes inhabited by two different sets of people.

IMO, all the narratives we were exposed to around privilege before and after COVID were a cover up of this fact that we have a two-class system which is explicitly creating this condition. The issue is at the system design level and goes far beyond "technology putting people out of a job". The privilege narrative was classic communist-style "accuse your enemy of what you're doing yourself." It was literally the privileged few preemptively accusing the unprivileged masses of being unfairly privileged in order to take control that narrative before it was used on them.

thegrim33 9 hours ago

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

sfblah 9 hours ago

How well I remember people pointing to the scoreboard in early 2008...

BeetleB 7 hours ago

How well I remember someone predicting 7 of the last 2 recessions...

Yes, one day, we'll have a recession. It doesn't mean the doom prophets were correct.

hypfer 9 hours ago

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.

toomuchtodo 9 hours ago

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.

(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, and is too much to quote in its entirety)

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 (274 comments)

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 (4 comments)

Why millennials feel hopeless about the economy - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46062082 - November 2025 (15 comments)

Most Americans don't earn enough to afford basic costs of living, analysis finds - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44119317 - May 2025 (9 comments) [Report: https://www.lisep.org/mql]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lies,_damned_lies,_and_statist...

mixmastamyk 8 hours ago

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.

LogicFailsMe 8 hours ago

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.

adventured 6 hours ago

The US doesn't require that you lend it money, it possesses the global reserve currency. It'll take it from you via currency debasement. That's a world problem whether the world likes it or not. There is still no viable (realistic) alternative, and that includes the Euro, Yen, Yuan, gold, Bitcoin.

There are no lenders outside or inside of the US for $20 trillion in new debt over the next decade. Monetization is the only path. If you mean lend the US money in regards to holding or using USD (while it's being debased as it is now), then sure.

And if the world tries to shake off the USD, well, Iran & Venezuela (oil transactions assist USD dominance) would like a word. I'm not suggesting defending the USD reserve position via military action is moral, I'm suggesting it's certain to occur.

goatlover 3 hours ago

And yet with all that, Democrats are likely to retake the US Congress because a majority of Americans are experiencing an affordability crisis.

joering2 an hour ago

Yet with all what? AI stock pushing indexes high and US stock market being cheap because dollar lost 30% of volume in last few years so the whole world is trying to profit from short ride? Record low unemployment because gas and groceries are so expensive most people work 2 or 3 jobs just not to end up homeless? Democrats are going to retake because ballroom and gold arch does not affect gas or grocery price. They will retake because Republicans proved they are extremely soft on corruption. Not only they allow POTUS & Fam. steal billions from taxpayers, they are not stopping it and some even profit themselves. Dems will retake because we have a dangerous version of plutocracy mixed with socialism, where one person on the top (POTUS) unilaterally decides that US Government will take a free chunk out of Intel, or that 20 billion of taxpayers money will go to help Argentina or Brazil or Japan. That's why.

arctic-true 9 hours ago

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.

sfblah 8 hours ago

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.

arctic-true 8 hours ago

I think that is tied to the general trend that people see themselves as far less replaceable than others. And I’m not sure that people who don’t need a salary are exactly objective about it - unless you mean people who live off the state or something, those are people who need their capital reserves to continue to appreciate in order to sustain their lifestyles, and are thus relying on the destruction of white collar work to justify the valuations of the technology companies which are underpinning the strength of the markets. It’s like saying in the 19th century that only the propertied classes should be allowed to make decisions about labor policy, because the laborers themselves have their judgment clouded by their position.

But I take your point, and I only brought up the o3 example to emphasize that people on both sides of the booster/doubter debate can be prisoners of the moment. There are boosters eternally convinced that the utopia (or armageddon, for the doomer-inclined) is either already here or imminent, and there are doubters eternally convinced that we have reached the peak. One of them will eventually be right, but neither has been yet. You can’t fault one of them for calling their shot if you’re not willing to see it happening on the other side.

pocksuppet an hour ago

The flip side of that is that at least half of all white-collar work was already useless before AI. If it hasn't already been eliminated, there's no reason to assume a-priori that AI can eliminate it.

dosisking 15 minutes ago

If half of all white-collar work was useless before AI, and AI can replace those workers, then one can logically conclude that AI is useless.

asats 2 hours ago

is this comment written by ai?

tavavex 8 hours ago

> 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.

wmf 7 hours ago

...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

What? Zitron is getting a lot of media attention by repeating the same takes hundreds of times. He's not a general pundit.

lurk2 an hour ago

> Once you become a pundit, whether on politics or tech, and rely on eyeballs to feed you, you are going to be throwing stinkers.

Peter Zeihan

simonw 9 hours ago

> 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.

0x20cowboy 9 hours ago

“Because Danny had a mortgage and a boss to answer to … The guilty don't feel guilty, they learn not to“

dgellow 9 hours ago

I don’t understand the issue, cannot you ignore his commentary and just look at the numbers?

simonuv 9 hours ago

He's the biggest AI shill on this forum. The point is AI haters are bad, AI addicts are good.

SpicyLemonZest 9 hours ago

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.

dcre 9 hours ago

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.

tovej 8 hours ago

If he meant that he would've said July revenue, not ARR. ARR means it's multiplied by twelve.

dcre 8 hours ago

She, and we do not have the direct quote. It's a paraphrase, and the report can't seem to decide whether they're talking about revenue or growth. If she was talking about growth, "the ARR growth in July exceeded the ARR growth of Q2" is perfectly coherent.

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/07/29/openai-cfo-sarah-friar-tells...

OP is way overinterpreting something we don't even have verbatim in a way that unfortunately resembles what they're rightly accusing Zitron of.

SpicyLemonZest 8 hours ago

"July revenue alone exceeded all of Q2" would be a very normal thing to say, but you're skipping over some of the words. Unless revenue is sharply dropping, annualized recurring revenue in any month will exceed the revenue incurred in any quarter, because it's an annualized figure.

I think the most likely explanation is that the CFO misspoke and intended to say something more like your quote, or perhaps she spoke correctly and was misquoted. But without audited financial statements, all we have is speculation, and there have definitely been times in the past when executives of major companies made intentionally misleading statements about their revenue. (In fact, this thread began with a question about why you can't just look at the numbers, and here the answer is that nobody has reported the actual revenue numbers this comparison is based on.)

dcre 8 hours ago

But you are using the misquote to do the thing Zitron does that you hate! I don't get it!

SpicyLemonZest 6 hours ago

I didn't say I hate it. I've never seen any reason to doubt that Ed Zitron is a great guy who's working hard to tell the truth as he understands it.

