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I've been doubting him myself (his recent articles just hedge on data centers more than anything else) but then I want to ask, are there any valid critics of AI

I've been doubting him myself (his recent articles just hedge on data centers more than anything else) but then I want to ask, are there any valid critics of AI? Not a "code is bad but it'll get better" but actual criticism in the nature of the financing, politics, etc. I think separating AI as a tool and it's capabilities and AI as product that needs to make a profit is helpful, however most people are really hedging in one camp or the other in their takes.

igorkraw 15d ago
To shamelessly shill a passion project: A friend of mine and I try to be skeptical-but-reasonable on our podcast https://kairos.fm/muckraikers/ https://kairos.fm/muckraikers/ we aggregate papers and reporting and try to contextualize it with our own (hopefully useful) perspectives and takes
nomel 15d ago
> however most people are really hedging in one camp or the other in their takes. As with most things, most people are somewhere in the middle, as the silent majority. You only see the comments of the strongly aligned, which are also the most emotionally motivated to comment. The internet is not real life.
jplusequalt 15d ago
>I think separating AI as a tool and it's capabilities and AI as product that needs to make a profit is helpful, however most people are really hedging in one camp or the other in their takes. There are a myriad of people out there who have brought up genuine issues that AI presents, or preexisting issues that AI is exacerbating. This series of articles is perhaps the best long form critique of AI as both a technology and an industry I've encountered [1]. [1] https://aphyr.com/posts/420-the-future-of-everything-is-lies-i-guess-where-do-we-go-from-here https://aphyr.com/posts/420-the-future-of-everything-is-lies...
simianwords 15d ago
Valid criticisms of AI - safety critics who think AI can take over the world like Yud (I find this the least credible but still valid) - Bernie type of critics who think AI can cause widespread job losses - Ruxandra Teslo who thinks AI can remove meaning which I feel is the most serious one [1] What are not valid - environmental like emissions and water usage - AI is useless and it will take the economy with it because it is a bubble - AI spreads misinformation and causes societal damage - AI is trained on copyright (are we really on this side of the debate ?!) [1] https://substack.com/@ruxandrabio/p-213699661 https://substack.com/@ruxandrabio/p-213699661
- knowaveragejoe 15d ago
  This sounds completely reasonable: > - AI spreads misinformation and causes societal damage
  - fwip 15d ago
    Agreed. And so are the other two, if stated reasonably instead of as strawmen.
- Retr0id 15d ago
  What is invalid about the environmental angle? (aside from the dubious water claims)
  - nomel 15d ago
    I personally see it as: These companies subsidizing green energy expansion, because it's now the cheapest power to expand. These companies are going to help "correct" the widespread problem with utility monopolies, in the US. Datacenters are deploying their own power generation, partly because power cost no longer aligns with power generation costs. This mismatch is motivating research into local nuclear power generation [1] (which is almost certainly an effort to force the monopolies, rather than actually deploy). [1] https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/big-tech-puts-financial-heft-behind-next-gen-nuclear-power-ai-demand-surges-2026-04-10/ https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/big-tech-puts-finan...
    - overfeed 15d ago
      > These companies subsidizing green energy expansion, because it's now the cheapest power to expand. Unless you consider natural gass green energy, it's quite the opposite for the moment. This is because the AI build-out is about speed, not cost-effectiveness. That is why xai's Colossus I & II were illegally running gas turbines, and Google recanted its pledge for data center renewables targets.
      - deleted 15d ago
dgellow 15d ago
Cal Newport has been interesting on the topic. But it’s also possible to read Zitron and skip his personal opinions and just follow the discussion of financing, that’s what I personally do. I don’t understand why anyone would take the commentary of an internet pundit as a set of predictions to evaluate as gospel
- tolugenius 15d ago
  I enjoy Newport myself, he's probably the most level-headed take I've come across. Everyone else has some agenda (or product) they're trying to get at and very much ruins the messaging (ex the agent 'civilization' piece is extremely overblown especially since..that's how multi agent systems coordinate already. Nothing happened that is unprecedented and isn't how the system is designed to work.
  - thoughtpeddler 14d ago
    Newport does tend to be more level-headed, but honestly, the people that have gotten AI 'right' so far (in the true technical sense of how scaling laws held, etc) had their strong convictions set back in the mid-2010s, when Newport would've been far more skeptical. At least Newport's shown that he's capable of updating, but in general, he hasn't been someone I'd value for their predictive power.
kristianp 15d ago
The data center growth questions he raised have been where I found him interesting. I could never find any other articles to corroborate his predictions though. My question is when will the AI bubble burst? I didn't know he'd had a long history of mispredicting AI quality and growth of companies like Microsoft and Google.
- oblio 14d ago
  > I didn't know he'd had a long history of mispredicting AI quality and growth of companies like Microsoft and Google. After watching this space for a long time, I think the growth angle is... untested. All the FAANGs were slowing down after Covid. They boomed as the money printer went brrrr, then they plateaued. They've also kind of covered a lot of their potential their main total addressable markets, with the big exception of clouds, which probably have at least 5 or 10 years of growth as workloads are still being moved away from on-premise. Maybe ads, too, since TV is still around and big and there are probably a bunch of other holdouts I'm forgetting. Then, FAANGs started reaccelerating around 2024. Part of it was due to internal reforms, basically, layoffs shaking some things up. But I suspect the bigger part has been AI, driven by CapEx and all sorts of other things. The problem with the AI growth is that it's highly opaque. We don't really know who the actual clients are. It is <<extremely>> likely that for Oracle (OCI), Microsoft (Azure), Google (GCP), Amazon (AWS) their direct customers are just OpenAI and Anthropic. That's it. It's likely that 70% of the AI growth is just 2 companies. That can't be healthy, it's also likely extremely risky. Just the fact that the new cloud growth is so opaque is worrisome.
- mossTechnician 15d ago
  I ended up on this comment after looking through the linked article and realizing the words "data center" never come up in it.
jonathanpglick 15d ago
Check out the writing of Baldur Bjarnason. There are a lot of blog posts and a book outlining the risks and tradeoffs. https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2023/ai-position/ https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2023/ai-position/ https://illusion.baldurbjarnason.com/ https://illusion.baldurbjarnason.com/

