I think one important distinction is at least they have some humility to admit they were wrong. I think Ed Zitron has rarely, if ever acknowledged he was wrong.
I think one important distinction is at least they have some humility to admit they were wrong. I think Ed Zitron has rarely, if ever acknowledged he was wrong.
I actually think you’ve got it backwards
I think one of Zitron’s problems is that his moral righteousness has blinded him to how embarrassingly incorrect he is about the AI space.
It’s similarly hubristic with the benefit of shielding from his adversarial framing.
I see this so much. "This shouldn't work, therefore it won't work." It's like the world is imagined to run on a moral causal framework rather than uncaring quantum mechanics.
I have watched many of his screeds; I think he undercuts his thesis with excess bile.
His core observation is that the unit economics of openAI and anthropic don't actually yield enough profit to pay off the huge debts that these two companies have incurred, and that as a result all the debt they've taken on will have to be written off which will trigger "the hyperscalers" to themselves suffer huge losses (likely wounding google and microsoft and destroying oracle).
He is rather more negative about the utility of LLMs than lots of other people (myself included); but his overall view of
seems pretty reasonable. There seem to have been lots of bets placed on the hope that this stuff will continue scaling as it has in the past, if it is given more compute and data, and that bet is one that has yet to have demonstrated itself as correct.Elsewhere, people have pointed out that many of the "FAANG" companies have shed lots of people and driven lots of profits, largely on the back of internal use of LLM tools. That doesn't necessarily contradict the skepticism that anthropic and openAI will succeed, and given all their obligations, if they fail it'll be a big mess.
But again, big Z doesn't do himself any favors when he rants about "failsons" or whatever.
Seems to me it's a reasonable position that runs face first into the irrational market.
Like they're digging a gigantic hole and Ed's up the top saying if you keep digging the hole will collapse (+ a whole lot of unnecessary swearing), and then a bunch of people jump into the hole to brace it and say "nuh uh, see we can keep digging" but really it's just postponing the inevitable and increasing the number of people who will be destroyed when it all crashes down
> I think one important distinction is at least they have some humility to admit they were wrong.
I'd be amazed to see a source proving that statement. There's never been a retraction around the AGI claims for example as far as I'm aware.
I can't find a counter to every statement they have made and not sure about your specific AGI claim but.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/QMhtTO3u61A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_ueDUrkOlQ
Examples of acknowledging he was wrong
I only watched the first one so far but you misunderstood what he says, he doesn't admit being wrong at all, in fact he doubles down on wrong claims.
Interesting; he is clearly saying that they were ("as a field") "confident and wrong" to believe that "the economy would have been completely upended" by the appearance of a model as strong as GPT4. What seems to be missing, from your point of view, to consider it an admission of being wrong?
Humility? I don't think they know what the word means let alone possess the capacity to demonstrate it.
Altman has admitted that some things are taking longer than he expected, and has walked one or two things back (usually to keep people from throwing bombs at his house, but still...)
Zitron continues to boast of a predictive record entirely unblemished by accuracy.
When Altman “admits” things it seems more manipulative than humility
The until Anthropic et al IPO to the tune of trillions Ed is more right than he is wrong.