My point is that any discussion of how a large, complex company is doing requires making judgment calls about which numbers are more or less reliable, do or don't matter, etc. This is especially so when it's a private company that has not yet any kind of meaningful disclosures. So if you don't think Ed Zitron's judgment is sound, there's no good way to adjust his commentary for that and "just look at the numbers", because the numbers have been filtered by his judgment even if they all came from accurate underlying sources.

dcre 5 hours ago

Completely agree there.

simonw 9 hours ago

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.

dgellow 9 hours ago

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.

jdgoesmarching 9 hours ago

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.

dcre 9 hours ago

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!

toomuchtodo 9 hours ago

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)

aleph_minus_one 9 hours ago

> while pathological liars like Musk and Altman are glossed over.

You seem to live in a bubble where these people are worshipped ... :-(

toomuchtodo 9 hours ago

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.

aleph_minus_one 9 hours ago

> 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. :-)

toomuchtodo 9 hours ago

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)

Karrot_Kream 9 hours ago

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.

toomuchtodo 8 hours ago

The concern is noted and appreciated. I am here (as you mention, likely too much) to learn, to grow, to share, and to be curious. I don't take this place too seriously, and I hope you don't either, it's not meant to be serious. Take value from what you can, discard that which you cannot. I have enough, and so have more free time than most. I am a scholar first now.

> and think that perhaps your time would be better spent elsewhere

Open to ideas, propose where. I have...looked extensively for work with meaning and am coming up short. Mods have my email if you want to reach out. I am always open to being proven wrong and/or updating my priors. What needs to be built that is also worth building? I am always happy to contribute my time, energy, and resources to meaningful causes and work. I have done my best to be interesting to people who can provide opportunity, and yet find opportunity in the scope of meaningful work in short supply.

Karrot_Kream 6 hours ago

> Open to ideas, propose where. I have...looked extensively for work with meaning and am coming up short.

FWIW I've decided to view sites like HN and Reddit as "intellectual junk food." There's a feeling that one is engaging in intellectual betterment by using these sites, but in practice none of the outcomes valued in intellectual output fall out of reading and posting a lot on these sites. I can't tell you what you should work on; every human who wishes to be creative struggles with this problem.

Ultimately very few problems can be solved by talking endlessly about them, whether that's online or in real life. I suggest just trying to actually make solutions to problems if you want to use your time that way. Talking with others can be a great way to get energized about solving problems, but doesn't take the place of actually solving them.

aarjaneiro 4 hours ago

> counterbubble

Gonna start using that one

dgellow 9 hours ago

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

rowanG077 9 hours ago

Are we living in the same universe? Musk and Altman are glossed over and not criticized?

toomuchtodo 9 hours ago

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...

rowanG077 9 hours ago

I don't see any sentiment in that data.

toomuchtodo 9 hours ago

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)

rowanG077 9 hours ago

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 and Altman are neutral at best.

toomuchtodo 9 hours ago

I will return with data.

GolfPopper 9 hours ago

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".

jsLavaGoat 9 hours ago

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

tim333 8 hours ago

As someone with a bit of understanding of accounts and finance I don't think Ed's analysis is very good. He's not someone who would pass a finance exam.

DenisM 6 hours ago

Is the source material good, in your opinion?

sobellian 6 hours ago

This was mentioned in the article.

> For example, when Timothy B. Lee looked at a spreadsheet that Zitron used to create a projection of Anthropic's revenue, he found, "He doesn't count February 1-10, counts March 1-10 twice, counts August 21-October 21 as one month instead of two, and doesn't count October 21-November 1. [another commenter notes that his spreadsheet also contains February 30] ... Ed claims he tried to compute Anthropic's revenue for 2025 and came up with $3.6 billion, suggesting some funny business [but the numbers work out once you fix the errors]"

iNerdier 9 hours ago

Didn’t the FT both vet his numbers and also publish on the same leak?

minimaxir 9 hours ago

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.

dcre 9 hours ago

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)

bogzz 8 hours ago

I don't find that frustrating about his writing-- on the contrary, his colorful (tinted with derision) use of language is very soothing to me, especially after encountering relentless LLM optimists like yourself on here every day, and dealing with people who have AI psychosis and are in positions of power over me, every week.

simonw 8 hours ago

Right, you're very much his target audience.

enraged_camel 7 hours ago

If you find derision and extreme cynicism "soothing", the problem may be with you, rather than those who are optimistic about AI.

GlacierFox 6 hours ago

Life is more serene in psychosis, am I right?

BeetleB 7 hours ago

One of the best heuristics I've seen on whether there will be a fruitful outcome in taking someone seriously is how often they invoke labels (name calling, etc).

Hasn't failed - both in real life and online.

dosisking 12 minutes ago

On the contrary, it has just failed.

solaire_oa 5 hours ago

Even if Zitron is hopelessly wrong and a complete fool, he's an engaging writer. Like the original article itself states, it's not about the numbers, it's about catharsis. The transparent absence of AI tells in his articles is refreshing, and just rampaging against the AI boosters who lack empathy and self-awareness (which so many of them absolutely do) is cathartic. Even if it's all bunk, fake, and stupid, it's nice to have a way to self-soothe and manifest how much some of us want AI to have a reckoning.

Does that make his readers suckers? Possibly. But personally I also think it's a very human trait to seek comfort.

GaryBluto 5 hours ago

This sounds incredibly neurotic and more than a little cultish. How long until Zitron starts a nice little AI-free settlement in Guyana?

swiftcoder 9 hours ago

> 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....

simonw 9 hours ago

As public companies, the megascalers publish pretty detailed financial reports.

iNerdier 9 hours ago

Reports which are (un)surprisingly light on actual financial details regarding their AI ‘investments’ and any profits therein.

dgellow 9 hours ago

They actually do not, they do not share details on their AI revenue and investments

reticulates 9 hours ago

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.

simonw 8 hours ago

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.

GlacierFox 7 hours ago

But you just wrote above "As public companies, the megascalers publish pretty detailed financial reports". Haha wtf is going on here?

simonw 7 hours ago

Consider this original comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49526069#49527546

I'll expand the section of the article that it quotes:

> Although this wouldn't be in the spirit of Zitron's statement, one could argue that Meta is actually dying, it just hasn't died yet. However, the reasoning in Zitron's argument is incorrect here—the Meta, Google, and Microsoft ecosystems are not dying. 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.

So the argument here is that Ed says those companies are dying, but Dan Luu points out that their economic figures show that they are not.

The counter-argument is "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"

My point is that the public reports of these companies, while not helping us unwind the circular financing, do at least show us that their non-AI businesses are growing at a healthy pace. Which supports Dan's argument that these companies are not dying.

solid_fuel 7 hours ago

> 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.

