I have been listening to this as a audio only podcast but oh fuck does this really inform. I highly recommend giving it a listen/watch. The guest really does make a case that the AI craze is a masterpiece in scamming
Can you explain this to the uninitiated?
Basically, LLMs are ruining my whole world and I’m barely keeping it together. Ed Zitron’s claims that the bubble will pop (hopefully soon) and I’ll never have to think about “Generative AI” again are my copium.
I thought blockchain was bad in terms of ruining my whole world. But I’m already to the point where I rarely hear anything about blockchains or cryptocurrencies. Generative AI is so much worse than the blockchain bubble ever thought of being and I want to reach the same “don’t have to think about it” milestone for Generative AI. Preferably soon.
Ed is (to me, and to the poster of this meme) a rational voice in a storm of media knee-bending to corporations and billionaires who are openly hostile to people, the environment, the economy, everything.
He reacts passionately calling them out on their scam. Nice that he’s getting more and more legit attention and media appearances
I’ve been a pretty big fan of Ed’s stuff, and I’ve definitely cited a lot of his statistics because they made sense to me, but somebody provided this link yesterday and frankly I’ve got nothing right now. https://danluu.com/zitron/
I’d love for there to be something I’m missing, but that’s a pretty convincing takedown
Forgive me for commenting before reading whole post but it’s quite lengthy and I’ll need to revisit it. I read the first 10 minutes and then skimmed the remainder once the structure of the post became apparent. The takedown is written from the perspective of a former Google employee who feels like it’s his duty to defend its honor.
Right out of the gate, he latches on to Zitron’s comments that the big 3 tech stocks are floundering in their pursuit of following the frontier labs on AI. It is true that he’s made those comments, but the bulk of Zitron’s remarks are criticizing the financials of OpenAI and Anthropic who do not have an established product and revenue stream to absorb AI losses like the big 3 do.
The rest of Zitron’s usual arguments are against the neo-cloud’s raising debt to pay for data centers to power the compute required to run the unprofitable frontier models. Again, not a subject tackled by the post.
The post acknowledges that he doesn’t go into them and decides to criticize Zitron’s comments and inaccuracies on corporate structure and how some of his predictions have not came true. (Zitron even admits as such in this interview with John Stewart, saying he was wildly incorrect when he predicted AI would be abandoned by the end of 2025)
The blog post does admit that it was only tackling a portion of Zitron’s arguments and (paraphrasing) says that the few things that line up with his expertise Zitron is so wrong about; that he doesn’t need to address the rest of his arguments. Calling Zitron a slinger of “Gish-Gallop”.
I don’t agree and without fully diving into the rest of the post I probably won’t be convinced. It’s one of those things where if you already were predisposed to either agreeing or disagreeing with Zitron, this post isn’t going to move you either way.
Good take, thanks for taking the time to write it up
I doubt that was written only by them. They used chatgpt for research and I have doubt they wrote that many words without it. I also found this post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28943747
