8 ms·

Before you spend 20 minutes reading this article, it's worth understanding that the writer has been posting popular but consistently wrong takes for 2+ years (e

Before you spend 20 minutes reading this article, it's worth understanding that the writer has been posting popular but consistently wrong takes for 2+ years (e.g. https://www.wheresyoured.at/peakai/ https://www.wheresyoured.at/peakai/ from March 2024) arguing that AI is failing, is a waste of money, is bad, will never work, etc.

ericmcer 3mo ago
Yeah they seem clickable because anything Anti-AI is a bit soothing right now, but he is constantly wrong and usually is pushing the angle of "these businesses aren't even profitable!" Instantly close the tab as soon as the popup to subscribe to his newsletter pops up.
- jimmaswell 3mo ago
  Why is anti-AI soothing?
  - recursive 3mo ago
    For some of us it is, I suppose as an alternate view to AI booster-ism, particularly if you think the long term effects would be mostly negative.
  - freejazz 3mo ago
    [flagged]
  - simonw 3mo ago
    Because there are still a huge number of people who would be very relieved if the whole AI thing just went away.
  - raziel2701 3mo ago
    It's seen as an existential threat to young people. If you can't get a job you starve.
  - Jtarii 3mo ago
    Gen AI is strictly bad for society.
    - jimmaswell 3mo ago
      Can't really agree. It's improved my life more than any other single innovation made in my lifetime.
      - lelanthran 3mo ago
        > Can't really agree. It's improved my life more than any other single innovation made in my lifetime. So? Something can be bad for society while improving your individual lot in life.
      - Jtarii 3mo ago
        The positives: Some tech nerds got a cool new toy The negatives: Culture is destroyed, truth is destroyed, democracy is destroyed. I guess its a wash at the end of the day.
        jimmaswell 3mo ago
        > Culture is destroyed, truth is destroyed, democracy is destroyed. Just because those things happened in Dune doesn't mean they'll come true. It should be obvious what massive potential the thinking machines have for humanity as a whole.
- Danox 3mo ago
  They ain’t profitable yet. Most of the model maker’s will be gone soon. It’s unsustainable unless you’re Google who has other income coming in to support their hobby, and the Chinese model makers are spending a fraction to be six months behind and many of them will be there for the long-term because they have backup support (government) who is in the race for the long-term. One other thing that’s working against the model makers is the hardware is getting better and the models are getting smaller and more capable. I don’t think we’re going back to the mainframe days. Local will be the endgame. Is Ed right? Probably because in the end it’s unsustainable the companies left will be the companies that have income coming from somewhere else and there’s one large tech company that isn’t even participating in the boondoggle unless you count $1 billion dollars a year as participating ultimately there is no moat in AI model making. Nvidia and Microsoft trying to introduce another Arm processor in a laptop of all things won’t change the tide either.
__alexs 3mo ago
The quality of AI doomerism takes is matched only by the quality of AI boosterism takes. Ed's kind of interesting as a temperature sensor but I don't feel like you can really take anything he writes seriously.
root_axis 3mo ago
Can you point to anything specific from the article that you'd describe as consistently wrong? Not disagreeing with you, but nothing popped out to me after skimming the article.
- zachthewf 3mo ago
  I didn't read the posted article (I don't read this author anymore because I think it's basically anti-AI ideological propaganda). But from the article I linked back in March 2024: "Generative AI models are expensive and compute-intensive without providing obvious, tangible mass-market use cases. Murati and Altman's futures depend heavily on keeping the world believing that development and improvement of their models' capabilities will continue a rapacious pace of progress that has unquestionably slowed, with OpenAI admitting that GPT-4 may be worse on some tasks. As I've written before, hallucinations are a feature not a bug. These models do not "know" anything. They are mathematical behemoths generating a best guess based on training data and labeling, and thus do not "know" what you are asking it to do. You simply cannot fix them. Hallucinations are not going away." Since then: - hallucinations are dramatically less of a problem - several mass market use cases have emerged, most notably coding - rate of progress has increased
  - Capricorn2481 3mo ago
    > several mass market use cases have emerged, most notably coding Most notably? This is not a mass market use case in the way the author is describing. They are asserting that the amount of spend they need to get this off the ground necessitates the entire world coming in on it, and I would say that opinion has aged pretty well. There are a lot of coders, but there are more people scratching their heads as AI is shoved into every part of their lives.
  - mashlol 3mo ago
    Has rate of progress increased? How does one measure that? Genuinely curious - would be very interesting to map out the "effectiveness" of each AI model vs how long it took to train/release. From my perspective, the model gains are mostly incremental now and a lot of the gains are just from things like improving the agent harnesses. I could be wrong though.
gdcbe 3mo ago
What if you phrase the question from "will AI ever be useful" (a term as utterly vague as "IT") to "will it ever be able to promise the financial gains these companies are hoping? Especially with local models eating their lunch :shrug:
freejazz 3mo ago
And its been 3 years of AI boosters telling me that my job as a litigating attorney will not exist in 2 months. Yet here I am, gainfully employed.
themafia 3mo ago