So the previous statement that "As public companies, the megascalers publish pretty detailed financial reports" is incorrect and irrelevant to the question that was asked.

swiftcoder 8 hours ago

Financial reports alone don’t paint the whole picture when it comes to valuations. For example, theoretically amazon has committed to invest 25 billion in anthropic, and anthropic has committed to spend 100 billion on aws compute. As far as we can tell, no real money has actually changed hands in either direction, but both valuations are being buoyed by their prospective investments…

infamouscow 8 hours ago

Because of accounting tricks, quarterly financials don't accurately reflect the size of this fiery money pit.

The datacenter build-outs are all majority (>50% ownership) financed by other companies, with a shell company owned by the hyperscaler as a minority owner. The data center then grants the hyperscaler an exclusive leasing agreement, and because the shell company is a minority owner, legally, it's not their debt.

The only reason this has worked is because there's such a long delay taking delivery on GPUs. When these capital allocators start paying for GPUs in data centers which haven't yet broken ground, then we'll see a very visceral market reaction. Some of that has already happened, but there's enough momentum that it can be absorbed and dismissed as an anomaly. But with governments unexpectedly passing moratoriums on data centers everywhere, it's only a matter of time before there's no data center to offload those GPUs to. That's when the music stops.

I believe that was Zitron's central thesis and why he started reporting on this. It mirrors the mortgage-backed securities situation that led to the 2008 GFC, except with even fewer guard rails to prevent financial calamity.

Investors are very savvy and keenly aware of what's going to happen. There's just zero incentive to pull the fire alarm and risk being blamed for crashing the market. If you're wondering why everyone's running toward the exits instead of treating these tech companies as 10+ year investments, you have your answer.

u1hcw9nx 6 hours ago

You are confusing Capex and revenue.

The predictions were predictions of revenue. Circular financing of AI projects does not create revenue for OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, or Google. Only Nvidia benefits from it.

Predicting revenue growth will stall and it does not was wrong.

reticulates 4 hours ago

Circular financing absolutely creates revenue.

A startup raises $50 million from OpenAI and Anthropic to finance API calls to OpenAI and Anthropic that they are using at a loss who in turn spend that money on compute with Microsoft and Google who in turn invest in Anthropic and OpenAI who then invest the startup using the startup’s revenue to value it… the cycle repeats.

There are multi-billion dollar valued startups invested in by OpenAI and Anthropic with hundreds of millions in ARR that are spending 90% of their revenue with Anthropic and OpenAI.

Situational Awareness, the fund that recently imploded, invested tens of billions into AI companies using their holdings in Anthropic to help finance the investments…

This could all work out fine in the long term, we’re all just speculating at this point, but the circular financing is absolutely making it to revenue because capital invested into startups is used to fund growth which is achieved by subsidizing costs incurred with OpenAI and Anthropic.

chrisco255 3 hours ago

The vast majority of startups are not funded by OpenAI or Anthropic. They are not a significant source of venture capital. Meanwhile, OpenAI is pulling in $40B+ per year and Anthropic $65B+ per year.

You are mixing up valuations with liquid cash and you're also making sweeping statements about how those startups are spending their cash. A majority of a raise is not spent on AI compute.

Situational Awareness blew up because they used leverage to invest, and leverage is a great way to blow up any fund even if they were directionally correct about AI.

reticulates an hour ago

You’re applying pre-AI investing to a post-AI world. Yes, a decade ago, a startup raised money and spent 90% of it on people. The people built software which had incredible margins. Build it and then print money for ever more. That’s not the case any more, these startups no longer have incredible margins, they’re not collecting $100/m per user and banking $99 of it. They’re collecting $1000 and sending $999 of it to Anthropic and OpenAI.

Revenue numbers are vastly inflated compared to pre-AI but these startups aren’t keeping the money. Profits are worse than ever before. Startups with 30 employees that reach $100m ARR in 6 months are not banking $90m or $80m or… they’re just passing that money straight through to OpenAI and Anthropic.

If startups aren’t just funnelling all their funds raised straight through to OpenAI and Anthropic, where is this combined $100bn in revenue coming from? Who is paying for it? My spend on software certainly hasn’t gone up in a post-AI world. My company is spending less on software now.

OpenAI have stopped being so reckless with their cash investments which is why they appear to have slowed down but they’re still investing millions in huge numbers of startups through token allowances. They invest $2 million in every YC startup (or did a few months ago). There’s an entire market of reselling these tokens!

https://mlq.ai/news/openai-and-anthropic-pour-up-to-800m-a-y...

Hell, I’ll go one step further and bet they book these credits being spent as revenue.

minimaxir 9 hours ago

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.

hypfer 8 hours ago

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.

minimaxir 7 hours ago

That's an unfair characterization of tech journalists in general. When BuzzFeed News was around, I worked closely with them on technical aspects and projects to ensure that everything was correct and accurate, and there were very receptive to it; it was not a "directionally correct" thing, the journalists wanted to avoid any unintentional. That was also one of the reasons I was open-minded to helping Ed even though we ideologically disagree: the truth is what's important.

BuzzFeed News incidentally was how I first came across Ed on Twitter from his tech PR work about 9 years ago, back when he was writing guest editorials on Gizmodo about Person of Interest (which is very very funny in hindsight). It's from the heart that I'm a bit bummed out that things turned out this way.

polski-g 7 hours ago

He made a blog post, literally last month, and it said that AIs have no use outside of coding.

It just shows he's done zero research on the things he talks about all day. Radiologists are using them, ad firms, artists, translators, law firms, auditors... It's hard to think of a white collar firm not using them.

kbelder an hour ago

>I will no longer be helping writers/journalists with a clear anti-AI bias.

Take out the 'anti-AI' qualification, and you've got a decent general principle.

autaut 2 hours ago

I’m not really convinced by any of this, in fact it seems most of the predictions were pretty correct and that Meta and Alphabet are having big issues is a shared opinion by multiple observers and pretty much every employee they have.

If they were doing so well why the layoffs? Why the tightening both in salaries and perks and work life balance? Why so many choices disrupting morale for their employees?

george_max 2 hours ago

Help me understand where Meta and Alphabet's issues are. They seem to be doing quite well on paper -- nothing anomalous in terms of profitability or scaling recently. Layoffs are to be expected when AI can increase productivity.

reticulates 2 hours ago

Meta narrowly avoided disaster earlier this year: https://www.reuters.com/investigations/mark-zuckerberg-had-b...

The problem with judging Alphabet and Meta on aggregate performance is that their advertising businesses print so much money that they can invest everything in a boondoggle and coast when it blows up. Zuckerberg burned $100,000,000,000 on the metaverse and it didn’t make a dent.

That said, Alphabet and Meta are borrowing against their future advertising profits to fund their AI boondoggles. If the advertising businesses keep growing then they’re somewhat insulated from their own missteps but the reliability of the advertising business depends on companies having money to spend on advertising.

The metaverse was mostly self-contained and the failure had zero consequence for the broader economy. AI on the other hand, every major fund is investing everything into AI companies. Every advertiser is using subsidized AI tools to generate hyper specific adverts. If this all goes south, who knows how advertising spend will be impacted.