igorkraw 15d ago

To shamelessly shill a passion project: A friend of mine and I try to be skeptical-but-reasonable on our podcast https://kairos.fm/muckraikers/ https://kairos.fm/muckraikers/ we aggregate papers and reporting and try to contextualize it with our own (hopefully useful) perspectives and takes

nomel 15d ago

> however most people are really hedging in one camp or the other in their takes. As with most things, most people are somewhere in the middle, as the silent majority. You only see the comments of the strongly aligned, which are also the most emotionally motivated to comment. The internet is not real life.

jplusequalt 15d ago

>I think separating AI as a tool and it's capabilities and AI as product that needs to make a profit is helpful, however most people are really hedging in one camp or the other in their takes. There are a myriad of people out there who have brought up genuine issues that AI presents, or preexisting issues that AI is exacerbating. This series of articles is perhaps the best long form critique of AI as both a technology and an industry I've encountered [1]. [1] https://aphyr.com/posts/420-the-future-of-everything-is-lies-i-guess-where-do-we-go-from-here https://aphyr.com/posts/420-the-future-of-everything-is-lies...

simianwords 15d ago

Valid criticisms of AI - safety critics who think AI can take over the world like Yud (I find this the least credible but still valid) - Bernie type of critics who think AI can cause widespread job losses - Ruxandra Teslo who thinks AI can remove meaning which I feel is the most serious one [1] What are not valid - environmental like emissions and water usage - AI is useless and it will take the economy with it because it is a bubble - AI spreads misinformation and causes societal damage - AI is trained on copyright (are we really on this side of the debate ?!) [1] https://substack.com/@ruxandrabio/p-213699661 https://substack.com/@ruxandrabio/p-213699661

