Posted by jatins 10 hours ago
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.
AI by itself, is surprisingly polarized; Ed Zitron even more so.
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
Zitron twists and misreports a lot of facts where they should know better.
CEO hypemen knowingly conflate Ambitions for certainty
- 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You do understand how drugs work right?
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.
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
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
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
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.
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.
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.
Peter Zeihan
Yeah uhm so I'm not sure if you've like seen the world recently, but uh.
Yea
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...
Yes, one day, we'll have a recession. It doesn't mean the doom prophets were correct.
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.
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.
> 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...
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.
Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.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.
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.
What? Zitron is getting a lot of media attention by repeating the same takes hundreds of times. He's not a general pundit.
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.
https://www.wheresyoured.at/exclusive-openai-financials/
https://www.ft.com/content/e15b0d7e-ff6b-4f16-ba7a-4068feddb... (https://archive.ph/pAIEa)
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)
> 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]"
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".
https://hackernewstrends.com/?q=Musk&q=Altman&from=151234560...
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)
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.
You seem to live in a bubble where these people are worshipped ... :-(
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.
For me, HN ist rather some kind of counterweight/counterbubble where not everybody is insanely critical and cynical about Elon Musk and Sam Altman. :-)
Gonna start using that one
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)
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.
> 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.
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.
Hasn't failed - both in real life and online.
Does that make his readers suckers? Possibly. But personally I also think it's a very human trait to seek comfort.
I read that as a bit of a snarky jibe.
You implied you weren't his target audience so asked if you're on the other side of it - deep in AI psychosis.
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.
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.)
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.
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....
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Take out the 'anti-AI' qualification, and you've got a decent general principle.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Lol, I appreciate the sprinkling of well timed humor in an article that is mostly straightforward facts and analysis.
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.
If by AI we mean LLMs, the question looks a bit different.
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.
This is precisely the sort of feedback an LLM could provide him before he hits the publish button, funny enough.