Google specifically are backstopping billions in data centre build out costs. They’ve committed to spending, like, all of their cash to data centres. If the market gets nervous and funding disappears, Google are deep in the hole.

Anthropic “invested” $50bn in data centers to be built by Fluidstack who raised a billion dollars from Situational Awareness who used their Anthropic ownership to raise money to fund these investments. Google are backstopping much of the Fluidstack build out, i.e: if Fluidstack goes out of business then Google is on the hook for $10bn+ in costs. And Google’s Anthropic investment makes up like $100bn on the balance sheet. So, Anthropic fails to live up to expectations and fails to pay Fluidstack who can’t pay their suppliers which puts Google on the hook to hand over tens of billions in cash while at the same time their biggest investment is going down the pan.

The top line numbers don’t really do justice to the scale of the risk. You need to look at the long term commitments they’re making.

baron816 2 hours ago

Alphabet hasn’t had any layoffs, tightening of salaries and perks, or impacts to work life balance. Morale is quite good, imo as an employee

pinkmuffinere 9 hours ago

> 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.

pinkmuffinere 5 hours ago

Upon further thought, I realized this should be counted as a correct prediction for Zitron! Zitron did indeed “keep writing this stuff until…proven wrong”. Zitron’s prediction says nothing about what happens after being proven wrong.

DonsDiscountGas 8 hours ago

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.

skybrian 8 hours ago

I can certainly see one happening without the other, but I'd expect P1 and P2 to be correlated at least some of the time?

delis-thumbs-7e 7 hours ago

Currently they don’t seem to be. At least OpenAI is haemorrhaging money left and right. Thing is, the compute for all this is far more expensive than anyone is willing or able to pay.

bawolff 6 hours ago

Sounds like the dot com bubble to me. many companies went bankrupt but the technology marched on.

sushisource 6 hours ago

In my mind the most obvious scenario where AI gets used a lot but AI companies (exlc. NVIDIA / chip makers) aren't worth much is the hardware becomes capable of running the current state-of-the-art models locally, cheaply, and those models are basically "good enough" for 90% of tasks.

nitwit005 2 hours ago

The most successful use of AI has almost certainly been advertising, which companies were already doing before the recent AI hype.

If by AI we mean LLMs, the question looks a bit different.

aspir 7 hours ago

> In terms of the style of reasoning, of the futurists reviewed, he's probably closest to Kurzweil, in that he uses numbers to give a kind of aura of credibility, but if you know something about the topic he's discussing or look at the numbers, the reasoning falls apart.

In one of his posts a few months ago, he went on a weird tangent about the CEO of ServiceNow talking about sales planning and whether his teams are "on plan" or not. For people who haven't spent time in or around sales, this is an extremely common shorthand for quota tracking.

Ed's rant about how impossibly weird and inhuman the framing was revealed how little he knows, and cares to know, about the mechanics of the businesses he claims to profile. Yes, something like "on plan" is jargon, but a shred of reasonable journalistic curiosity (a Google search) would explain what it means and how it's a normal statement for a career-sales CEO.

alephnerd 6 hours ago

This is a common issue I face on HN as well. A lot of "folk wisdom" on here is divorced from how stuff actually operates.

supern0va 2 hours ago

>Ed's rant about how impossibly weird and inhuman the framing was revealed how little he knows, and cares to know, about the mechanics of the businesses he claims to profile. Yes, something like "on plan" is jargon, but a shred of reasonable journalistic curiosity (a Google search) would explain what it means and how it's a normal statement for a career-sales CEO.

This is precisely the sort of feedback an LLM could provide him before he hits the publish button, funny enough.

delis-thumbs-7e 8 hours ago

I don’t really care of anyone’s predictions, whether that of Altman or Zitron. I can make a prediction that sun will collapse into itself and stop shining. I would probably be right as long as I don’t give any too strict timeframe to ky prediction. In terms of Zitron, his style is that of a British tabloid columnist. It’s rather refreshing when most tech journalism is just selling gadgets, stock or whatever without questioning at all what either Musk, Altman, Amodei or whoever says. It aggravates many people because, well, it is suppose to.

Regardless of whether you love LLM’s as technology, the financial realities of Anthropic and especially OpenAI really does not look good. They have a massive expenditure that they need to keep going in order to make profits, which at least in terms of OpenAI are horrendously behind. Zitron published these numbers together with Financial Times, so you gotta give him that at least. Meanwhile the CEO’s talk all kind of nonsense and give their own predictions to get more investors money to fund what might or might not be the biggest bubble in the history of finance. I certainly do not hope this happens, since the consequences would be horrific. But there is likely to be a some sort of correction in horizon, since the models will plateau and they will run out of money at some point.

Let me finish with my own prediction. I think a lot of people are going to lose a lot of money some time next couple of years.

GaryBluto 5 hours ago

I've come to see Ed Zitron's dramatic predictions as reminiscent of a trend I noticed on YouTube a while back;

Whenever you'd look up anything pertaining to China's future, you'd inevitably find your screen plastered wall to wall with thumbnails of a photoshopped Xi Jinping, tears streaming down his face, next to large impact font text reading "CHINA WILL COLLAPSE IN X DAYS", with X varying from 1 to 30. Much like Ed Zitron's predictions, these events obviously never occur.

vehemenz 9 hours ago

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.

torginus 6 hours ago

I find it ironic, that one of the most memorable articles Dan Luu has written imo is about how futurists faked 'exponential scaling' about semiconductors, and we ran out of the 'good kind' of scaling, Dennard scaling a while ago, and people interested in maintaining the narrative have been making up marketing numbers, which are believable to outsiders, but not to those who know:

https://danluu.com/futurist-predictions/

Yet, in this case, he takes the marketing numbers at face value, not being an expert in AI financing, while those who know more, can spot the sleight of hand, just like he can when it comes to semiconductors.

aesthesia 5 hours ago

Who are the people who know more about AI financing and can point out the sleight of hand? I'd be interested in reading them.

randomImmigrant 7 hours ago

I’m with Zitron on the frustration and even the analysis of the economic feasibility of AI.

What I’ve stopped doing is reading him regularly. It feels hard to parse the factual from the obviously exaggerated.

I get he’s frustrated. We all are. But I’m not sure letting it out that much helps making the very urgent case he’s making.

sfblah 9 hours ago

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.

dcre 9 hours ago

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...

sfblah 9 hours ago

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.

blargey 9 hours ago

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).

sfblah 9 hours ago

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.

inferniac 9 hours ago

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

sfblah 9 hours ago

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.

enraged_camel 7 hours ago

>> I think it's fair to call his specific predictions "early." I'm saying his timelines are too short.

