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.

Do his predictions about the datacenters being a risky and unprofitable business suffer the same fate as the others?

His biggest error was the blanket rage against "AI" when it should have been focused on LLMs and data centers.

AI is a big field. Hating on AI is like hating food because you don't like broccoli.

Robotics AI that replaces high risk labor and even low risk repetitive stress labor is nothing but a win for humanity.

Same mistake over and over again: zitron job is not "making successfully predictions", he is a content creator.

For him, it's enough to be right once, even in 3 years from now.

I knew him personally years ago and he broke my trust, my own opinion is that Ed wants to be popular and make money. He couldn't care less about being a diligent reporter that cares about the subject matter, he's a hype merchant jumping on one side of the band wagon to get clicks.

The lady doth protest about the lady doth protesting too much, too much.

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...