The first section of this post responding to "Meta, Google, and Microsoft are dying" is completely misrepresenting Zitron's arguments in the linked video. Zitron is making essentially an enshitification argument concerning Google and Meta. He's not talking about whether they will be able to squeeze out more revenue in the short run, but how they are willing to abuse their users to ensure that they do. Citing increased revenue for these companies is not arguing against Zitron's point.

Luu also fixates on Zitron mentioning Prabhakar Raghavan, but then proceeds to agree with Zitron's core point that Google has intentionally degraded it's search product to maximize revenue. Maybe Raghavan is not solely responsible, but it seems fair to hold him accountable for trends that accelerated under his leadership.

Though the bubble has not popped, I don't see the following discussed in the post: Zitron would probably point out (as have others) that many of the hyperscalers are booking valuation increases in Anthropic, OpenAI as "Other Income", which is substantially increasing their reported revenue and earnings. It's roughly:

- Hyperscalers like Goog, Meta, Msft invest cash in Anthropic, OpenAI, in exchange for equity

- The ongoing investment actually boosts the valuations in the Anthr/OpenAI (new raises are done at higher valuations), so the valuation of the Hyperscaler's existing investments in Anthr/OpenAI increases, which gets recorded as Other Income in quarterly earnings

- Much of that invested cash will itself come back (circularly) to the hyperscalers as revenue since Anthropic and OpenAI spend a lot of money via datacenters etc.

On Other Income phenomenon, see for example, https://www.ft.com/content/be97df0a-76b1-4cb0-9ba4-d1117d8d1...

Also, there's apparently lots of off-balance sheet debt. For example https://www.ft.com/content/a0a07cce-6d19-4b1e-a73b-9855a06ba...

zitron just saw the next frontier in culture war grifting and went all in on it

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.

To me and most other non-West coast Americans its obvious he's right. Which is a good explanation of why SV has the resources and success it has because it can do things no one else believes in. While the rest of the world will always be catching up.

This article cherry picks:

Ed Zitron mostly covers the costs of data centers, circular spending, and predictions of large the market for AI has to be to justify the data center expenditures.

I was disappointed this article didn’t really cover Zitron’s main arguments.

Maybe a paid article placement? I don’t know, but I was dissapointed: I read Zitron’s material and I wanted to see good counter arguments to his rants about costs of data centers, circular spending, and predictions of large the market for AI has to be to justify the data center expenditures arguments.

I feel like just saying "wrong" to some of these feels a bit unconvincing.

e.g.

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

Is generative AI really doing much more today relative to 1.5 years ago? Sure there have been sone improvements, but i feel like nothing fundamental has shifted in that time period. Nor would i really expect it to even if the statement was false, but it seems too early to tell.

Ed Zitron has the economics of AI basically right. Most technologies arrive by digging an enormous financial crater, followed by a contraction period in which everyone insists the crater is actually a revolutionary new business model, before the survivors eventually buy up whatever remains.

What likely resonates is AI really does feel like a science experiment. There is clearly real value here. The problem is that the economic value has yet to catch up with the technological value. And yet the claims coming from AI companies have the unmistakable energy of a state-fair entrepreneur standing beside a suspicious knife yelling, “You have never seen anything like this before, it slices it dices...!”

I think Ed goes too far when he compares LLMs to garbage. He’s tried them, had a handful of bad experiences, and apparently decided the entire technology belongs in the round file. But much of what humans do is essentially trial and error with better PR: apply some logic, see what happens, adjust, try again, and continue until you eventually solve the problem.

If you can get an LLM to reliably do that, you can solve certain classes of problems dramatically faster.

I agree that Zitron is not honest and a denialist regarding the usefulness of AI, but the "profit" chart is just completely misleading as most of these companies have made large investments in OpenAI/Anthropic and list the gains in their share price as "profits" - so yes, while the asset prices are rising, that's typical in any financial bubble. Google is actually cash flow negative for the first time in history (which imo should be what measures profitability: income from products and services - costs to produce them) so Zitron's core thesis that there are no returns in AI is playing out as far as I can tell...