That means his predictions were either wrong, or meaningless.

adventured 7 hours ago

The US can safely reduce its deficit spending by $1 trillion and absolutely nothing big will happen.

The US typically adds that much annual GDP every 16-24 months at this point. The notion that somehow the gigantic ~$31 trillion economy will fall apart if the outsized deficits don't continue, is very absurd.

The exact same things were said of the Bush deficits. The US economy was supposedly dead in 2009-2010. Here in 2026 the economy is 50% larger inflation adjusted and it has left most of Europe in the dust. The housing bubble contagion was much worse than anything we're sitting on now with AI spend.

Why do I say $1 trillion instead of $2 trillion? There are plausible scenarios where increased taxes bring down the deficits (the Dems will take the House + Senate + Presidency, we'll see how much taxes go up), there's no plausible scenario where the deficits go away completely.

achompas 7 hours ago

A prediction definitionally includes an outcome, and it _can_ include a timeline. (if you’re serious about your forecasting, then you generally include a timeline; forecasting is non-actionable if it does not include a timeline).

You might choose a different timeline for Ed’s outcomes. Okay: those are now your predictions, not his.

Zitron has done us the favor of including timelines with his predictions, so that Dan can invalidate almost all of them.

Jtarii 6 hours ago

Would you say the 2012 apocalypse doomsayers were correct but just "early"? After all the sun exploding in a billion years will ultimately prove them correct.

drdeca 4 hours ago

What? No, they were correct; the world ended in 2012.

WarmWash 3 hours ago

The world actually ended when harambe got shot in may 2016.

asveikau 4 hours ago

It's not government stimulus driving this. It's that when you start with a "successful" company, the financial consequences of bad decisions or bad leadership can take a long time to have a negative effect, if at all, because financial success has a momentum to it.

I left Microsoft during the windows 8 cycle in large part because I could tell nobody knew what the hell they were doing, which is an objectively true statement about the time and place. My dad happened to buy Microsoft stock at that same time and did very well with it.

That's the paradoxical problem that I think all big tech has. Poor decisions by incompetent people, met with inexplicable financial success.

dofm 7 hours ago

If you're saying that OpenAI forecast something and you're saying it's validation that the numbers match the forecast, I don't think you're really paying attention to the problems (with annualised run rate bullshit when these are proper companies who could be publishing proper numbers), with unclear financials that are designed to look good, etc.

Denzel 6 hours ago

The actual quote and topic is far different than you’ve portrayed it. Here’s the actual quote: “ yet the company says that it expects to make $11.6 billion in 2025 and *$100 billion by 2029*, a statement so egregious that I am surprised it's not some kind of financial crime to say it out loud.” from https://www.wheresyoured.at/oai-business/

He goes on to specifically discuss how unrealistic $100B by 2029 is given that OAI is structurally unprofitable.

The fact that you’re skewing your misinterpretation of what he said so much shows your own bias I’m afraid.

rtpg 4 hours ago

> 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.

on this specific point: tokens aren't fungible between models right? Like the argument Zitron makes is that improvements in output are due to, glibly, using more tokens to get there. We see people turn on new models and instantly use up all their tokens.

Like the actual measure is more something like "for this specific task, did it cost less now to do it than it did 3 years ago with these AI pipelines" right? The token pricing isn't actually relevant in that discussion.

atleastoptimal 8 hours ago

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.

blitzar 8 hours ago

Being early is being wrong.

goatlover 3 hours ago

Being wrong about when a financial bubble will burst is different than being wrong that there is a financial bubble. That's the question, because if AI is driving a bubble, then it will burst at some point.

matherial 8 hours ago

> I don't think Zitron is wrong, exactly. He's just early.

By that metric, so was Nostradamus. The apocalypse is coming for sure, we're just quibbling about the timeline.

Realistically, timing is everything. You don't need to get it precisely right, but you also don't get a pass if you, for example, keep predicting an imminent recession through a decade of unprecedented growth.

gizajob 7 hours ago

"Being right at the wrong time is indistinguishable from being wrong” - Howard Marks.

CamperBob2 5 hours ago

Worse, actually, because the knowledge that you're right will keep you from changing course.

joshcsimmons 7 hours ago

"Early" works for an open-ended bubble thesis. It does not rescue dated claims that already failed.

Google's 500 million Gemini-user goal had an end-of-2025 deadline. Zitron called it so unrealistic that Sundar Pichai should be fired. Google reported more than 650 million monthly users by October.

"AI had already peaked" is also a claim about the state of the technology at that time. Agent and coding benchmarks moved sharply after it. The fact that every technology eventually peaks does not make a past claim that it already peaked correct.

The bubble may still burst. That would validate the bubble thesis. It would not retroactively fix the prediction record.

btw Zitron has the only fan base that has come after me with doxxing and death threats so far. Truly misery loves company!

Zigurd 7 hours ago

Some numbers have a lot of squish to them. Gemini can't be called a failure. But Copilot is a flop and yet Microsoft can probably show you similar numbers to what Gemini has.

achompas 7 hours ago

But we’re talking about Gemini, which is one of Dan’s point: the surface area is so large that any prediction is almost laughable. Zitron’s prediction here is laughable in fact because he claims both (1) Pichai is jamming AI everywhere and (2) the 500M number is impossible. Those statements are immediately contradictory to anyone who understands the scale of Google’s products.

dofm 7 hours ago

> The bubble may still burst. That would validate the bubble thesis. It would not retroactively fix the prediction record.

If it does not burst it will be because specific efforts have been taken to deflate it in the face of concerns like those he is raising.

The bubble may not burst for example if the securitization of AI debt really happens. Then when it happens it won't be an "AI bubble" that bursts, it will be a full-on collapse of the US economy. Like when 2008 happened it wasn't really about mortgages anymore.

elonfboy 7 hours ago

Did you read the post? The author cited very clearly a plethora of very specific predictions made by Zitron that were verifiably and factually wrong. False. Incorrect. Not “early”.

Zigurd 7 hours ago

After looking at Nvidia's orderbook, it's a reasonable conclusion that nothing bad will happen for at least another year. In which case Ed Zitron is off by at least a year.

But there are enough signs of trouble that could happen soon: Oracle debt is junk. OpenAI might not be on a viable trajectory to IPO. One or both of those could collapse the lower quality data center companies. Zitron is probably overconfident about a crash in the short term. Probably.

adventured 7 hours ago

Oracle fits in Nvidia's pocket at this point: $67b sales, $22b op income.

Vs of course Nvidia: $302b sales, $197b op income.

Oracle was never as big of a deal as that brief market cap run implied. The herd pushed it up for no reason.

