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Posted by jatins 17 hours ago

How accurate have Ed Zitron's AI skeptic predictions been?(danluu.com)
717 points | 789 commentspage 8
andai 15 hours ago||
Most surprising thing to me here is tech giants growing 50%+ in 2 years. What's up with that?
keybored 2 hours ago||
> No good reason, really. I got four hours of sleep and my brain wasn't good for much of anything and I saw someone posted a screenshot of a reddit post dunking on Ed Zitron's prediction record. When I wrote this review of futurist prediction accuracy, I tried to make sure that I didn't bias what I was reviewing in any way. It's not obvious from the post if the redditor who reviewed Zitron's predictions was pulling predictions in an unbiased fashion or if they were biased in some way (since AI has become a culture war issue, it wouldn't be surprising if someone pulled biased predictions), so I decided to read some Zitron in my spare time while poking at agents to get them to do an unrelated task I wanted them to do. For the futurist post, I read multiple entire books to pull predictions and generally only stopped when someone was being repetitive and kept saying the same thing over and over again. In this case, all Zitron does is be repetitive, so the methodology in the futurist review would mean that I review a few predictions and then stop immediately. To overcome this, I had ChatGPT give me a list of predictions (with no attempted tilt towards correct or incorrect predictions) and then I skimmed/read the posts that ChatGPT linked to. There were some cases where I thought ChatGPT's reading of the post was incorrect (these were generally cases where it flagged a prediction that would be incorrect if its reading was correct, but I disagreed with its reading) and (discussed further below) I also removed predictions which weren't falsifiable or seemed pointless because they were tautological (I noted something similar to this in the futurist post).

No reason really. Just very sleep deprived and want to multitask in between agentic feedback.

Some people obviously want AI to fail. Some people obviously want The Magic Machines to win.

croes 2 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...

mwkaufma 7 hours ago||
The lady doth protest about the lady doth protesting too much, too much.
cryzinger 14 hours ago||
On the off chance Dan sees this: one of the footnotes ("Some Zitron predictions" > July 2024) is broken. Right now it's showing a little 0 that doesn't actually link to anything if you click it :(
kshri24 7 hours ago||
Cannot take profits of these companies seriously when they have been laying off employees by the droves the past couple of years. Obviously profits will increase when workforce expenses have reduced. I'll only take it seriously after a couple more years and see how the company has held up with massively reduced workforce (powered by AI™). Another point would be to see how these incumbents get challenged by new startups and if incumbents can survive this phase.
nozzlegear 12 hours ago|
I don't know anything about this guy, but based on the discourse every time he comes up, Ed Zitron is a more polarizing figure for HNers than even Trump. Everyone here loves trying to dunk on the guy, yet he's apparently living rent free in everyone's social media feeds.
tkel 4 hours ago|
Yeah for real, an AI critic being popular is making everyone here lose their minds and try to come up with ten "Well Akshually..."
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