> Before you spend 20 minutes reading this article, it's worth understanding that the writer has been posting popular but consistently wrong So, judge the book by it's cover? > arguing that AI is failing, is a waste of money, is bad, will never work, etc. Then the opposite should be easy to prove. AI is succeeding, is efficient, is universally good, and is working everywhere it's tried. Are those true?
- gilbetron 3mo ago
  > So, judge the book by it's cover? It is literally judging the book by it's author, which is an extremely rationale judgement to make.
  - themafia 3mo ago
    > It is literally judging the book by it's author How is that better? > which is an extremely rationale judgement to make. So it's "rational" to take bias into reading? Why even read? If you know what you think and refuse to accept new information then what purpose is there in consuming anything? You should just read the comments and get a warm fuzzy that the crowd, for the time being, agrees with your intentionally static ideology. Comments like these obviously hope they can sway the crowd before they can take an unbiased reading of the article. If the author is that wrong then the crowd here should be able to discover that on their own. If the author convinces the crowd then I'd think you'd want to present a better argument than "well, he was wrong _before_." Post hoc, ergo propter hoc, in action.
  - bigstrat2003 3mo ago
    That's the exact opposite of rational. It is, in fact, a formal logical fallacy (ad hominem). His argument can be correct even if he himself is not typically correct.
    - supern0va 3mo ago
      On the surface, that's quite fair. However, there's one problem: it is much easier to make statements than to verify them, and that asymmetry is part of why the internet has been slowly eroding society. It's useful/necessary to use past writing/arguments from an author to say whether they should actually receive any further critical evaluation, or be dismissed. We shouldn't say definitively "they're always wrong, so they're wrong now". However, it's reasonable to say: the author has a demonstrated lack of credibility, so we can probably assume they're wrong here, particularly if they have been wrong in this domain so many times before. Or if they happen to be correct, it's probably not strongly demonstrated by their work.
asveikau 3mo ago
Not sure where I heard this, but I'm reminded of a story about someone predicting the dotcom crash early, circa 1998. For 2 years they were demonstrably crazy, and missed out on massive stock market gains. Then they were right. (And yes, tech slowly bounced back after that.) Predicting the timing of such a thing is notoriously difficult. I don't think being wrong about timing 2 years ago means there won't be a correction.
- abaymado 3mo ago
  Not related to AI but, I recently rewatched "The Big Short" and your comment reminded me of it. I can't testify the accuracy of the movie, but for over year, Michael Burry was viewed as in the same manner for shorting the market, while the economy was was in a hype cycle.
  - deaton 3mo ago
    Burry of course has famously predicted 40 of the last 5 crashes, so maybe not the best example.
    - loeg 3mo ago
      And lost his shirt doing it. (Or, well, his investors' money. I'm sure he's fine.) https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/sustainable-finance-reporting/michael-burry-big-short-fame-deregisters-scion-asset-management-2025-11-13/ https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/sustainable-finance-r...
      - asveikau 3mo ago
        This is like the old quote, "the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent"
- nostrademons 3mo ago
  I'm also reminded of all the HN posts from 2007-2009 that predicted that the adoption of social networking would be a terrible thing for privacy, that it would destroy society, that people would lose their jobs over crazy shit they said on the Internet, that it would lead to the decline of trust and in-person interactions, that people would forget how to socialize, etc. They were right about all of that but it took 15-20 years and the companies involved grew 100x in that timefold, eventually reaching trillion-dollar valuations that would've seemed insane in 2007. There is a tremendous amount of money to be made in destroying society.
syawin 3mo ago
[flagged]
- tomhow 3mo ago
  Please don't comment like this on HN. We can disagree with people whilst still affording people basic decency; it's a condition of participating here. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
Kye 3mo ago
He also does PR for AI companies and only really acknowledges this in interviews. As far as I know he never discloses it in his rants.
supern0va 3mo ago
I highly recommend folks read Wired's profile on him: https://www.wired.com/story/ai-pr-ed-zitron-profile/ https://www.wired.com/story/ai-pr-ed-zitron-profile/ Tim Lee also pointed out that when Ed has posted details on some of his analysis, they have had some....oddities: https://x.com/binarybits/status/2034377838883700953 https://x.com/binarybits/status/2034377838883700953
mrkeen 3mo ago
From your link: When asked whether it will be possible to fix Sora's videos after they've been generated, Murati said "eventually," and then couched that by saying "that's what we're trying to figure out...how to use this technology as a tool that people can edit and create with." She promised that there would "eventually" be "more steerability, control and accuracy...and reflecting of intent of what you want." You'll "eventually" be able to add audio to Sora videos, and when asked when Sora's generative videos will be available to the public, she once again said "eventually," and when pushed said that Sora's launch would "definitely be this year, but could be a few months." Murati, living in a world of "eventuallies," provided no technical insights, no specifics, and very few details. And, take a look at https://openai.com/index/sora-is-here/ https://openai.com/index/sora-is-here/ Please speculate on why OpenAI wouldn't just leave it up (whether or not they were able to improve it).
GolfPopper 3mo ago
From the linked article, "Sora is not going to generate movies." How's Sora doing these days?