The comparison to Apple, Microsoft, Google and Amazon are pretty similar. Oracle fits in their pockets too. Who cares if their debt is junk. Ellison has nearly wrecked that ship on numerous occasions over the decades. He went on an elaborate acquisition binge in the previous epoch, buying his way to the next stage (preventing Oracle from being market-eliminated, or acquired), and that was an incredible mess that took a long time to sort. He's doing the same move now, trying to spend to stay on the board as the world rapidly changes under his feet.

dofm 7 hours ago

> Who cares if their debt is junk.

Non-rhetorical answer to your rhetorical question, but:

The near future of the political right wing of the USA is dependent on the Ellisons staying afloat to create an impervious right-wing media sphere that would survive the end of Fox.

The Paramount-Skydance/Warner merger is now delayed until 2027. Trump/the GOP needs that merger to go ahead, but if Larry's debt position worsens it really might not.

So you can expect the executive branch to push for the USA to backstop Oracle's debt in some way, whether directly or indirectly (taking some sort of stake in OpenAI to allow it to guarantee Oracle gets most of its money, for example — anything to get the credit rating back up).

It will be the first stage of this becoming a problem for the American taxpayer.

dofm 7 hours ago

> After looking at Nvidia's orderbook, it's a reasonable conclusion that nothing bad will happen for at least another year. In which case Ed Zitron is off by at least a year.

Zitron is fairly clear that nothing is going to happen for a year or so — he says himself that he thinks there's another round of funding possible for both OpenAI and Anthropic.

minimaltom 6 hours ago

Idk about that. A bunch of his wrong predictions were predicated on things turning sour sooner than a "year or so" than now.

dofm 6 hours ago

Right, but you know the thing. The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent. Predicting the medium future is hardest.

Markets don't just pre-plan their behaviour three years earlier and act it out lock-step. Other circumstances can change. By now, the world's financial press has covered some of the scariest aspects of this, and the situation has evolved.

There are other moves (the OpenAI/Blackrock AI debt securitization idea for one) that could delay it even further.

Zitron, I get the impression, has moved on to talking about the horsemen of the bubble apocalypse — talking about banner events that would need to happen for his predictions to be true. This is safer ground for a forecaster, because every forecast affects the future.

His shorter term predictions have not all failed by any means: he described Oracle's woes before the ratings agency downgraded them specifically because of OpenAI.

But most of his predictions will be irrelevant if the insane securitization plan happens. Because it will stop being about an AI bubble then; the worst risk will be the collapse of the entire US economy. It will need a different kind of analyst.

Me, I don't really care either way. I'm not on the cloud AI hype train, I don't work for a YC company, I'm not an American taxpayer so I will not be directly on the hook, and as Americans like to point out, the UK economy is behind on the whole AI thing so (unlike Ireland, which the USA will 100% leave to fail) we are ironically insulated. Maybe a couple of small British investment banks will fail and a pension fund or two will default.

For the most part we'll just watch the flames.

I do enjoy watching a Brit — albeit an ex-pat — upset a bunch of po-faced AI evangelists. It’s like “Itanic” all over again.

I think he is directionally correct. My own impression is that the bubble will burst at the worst time, and so my assessment is that, given the way this is entangled with the functioning of the USA as an economic power and with the future of the US political hard right, it will therefore darkly but poetically burst sometime around Labor Day 2028, which is the worst possible time.

minimaltom 6 hours ago

I agree he is directionally correct, or at least is a vessel to raise important points and valid criticisms.

But predictions need to be specific and falsifable. If not, its just rag-chewing over a beer (luv that shit, but i aint predicting on taco tuesday). If they arent falsifable, then its not a prediction.

I think a lot of the HN comments generally can be described as one camp which cares about and enforces the rigor of predictions and trying to direct limited ear-time to voices which tend to get predictions right, vs the other camp that puts more weight towards directional accuracy.

beepbooptheory 4 hours ago

Why would one ever predict anything at all if it was always falsifiable? Do you mean like eventually falsifiable? Like, I don't know about you, but I tend to go ahead and do any falsifying of something first if possible, before I resort to predicting.

Can you give an example of what a good/proper prediction might be, even in a hypothetical universe, in this schema? Does one "predict" when they play blackjack? Or is there a different concept for that kind of thing?

minimaltom 3 hours ago

Falsifiable means able to be correct or incorrect. So if i said that my stepmom was kinda whelp, that wouldnt be falsifable, because like what does that even mean. But if I said my stepmom is going to be on her third marriage by the end of the decade, that is, because in 2030 someone can yell at me either way.

This is a spectrum of course: a prediction that OAI will collapse is probably right as _eventually_ all companies come to an end, but under that interpretation, the prediction is useless. It's more signal / useful / falsifable to say OAI is going to collapse around/at <year> due to <thesis>.

Anyway thats my two cents. Its fine to outline forces and trends, but when you make predictions there are useful (better, falsifiable) and useless.

beepbooptheory 32 minutes ago

The first example is not a prediction at all?

emp17344 3 hours ago

I honestly don’t understand why you care so much about the “rigor of predictions”. Short-term predictions are almost always at least somewhat inaccurate, no matter who’s doing the predicting. Directional accuracy strikes me as far more important.

minimaltom 3 hours ago

Take a look at the thread below yours, but basically if the prediction has to be wishy-washy or just interpreted as 'direction', theres way more noise and way less signal. Why not just state the underlying trend/forces instead? Why lean into the online culture of predictions and do it badly.

Bad (form) prediction: OAI is gonna be wobbly in a bit Good (form) prediction (could be totally wrong): OAI as we know it today is going to collapse due to running out of money around/at 20xx.

And sure we can be pedantic about detail, but the litmus test is: is the prediction useful if you had a crystal ball and you could know if it was true/false a priori?

emp17344 3 hours ago

Who cares about predictions to this extent? They’re practically always incorrect or flawed in some way, and most people understand and accept that. No need to be so neurotic about it.

minimaltom 2 hours ago

That’s the crux of it!! You don’t have to agree but people do care, and I think (ignoring the obvious partisans) that’s the two dominant camps of commenters on this thread.

One pony’s trash is another pony’s treasure, so I guess here one persons pedanticism is another persons hobby.

jongjong 7 hours ago

I recall a time when Google was struggling to monetize ads and then something changed and they started becoming profitable. The narrative was about improved targeting.

I think it might have helped a little but I never fully bought this argument. I don't think I've ever bought a product which was advertised to me online and I was using some of these platforms for years. I'm probably a liability to them; using up compute but not clicking on ads or buying anything.

Also when I ran social media ads many years back, I never got any users out of it. It literally seemed like mostly bot traffic back then; I can't imagine how bad the situation would be now with LLMs.

johnfn 7 hours ago

Zitron is wrong, not "early", and the post has an extremely long list of examples.

sarjann 7 hours ago

Not sure about being early when it comes to points about models reaching the peak of their capability. Honestly, I don't understand how he's qualified (in terms of knowledge) to make such claims.

bawolff 7 hours ago

in fairness, if you make the same prediction over and over again, you will probably be right eventually by sheer random chance.