knowaveragejoe 15d ago
This sounds completely reasonable: > - AI spreads misinformation and causes societal damage
- fwip 15d ago
  Agreed. And so are the other two, if stated reasonably instead of as strawmen.
Retr0id 15d ago
What is invalid about the environmental angle? (aside from the dubious water claims)
- nomel 15d ago
  I personally see it as: These companies subsidizing green energy expansion, because it's now the cheapest power to expand. These companies are going to help "correct" the widespread problem with utility monopolies, in the US. Datacenters are deploying their own power generation, partly because power cost no longer aligns with power generation costs. This mismatch is motivating research into local nuclear power generation [1] (which is almost certainly an effort to force the monopolies, rather than actually deploy). [1] https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/big-tech-puts-financial-heft-behind-next-gen-nuclear-power-ai-demand-surges-2026-04-10/ https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/big-tech-puts-finan...
  - overfeed 15d ago
    > These companies subsidizing green energy expansion, because it's now the cheapest power to expand. Unless you consider natural gass green energy, it's quite the opposite for the moment. This is because the AI build-out is about speed, not cost-effectiveness. That is why xai's Colossus I & II were illegally running gas turbines, and Google recanted its pledge for data center renewables targets.
    - deleted 15d ago

dgellow 15d ago

Cal Newport has been interesting on the topic. But it’s also possible to read Zitron and skip his personal opinions and just follow the discussion of financing, that’s what I personally do. I don’t understand why anyone would take the commentary of an internet pundit as a set of predictions to evaluate as gospel

tolugenius 15d ago
I enjoy Newport myself, he's probably the most level-headed take I've come across. Everyone else has some agenda (or product) they're trying to get at and very much ruins the messaging (ex the agent 'civilization' piece is extremely overblown especially since..that's how multi agent systems coordinate already. Nothing happened that is unprecedented and isn't how the system is designed to work.
- thoughtpeddler 14d ago
  Newport does tend to be more level-headed, but honestly, the people that have gotten AI 'right' so far (in the true technical sense of how scaling laws held, etc) had their strong convictions set back in the mid-2010s, when Newport would've been far more skeptical. At least Newport's shown that he's capable of updating, but in general, he hasn't been someone I'd value for their predictive power.

kristianp 15d ago

The data center growth questions he raised have been where I found him interesting. I could never find any other articles to corroborate his predictions though. My question is when will the AI bubble burst? I didn't know he'd had a long history of mispredicting AI quality and growth of companies like Microsoft and Google.

oblio 14d ago
> I didn't know he'd had a long history of mispredicting AI quality and growth of companies like Microsoft and Google. After watching this space for a long time, I think the growth angle is... untested. All the FAANGs were slowing down after Covid. They boomed as the money printer went brrrr, then they plateaued. They've also kind of covered a lot of their potential their main total addressable markets, with the big exception of clouds, which probably have at least 5 or 10 years of growth as workloads are still being moved away from on-premise. Maybe ads, too, since TV is still around and big and there are probably a bunch of other holdouts I'm forgetting. Then, FAANGs started reaccelerating around 2024. Part of it was due to internal reforms, basically, layoffs shaking some things up. But I suspect the bigger part has been AI, driven by CapEx and all sorts of other things. The problem with the AI growth is that it's highly opaque. We don't really know who the actual clients are. It is <<extremely>> likely that for Oracle (OCI), Microsoft (Azure), Google (GCP), Amazon (AWS) their direct customers are just OpenAI and Anthropic. That's it. It's likely that 70% of the AI growth is just 2 companies. That can't be healthy, it's also likely extremely risky. Just the fact that the new cloud growth is so opaque is worrisome.
mossTechnician 15d ago
I ended up on this comment after looking through the linked article and realizing the words "data center" never come up in it.

jonathanpglick 15d ago

Check out the writing of Baldur Bjarnason. There are a lot of blog posts and a book outlining the risks and tradeoffs. https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2023/ai-position/ https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2023/ai-position/ https://illusion.baldurbjarnason.com/ https://illusion.baldurbjarnason.com/