ericmcer 3mo ago

Yeah they seem clickable because anything Anti-AI is a bit soothing right now, but he is constantly wrong and usually is pushing the angle of "these businesses aren't even profitable!" Instantly close the tab as soon as the popup to subscribe to his newsletter pops up.

jimmaswell 3mo ago
Why is anti-AI soothing?
- recursive 3mo ago
  For some of us it is, I suppose as an alternate view to AI booster-ism, particularly if you think the long term effects would be mostly negative.
- freejazz 3mo ago
  [flagged]
- simonw 3mo ago
  Because there are still a huge number of people who would be very relieved if the whole AI thing just went away.
- raziel2701 3mo ago
  It's seen as an existential threat to young people. If you can't get a job you starve.
- Jtarii 3mo ago
  Gen AI is strictly bad for society.
  - jimmaswell 3mo ago
    Can't really agree. It's improved my life more than any other single innovation made in my lifetime.
    - lelanthran 3mo ago
      > Can't really agree. It's improved my life more than any other single innovation made in my lifetime. So? Something can be bad for society while improving your individual lot in life.
    - Jtarii 3mo ago
      The positives: Some tech nerds got a cool new toy The negatives: Culture is destroyed, truth is destroyed, democracy is destroyed. I guess its a wash at the end of the day.
      - jimmaswell 3mo ago
        > Culture is destroyed, truth is destroyed, democracy is destroyed. Just because those things happened in Dune doesn't mean they'll come true. It should be obvious what massive potential the thinking machines have for humanity as a whole.
Danox 3mo ago
They ain’t profitable yet. Most of the model maker’s will be gone soon. It’s unsustainable unless you’re Google who has other income coming in to support their hobby, and the Chinese model makers are spending a fraction to be six months behind and many of them will be there for the long-term because they have backup support (government) who is in the race for the long-term. One other thing that’s working against the model makers is the hardware is getting better and the models are getting smaller and more capable. I don’t think we’re going back to the mainframe days. Local will be the endgame. Is Ed right? Probably because in the end it’s unsustainable the companies left will be the companies that have income coming from somewhere else and there’s one large tech company that isn’t even participating in the boondoggle unless you count $1 billion dollars a year as participating ultimately there is no moat in AI model making. Nvidia and Microsoft trying to introduce another Arm processor in a laptop of all things won’t change the tide either.