HDBaseT 6 hours ago

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

This was said in February 2024. This is months before GPT-4o released. GPT 4.5 was released a year later.

I don't know anyone holding on to models of GPT 4.5 caliber, yet know 4o. ChatGPT 4o and 4.5 score 8 and 14 points on Artificial Analysis benchmarks. [1]

For perspective, Qwen 3.6 27B, which can be ran on single GPU setups, scores 3-5x that on modern benchmarks.

I don't know why anyone would even make a claim like that in the first place. It's like saying "Computers are never going to get faster". I feel like we could run out of sand and still have faster machines over time. Just a silly thing to say.

[1] https://artificialanalysis.ai/?models=muse-spark-1-2%2Cgemin...

daishi55 6 hours ago

I don’t think you read the article, which documents many cases of him being wrong

For example saying in 2024 that LLMs had peaked. That’s not early, that is already, definitively wrong.

raincole an hour ago

> He's just early

The whole point of making predictions is timing. I can tell you the US dollar will continue to devalue (a 100% accurate prediction). But it's a worthless statement unless I can tell you when and how much.

q23lk 8 hours ago

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.

hydrolox 8 hours ago

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.

aksj5Hg 8 hours ago

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.

hydrolox 7 hours ago

I've literally never heard of this guy until today, they're not my guru. I am just showing where in the post the criticism was covered

minimaltom 6 hours ago

You made a poor characterization of the content of the post and were rebutted with direct quotes. It happens, thats okay! Its not an attack on your character. There's no need to feel defensive!

strange_quark 6 hours ago

Agree. Even Zitron's predictions about AI peaking are arguably correct if you step outside the silicon valley bubble. People I know who don't work in tech who use AI at work are doing the same stuff they were a couple years ago: they use it to summarize emails, generate an occasional slide deck, and mostly just send workslop to their coworkers.

And for personal use, I can count on a single hand people I know who pay for an AI subscription, and of those people nobody pays for more than the $20/month plan. And they all just use it as search or maybe to vibecode some one-off party game they use once and then throw away.

I don't know a single person who has done something like run Openclaw or leaves coding agents running on their laptop open all day.

tolugenius 9 hours ago

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.

simianwords 9 hours ago

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

knowaveragejoe 9 hours ago

This sounds completely reasonable:

> - AI spreads misinformation and causes societal damage

fwip 9 hours ago

Agreed. And so are the other two, if stated reasonably instead of as strawmen.

Retr0id 9 hours ago

What is invalid about the environmental angle? (aside from the dubious water claims)

simianwords 9 hours ago

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.

nateglims 9 hours ago

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?

simianwords 8 hours ago

wait, please stick to the argument. Why is increasing emissions bad while considering tradeoffs?

>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?

Slowing down reduces the value it provides to humans, that's clear to me and you I hope.

cccbbbaaa 7 hours ago

Our current emissions level is causing climate change.

simianwords 19 minutes ago

Ok so you are against any type of action whatsoever? No matter how useful it is?

jplusequalt 6 hours ago

>Why is increasing emissions bad while considering tradeoffs?

Because climate change stands to be the biggest market failure in history. You need to show that the rapid scale out of data centers is going to reasonably offset the current trajectory we're on.

simianwords 19 minutes ago

> Because climate change stands to be the biggest market failure in history

Proof?

RetroTechie 6 hours ago

> There's way more to lose by slowing down AI because of emission control than to gain by reducing emissions.

If AI works out as proponents would make you believe, then either you'll see masses of people out of a job - for which society is unprepared. Or you'll see a big, society-wide productivity boost. Read: consuming non-renewable resources on this planet even faster (not just energy).

Society as a whole would benefit if rollout would slow down. Give us time to reflect on those 2nd-order effects & how to address them. But instead we have the opposite: a crazy race with big AI labs trying to out-spend & out-do the other guy, ignoring externalities everywhere.

nomel 7 hours ago

I personally see it as:

These companies subsidizing green energy expansion, because it's now the cheapest power to expand.

These companies are going to help "correct" the widespread problem with utility monopolies, in the US. Datacenters are deploying their own power generation, partly because power cost no longer aligns with power generation costs. This mismatch is motivating research into local nuclear power generation [1] (which is almost certainly an effort to force the monopolies, rather than actually deploy).

[1] https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/big-tech-puts-finan...

overfeed 6 hours ago

> These companies subsidizing green energy expansion, because it's now the cheapest power to expand.

Unless you consider natural gass green energy, it's quite the opposite for the moment. This is because the AI build-out is about speed, not cost-effectiveness. That is why xai's Colossus I & II were illegally running gas turbines, and Google recanted its pledge for data center renewables targets.

nomel 5 hours ago

> it's quite the opposite for the moment

This point is about power generation companies accommodating the new power demand. It's true that the power companies are keeping coal and gas peaker plants running, that they planned to retire. But, actual additions are all green [1].

And, step functions are inefficient, always, so "for the moment" isn't so unreasonable. Dataceners are something like 100 million tonnes of CO2 per year, where cars are 1,800! So, this isn't some world ending emissions, within this moment. Everything is trending green. Why? Because it's cheaper (thank you China).

Xai using gas turbines is closer to my second point of side-stepping monopolies (improperly in that case), but is also just one example. See previous link for very long term, and all the datacenters using green energy, mid term.

Everyone will do what's cheapest. Luckily, China has made that solar power. We just need to get the monopolies off their asses, and put some of their record profits into actual power expansion. Lucky for them, everyone blames the data centers for all of this. Where I am, the single power company has already raised rates so much, in preparation for electric, that it's more expensive to fast charge an electric car at noon than to buy gas, with a planned 10% increase over the next few years. So, they're dodging criticism too!

[1] https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=67205

jryle70 3 hours ago

That's wrong. US battery energy is growing faster than ever, not in small part thanks to the push by data centers.

https://www.siliconvalley.com/2026/09/01/us-battery-installs...

ChoosesBarbecue 9 hours ago

> - 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

hajile 7 hours ago

Water usage may be a drop in the bucket nationally, but they tend to put datacenters in areas without much water (often because evaporative cooling is less expensive in arid regions) and the effects to those local water supplies can be extreme.

achierius 9 hours ago

> - 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.

karmakurtisaani 9 hours ago

Another one: data centers making electricity more expensive while not contributing much to the local economy.

Borealid 9 hours ago

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.

astrange 9 hours ago

> - 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.

NateEag 8 hours ago

> 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.

astrange 7 hours ago

Unlike GPT (I think?), Claude is served by all of AWS/GCP/Azure and you can go buy it from any of them.

