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Posted by jatins 20 hours ago

How accurate have Ed Zitron's AI skeptic predictions been?(danluu.com)
792 points | 886 commentspage 11
browningstreet 14 hours ago|
I’ve come this far without knowing who Ed Zitron is…
12sag15 18 hours ago||
As always, shooting down commentary asking for more and more evidence is very simple.

Zitron has a somewhat ranting style. Luu's passage on Google search for example just nitpicks on the person that Zitron allegedly named as responsible for the decline of Google search.

The real issue of course is that search quality clearly has gone down. What does Luu want? A "study"? Everyone can see that. The person is not the issue.

This is a highly selective analysis of Zitron's writings that focuses on a couple of mistakes. People need to understand that any normie will understand the difference between rants, numbers and speculation in Zitron's essays. They are not written for autists who talk of "priors" and "evidence".

simonw 18 hours ago||
"This is a highly selective analysis of Zitron's writings that focuses on a couple of mistakes"

While reading this I was thinking it would be interesting to see just a few examples of Zitron predictions that he got right. Since you appear to follow his work, do you know of any?

HDThoreaun 17 hours ago||
The issue is the conspiracy. By pinning the whole problem on a single villain rather than the incentives the larger organization has created he 1. doesnt help solve the problem 2. creates an environment ripe for tribalism. Even if you ignore the racist undertones(fine its a stretch) he's still misleading people about what is happening.
WarmWash 18 hours ago||
Zitron is just a rage farmer that tells angry people what they want hear while selling them subscriptions.

Maybe he is well meaning, but it's pretty common these types are just milking an audience that they dialed in on with zero regard for integrity or honesty.

croes 5 hours ago||
Did he add the trillions of off balance debt to his revenue/profit overview?

https://247wallst.com/investing/2026/08/17/alphabet-meta-and...

baggachipz 18 hours ago||
Hate on him all you want (he's gotten very repetitive for the sake of subscribers and reads), but the basic premise that the modern AI industry is a circular-dealing, point-of-diminishing-returns grift still holds. The bubble is here and the longer it inflates, the worse the pop will be. Sure the goalposts have moved, but the basic numbers don't math.
pfraze 18 hours ago||
The current cross-deals aren't purely circular; quite a bit of revenue is, in fact, flowing into the AI industry from the outside (you know, via customers). What's more notable is the shared risk, as the deals tie multiple companies across the chain to a set of shared bets.

If the frontier labs suddenly found themselves unable to compete with cheap open weight models running on widely available compute, then one might expect the frontier labs to be the only ones exposed to that risk, while a chip-manufacturer like nvidia could thrive in either environment. A partnership or commitment from the chip manufacturers to the frontier labs could change that. Whether that kind of inescapable connection exists is hard to predict without a lot of specific modeling, and at this point I'm inclined to think that neither chip nor datacenter demand is going to drop any time soon, and that the commitments would be unwound before a company like nvidia is threatened.

reducesuffering 18 hours ago||
> The bubble is here

Zitron implied 2 years ago that OpenAI would collapse by now. How's that bubble popping going? All NVDA+memory co+frontier lab numbers are accelerating

Grombobulous 18 hours ago|||
The thing about bubbles is that everyone who thinks they’re going to pop look crazy until they pop.

And to be clear, a bubble popping doesn’t mean that AI goes away forever.

What it does mean is that we’ll see some kind of economic crash or recession, and we’ll probably see at least one big company fail or go bankrupt/restructure.

OpenAI is the company in most obvious peril.

I happen to think that Nvidia is in a more perilous position than they appear. Their hardware advancement pace is relatively weak and they’re in a crypto-like hardware bubble where they’re one technology breakthrough away from a complete collapse in demand for their AI data center solutions. They’re also doing a lot of sketchy hardware financing schemes.

karmakurtisaani 18 hours ago||||
Comparing to other bubbles in the past, this one could still have something like 2 years left. Patrick Boyle has a video on the topic, in which he's also very careful to point out he could easily be wrong.
fwip 18 hours ago||||
The market can stay irrational for quite a while.
baggachipz 18 hours ago||||
By all means, keep betting on this being a wild success and we'll see who's right in a little while. If you don't think this is a bubble then you're in for a ride.
ahnick 16 hours ago|||
Look if we are going to raid pensions and 401Ks to prop up the valuation targets of Anthropic and OpenAI longer, then the bubble can stretch further and further, but eventually datacenters have to get built and powered. It's the power generation part that no one talks about. We simply don't have enough power in the United States to scale at the rate that Anthropic and OpenAI need to prop up their absurd valuations. AI is real, but these valuations are not.

TL;DR: Ed is directionally correct, but it's anyone's guess as to the exact timing.

In the meantime I'm not going to complain about subsidized credits from the big labs. :-)

asveikau 14 hours ago||
I think it's a mistake to make concrete predictions about something like a stock market crash on a given timeline. As they say, the market can remain irrational for longer than you can remain solvent. However, Zitron is directionally correct about a lot.

I will say, the first part Mr. Luu says about big tech not being out of ideas is pure horse shit. Anyone who has worked in big tech knows that leadership at those companies can have no idea what they are doing and still be successful in earnings or the stock market. They are sometimes successful despite themselves.

lz400 14 hours ago||
I've said this before in here but Zitron is completely captured by his audience at best and a grifter at worst. A couple of months ago he was tweeting that people were crazy talking about _agents_, that they didn't _exist_ and that people talking about them were shills or bots. The responses were full of incredulous software developers saying but but but I use them every day, they're so good they're scary actually...

Zitron is just, like Dan Luu says, wrong about everything and doesn't care anymore, he's in the business of extracting money from his engagement.

faragon 6 hours ago||
Accurate or not, there are many risks other than those that could bring AI companies value to 0. E.g., systems not requiring passing over all the data continuously, but in small regions running at L2-L3 cache memory speed. Once someone figures out that, the need for high bandwidth memory would end.
nalekberov 6 hours ago|
I don’t know much about Zitron, but YouTube somehow pushes these “experts” onto my feed. This guy is full of crap, he doesn’t even care, because that doesn’t matter, what matters is view count.
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