__alexs 3mo ago

The quality of AI doomerism takes is matched only by the quality of AI boosterism takes. Ed's kind of interesting as a temperature sensor but I don't feel like you can really take anything he writes seriously.

root_axis 3mo ago

Can you point to anything specific from the article that you'd describe as consistently wrong? Not disagreeing with you, but nothing popped out to me after skimming the article.

zachthewf 3mo ago
I didn't read the posted article (I don't read this author anymore because I think it's basically anti-AI ideological propaganda). But from the article I linked back in March 2024: "Generative AI models are expensive and compute-intensive without providing obvious, tangible mass-market use cases. Murati and Altman's futures depend heavily on keeping the world believing that development and improvement of their models' capabilities will continue a rapacious pace of progress that has unquestionably slowed, with OpenAI admitting that GPT-4 may be worse on some tasks. As I've written before, hallucinations are a feature not a bug. These models do not "know" anything. They are mathematical behemoths generating a best guess based on training data and labeling, and thus do not "know" what you are asking it to do. You simply cannot fix them. Hallucinations are not going away." Since then: - hallucinations are dramatically less of a problem - several mass market use cases have emerged, most notably coding - rate of progress has increased
- Capricorn2481 3mo ago
  > several mass market use cases have emerged, most notably coding Most notably? This is not a mass market use case in the way the author is describing. They are asserting that the amount of spend they need to get this off the ground necessitates the entire world coming in on it, and I would say that opinion has aged pretty well. There are a lot of coders, but there are more people scratching their heads as AI is shoved into every part of their lives.
- mashlol 3mo ago
  Has rate of progress increased? How does one measure that? Genuinely curious - would be very interesting to map out the "effectiveness" of each AI model vs how long it took to train/release. From my perspective, the model gains are mostly incremental now and a lot of the gains are just from things like improving the agent harnesses. I could be wrong though.

gdcbe 3mo ago

What if you phrase the question from "will AI ever be useful" (a term as utterly vague as "IT") to "will it ever be able to promise the financial gains these companies are hoping? Especially with local models eating their lunch :shrug:

freejazz 3mo ago

And its been 3 years of AI boosters telling me that my job as a litigating attorney will not exist in 2 months. Yet here I am, gainfully employed.

themafia 3mo ago

> Before you spend 20 minutes reading this article, it's worth understanding that the writer has been posting popular but consistently wrong So, judge the book by it's cover? > arguing that AI is failing, is a waste of money, is bad, will never work, etc. Then the opposite should be easy to prove. AI is succeeding, is efficient, is universally good, and is working everywhere it's tried. Are those true?

gilbetron 3mo ago
> So, judge the book by it's cover? It is literally judging the book by it's author, which is an extremely rationale judgement to make.
- themafia 3mo ago
  > It is literally judging the book by it's author How is that better? > which is an extremely rationale judgement to make. So it's "rational" to take bias into reading? Why even read? If you know what you think and refuse to accept new information then what purpose is there in consuming anything? You should just read the comments and get a warm fuzzy that the crowd, for the time being, agrees with your intentionally static ideology. Comments like these obviously hope they can sway the crowd before they can take an unbiased reading of the article. If the author is that wrong then the crowd here should be able to discover that on their own. If the author convinces the crowd then I'd think you'd want to present a better argument than "well, he was wrong _before_." Post hoc, ergo propter hoc, in action.
- bigstrat2003 3mo ago
  That's the exact opposite of rational. It is, in fact, a formal logical fallacy (ad hominem). His argument can be correct even if he himself is not typically correct.
  - supern0va 3mo ago
    On the surface, that's quite fair. However, there's one problem: it is much easier to make statements than to verify them, and that asymmetry is part of why the internet has been slowly eroding society. It's useful/necessary to use past writing/arguments from an author to say whether they should actually receive any further critical evaluation, or be dismissed. We shouldn't say definitively "they're always wrong, so they're wrong now". However, it's reasonable to say: the author has a demonstrated lack of credibility, so we can probably assume they're wrong here, particularly if they have been wrong in this domain so many times before. Or if they happen to be correct, it's probably not strongly demonstrated by their work.