Borealid 7 hours ago

Whether Claude is or is not available via AWS Bedrock is entirely decided by Anthropic, not by you and not by Amazon. And you can't buy the data sets (the REAL power...) from any AI company.

watwut 8 hours ago

Basically, all criticism of issues that affect real people is invalid per you.

> environmental like emissions and water usage

There is real crisis with warming this year, yes the plan to consume staggering anounts of energy and make environment worst in the process is valid criticism.

> AI is useless and it will take the economy with it because it is a bubble

If it turns out to be true, a lot of innocent people get hurt. Valid.

> AI spreads misinformation and causes societal damage

As valid as criticism of facebook was valid the whole time. And yes, facebook made world into worst place.

> AI is trained on copyright (are we really on this side of the debate ?!)

100% valid.

> safety critics who think AI can take over the world

Not valid, that is bullshit. If you think the word is wrong suggest polite word that says the same.

dgellow 9 hours ago

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

tolugenius 9 hours ago

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.

kristianp 9 hours ago

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.

mossTechnician 8 hours ago

I ended up on this comment after looking through the linked article and realizing the words "data center" never come up in it.

jonathanpglick 8 hours ago

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/

igorkraw 7 hours ago

To shamelessly shill a passion project: A friend of mine and I try to be skeptical-but-reasonable on our podcast https://kairos.fm/muckraikers/ we aggregate papers and reporting and try to contextualize it with our own (hopefully useful) perspectives and takes

nomel 7 hours ago

> however most people are really hedging in one camp or the other in their takes.

As with most things, most people are somewhere in the middle, as the silent majority. You only see the comments of the strongly aligned, which are also the most emotionally motivated to comment.

The internet is not real life.

jplusequalt 6 hours ago

>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.

There are a myriad of people out there who have brought up genuine issues that AI presents, or preexisting issues that AI is exacerbating.

This series of articles is perhaps the best long form critique of AI as both a technology and an industry I've encountered [1].

[1] https://aphyr.com/posts/420-the-future-of-everything-is-lies...

mustaphah 7 hours ago

I don't like Ed, but it seems that Luu spends far more attention documenting failed predictions than checking other predictions that might have been correct.

enraged_camel 7 hours ago

What predictions have Ed made that were correct? And how do they weigh against the incorrect ones, in terms of both quantity and quality?

That's relevant because if you make a thousand predictions, a few of them might turn out to be true. That doesn't mean you're good at making accurate predictions.

BeetleB 7 hours ago

Telling me that quite a few of Zitron's predictions turned out to be accurate, while many others were completely off base, means he's throwing darts on a dartboard. Why should I listen to him?

I'm sure I can make a lot of accurate predictions. It doesn't mean I'm worth listening to, if people can't distinguish the accurate from the inaccurate in the moment.

Reminds me of a tactic I've seen often amongst both critics and shills on fads. An OpenClaw fanatic on Youtube comes to mind. He makes opposing claims in different videos. One of them has to turn out to be true, and he trumpets his successes ("Look, I predicted this!"). Only a few notice he also predicted the opposite.

Just look at the other thread about Zitron and his Enron comparisons.

fyredge 4 hours ago

Looking at the refutations of Zitrons predictions in TFA, it boils down to two categories:

1. Zitron claims model capability has peaked 2. Zitron claims AI lab growth (user and revenue) has stalled.

In the first case, TFA refutes by claiming 'wrong' repeatedly, which does not convince me of anything. If anything, Zitron is probably right in this regard, since the majority of progress in recent LLM tech has been setting up of guardrails to cajole the models using 'agents'.

In the second case, numbers are given showing growth, directly refuting Zitron. However, I'm giving Zitron the benefit of the doubt, given the old saying - market can remain irrational far longer than you can remain solvent. As long as people can be convinced that the sky is falling, rational predictions rarely pan out.

no-name-here 2 hours ago

> 1. Zitron claims model capability has peaked … Zitron is probably right in this regard …

Is there any objective measure that shows this?

Would we use examples such as his Feb 2024 claim "I believe we're reaching the upper limits about what generative AI can do"?

> 2. Zitron claims AI lab growth (user and revenue) has stalled.… I'm giving Zitron the benefit of the doubt …

Is there some date by which you'd say it'd be fair to evaluate whether Z’s claims are true (without the benefit of the doubt)?

You mentioned revenue - would we use claims such as his 2024 claim that the companies no longer knew how to grow? But that in 2024, 2025, and 2026 both the companies revenues and profits have grown at double-digit rates each period?

You also mentioned users - would we use claims that "Sundar Pichai wants Gemini to be 'used by 500 million people before the end of 2025, 'a number so unrealistic that someone at Google should have been fired, and that someone is Sundar Pichai", where Gemini then hit 750 M users?

Or by what measures should we evaluate whether Z's claims are true?

roywiggins an hour ago

> In the first case, TFA refutes by claiming 'wrong' repeatedly, which does not convince me of anything. If anything, Zitron is probably right in this regard, since the majority of progress in recent LLM tech has been setting up of guardrails to cajole the models using 'agents'.

I am certain that plugging a circa 2023 model into a 2026 harness would be a pretty frustrating experience. Yes, you could code a bit with AI in 2023, but models are just much better at it than they used to be. And smaller open models are leaps and bounds better at it than they were three years ago.

manlymuppet 4 hours ago

What’s particularly bad about Zitron is his financial analysis. Some people have the idea in their heads that “yeah, Zitron is wrong about a lot of things, but his economic data and analysis is tight.” That couldn’t be further from the truth.

The entire AI industry, especially the vested interests, are often full of shit, sure, but the sheer amount of misunderstanding that has surrounded the economy and its relation to AI has been mind boggling. There is much bologna being accepted as reasonable or even standard by HN comment sections.

amoorthy 7 hours ago

Side-bar: I once hired Ed for PR for my startup. He was very difficult to work with, not even willing to share how he pitched our startup to publications because he considered the pitch his IP. So it was hard to know what was resonating or not.

I share this less to take a shot at Ed but more so that you all know to ask this if you ever hire a PR person.

rawgabbit 8 hours ago

This kind of back and forth reminds me of the Dot Com bubble circa 1999. There were endless articles saying that the internet was a new golden era for mankind and that the hyperbolic company valuations were justified; the detractors cried bullocks.

I use AI every day as I assume everyone else on Hacker News does. Will the S&P 500 drop 20%? I have no idea. If you know, please let me know so I can adjust by 401K.

fwipsy an hour ago

> February 2025: "I will keep writing this stuff until I’m proven wrong."

> Wrong (Zitron continues to write despite repeatedly being proven wrong)

Technically he didn't say he would stop if he was proven wrong.

raincole an hour ago

Big shout out to Zitron. Everyone knows how to monetize good predictions (stock market, etc), but he might be one of the few who successfully monetized bad predictions, making him a step ahead of the rest of us.