asveikau 3mo ago

Not sure where I heard this, but I'm reminded of a story about someone predicting the dotcom crash early, circa 1998. For 2 years they were demonstrably crazy, and missed out on massive stock market gains. Then they were right. (And yes, tech slowly bounced back after that.) Predicting the timing of such a thing is notoriously difficult. I don't think being wrong about timing 2 years ago means there won't be a correction.

abaymado 3mo ago
Not related to AI but, I recently rewatched "The Big Short" and your comment reminded me of it. I can't testify the accuracy of the movie, but for over year, Michael Burry was viewed as in the same manner for shorting the market, while the economy was was in a hype cycle.
- deaton 3mo ago
  Burry of course has famously predicted 40 of the last 5 crashes, so maybe not the best example.
  - loeg 3mo ago
    And lost his shirt doing it. (Or, well, his investors' money. I'm sure he's fine.) https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/sustainable-finance-reporting/michael-burry-big-short-fame-deregisters-scion-asset-management-2025-11-13/ https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/sustainable-finance-r...
    - asveikau 3mo ago
      This is like the old quote, "the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent"
nostrademons 3mo ago
I'm also reminded of all the HN posts from 2007-2009 that predicted that the adoption of social networking would be a terrible thing for privacy, that it would destroy society, that people would lose their jobs over crazy shit they said on the Internet, that it would lead to the decline of trust and in-person interactions, that people would forget how to socialize, etc. They were right about all of that but it took 15-20 years and the companies involved grew 100x in that timefold, eventually reaching trillion-dollar valuations that would've seemed insane in 2007. There is a tremendous amount of money to be made in destroying society.

syawin 3mo ago

[flagged]

tomhow 3mo ago
Please don't comment like this on HN. We can disagree with people whilst still affording people basic decency; it's a condition of participating here. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

Kye 3mo ago

He also does PR for AI companies and only really acknowledges this in interviews. As far as I know he never discloses it in his rants.

supern0va 3mo ago

I highly recommend folks read Wired's profile on him: https://www.wired.com/story/ai-pr-ed-zitron-profile/ https://www.wired.com/story/ai-pr-ed-zitron-profile/ Tim Lee also pointed out that when Ed has posted details on some of his analysis, they have had some....oddities: https://x.com/binarybits/status/2034377838883700953 https://x.com/binarybits/status/2034377838883700953

mrkeen 3mo ago

From your link: When asked whether it will be possible to fix Sora's videos after they've been generated, Murati said "eventually," and then couched that by saying "that's what we're trying to figure out...how to use this technology as a tool that people can edit and create with." She promised that there would "eventually" be "more steerability, control and accuracy...and reflecting of intent of what you want." You'll "eventually" be able to add audio to Sora videos, and when asked when Sora's generative videos will be available to the public, she once again said "eventually," and when pushed said that Sora's launch would "definitely be this year, but could be a few months." Murati, living in a world of "eventuallies," provided no technical insights, no specifics, and very few details. And, take a look at https://openai.com/index/sora-is-here/ https://openai.com/index/sora-is-here/ Please speculate on why OpenAI wouldn't just leave it up (whether or not they were able to improve it).

GolfPopper 3mo ago

From the linked article, "Sora is not going to generate movies." How's Sora doing these days?