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I would be interested in seeing a similar list of predictions from Altman, Amodei, etc with annotations about how many have come true. Ed Zitron is a blow hard

I would be interested in seeing a similar list of predictions from Altman, Amodei, etc with annotations about how many have come true. Ed Zitron is a blow hard and frequently overstates things to the point where it is hard to take seriously, but so are the AI industry leaders. I have heard multiple breathless press releases warning that the end of white collar work is "just 6 months away" and that people not using the latest Mythos/Fable/Whatever model will be hopelessly left behind.

sarjann 15d ago
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.
- iLoveOncall 15d ago
  > 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.
  - sarjann 15d ago
    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/shorts/QMhtTO3u61A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_ueDUrkOlQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_ueDUrkOlQ Examples of acknowledging he was wrong
    - iLoveOncall 15d ago
      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.
      - deleted 15d ago
        [deleted]
      - krcz 15d ago
        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?
        iLoveOncall 15d ago
        This was posted in August 2026, so he's talking about the latest OpenAI models. I don't know where you got GPT4 from but clearly you are also misunderstanding everything he said. He's also just saying what he thinks people (the general population) want to hear ("AI won't take your job").
        sarjann 15d ago
        What are you actually trying to get at? Had you even bothered to watch the 2nd (short) yet? My point was that he’s willing to acknowledge that he was wrong, that is what the clip shows. Also can you read minds now? ‘He's also just saying what he thinks people (the general population) want to hear’
        iLoveOncall 15d ago
        > Had you even bothered to watch the 2nd (short) yet? Have you? He's clearly saying that it's society's fault if GPT-4 didn't lead to the great replacement of software engineers he predicted rather than the capabilities of the model. He's acknowledging absolutely no fault of his, rather blaming sOcIeTy for his own failures and lies.
- achompas 15d ago
  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.
  - pfdietz 15d ago
    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.
  - cduzz 15d ago
    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 1. they're not completely trustworthy 2. they're really expensive to train 3. it isn't obvious that anyone's willing to pay the full freight for the resulting product 4. lots of large orgs "that should know better" have gone far down the LLM "AI" road because they're looking for "the next big thing" when they should be pivoting to "mature, stable" companies instead of "hypergrowth" companies. 5. there's lots of debt and obligations and no obvious way for all of it to be paid off from revenues from openai / anthropic. 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.
- greekrich92 15d ago
  Humility? I don't think they know what the word means let alone possess the capacity to demonstrate it.
  - CamperBob2 15d ago
    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.
    - only-one1701 15d ago
      The until Anthropic et al IPO to the tune of trillions Ed is more right than he is wrong.
    - arealaccount 15d ago
      When Altman “admits” things it seems more manipulative than humility
anonuser123 15d ago
My bet is that Amodei's claims about the dangers of AI are the most likely to come true – I'm predicticing amodei/anthropic will become the evil it was against.
- ngcazz 15d ago
  Those claims are warnings if you're working class, and marketing if you're corporate.
- m4rtink 15d ago
  I predict they go bankrupt.
tadfisher 15d ago
No, you see, they were right all along, they just "didn't anticipate the public outcry against data center expansion", thus the obviously inevitable AI takeover of the economy is being slowed by NIMBY curmudgeons who should be ignored and punished.
achompas 15d ago
But I think anyone who evaluates their claims understands that they’re talking their own books. Zitron’s problems are more subtle. He benefits financially from his own claims, while also touting his impartiality and capacity for objective thought.
- only-one1701 15d ago
  A person savvy enough to understand the indirect financial benefit to Dario promising that Claude is so dangerously smart it must be regulated understands Zitron’s schtick
tptacek 15d ago
Dan Luu's piece talks about this! He gives the example of Ray Kurzweil, who is similarly catastrophically wrong about everything, just in the opposite direction as Zitron. Luu's point isn't that anti-AI analysis is bad; it's that Zitron is bad. Zitron is bad in this analysis no matter what Altman says. It could be the case that Altman is also bad.
- dinfinity 15d ago
  > He gives the example of Ray Kurzweil, who is similarly catastrophically wrong about everything Is he, though? It seems to me that a lot of his predictions were surprisingly close to the mark, especially given how long ago they were made.
  - nl 15d ago
    Luu's piece linked his analysis! Kurzweil scores 7% accuracy. If you scroll to the appendix he grades individual predictions. https://danluu.com/futurist-predictions/ https://danluu.com/futurist-predictions/
    - scarmig 15d ago
      Reading through them, Luu's grades seem fair and accurate to me. Best defense of Kurzweil I can give is that if you give a grace period of a decade and scope them down substantially (to maybe a subset of well-off Americans in coastal cities), he looks much better, though still under 50%. One of Kurzweil's close-but-no-cigar failed predictions was "neural nets and genetic algorithms," killed off by the conjunction and being a couple years too early (2009 for increasing interest, and 2019 for wide use).
      - roenxi 15d ago
        Fair, sure. But it seems to be underselling how reasonable Kurzweil is. We've got things like 2009 - "Computers can recognize their owner's face from a picture or video. No." And ok, sure, but that has happened by 2026 and we have more than 2000 years of recorded history of people making predictions. I don't think that situation reflects at all badly on Kurzweil except that he doesn't explicitly say he has a 15 year error bar. Which, yes, technically inaccurate, but it seems quite likely nobody would be talking about him if he spent that much time exploring the minor caveats. And hitting him for the "and genetic algorithms" is verging on pedantry. Ok so genetic algorithms aren't a civilisation-level success that appears to be reshaping the fate of the species in the same way neural nets are. He was right that learning systems were going to be huge and he was off on a detail.
sroerick 15d ago
Man, as a former extreme skeptic, I watched a video from Eric Schmidt in early 2025 where he said that by the end of the year nobody would be coding, and that one was dead frickin on.
- weakfish 15d ago
  I mean, I code?
- torben-friis 15d ago
  I guess I don't exist...
  - marcosdumay 15d ago
    I guess the GP is joking. But on the current climate, it's really hard to be sure.
- meowface 15d ago
  Dario Amodei and Eric Schmidt seem fairly well-calibrated, although a bit early. Elon Musk is constantly way, way overoptimistic (perhaps to the point of willful fraud). Zitron is hopelessly and ridiculously incompetent (and there are allegations he is willfully lying, too, but who knows).
  - marcosdumay 15d ago
    The AGI that appeared mid 2023 and killed single every person in 8 months was neat!
    - meowface 15d ago
      Did Dario Amodei say that?
    - specialist 15d ago
      Live long enough and all these apocalypses start to smell the same.
jimmis 15d ago
To be fair, Zitron's career is as a commentator. To some extent, I expect CEOs of companies to make ridiculous claims. At the end of the day, when shareholders come knocking, what they care about is whether or not your company is growing. No such mechanism for social media personalities. You can be wrong 90% of the time, and your audience will still praise you for the 10% of the time you were right.
- jgalt212 15d ago
  CEOs and leaders used to trade on credibility.
- Pxtl 15d ago
  I don't think of Zitron as a journalist, I think of him as an entertainer, no different from all the columnists paid to tell people that what they already think is right. The fact that you're holding him to a higher standard than fabulously compensated professional c-suite officers whose products are used in matters of life and death is... kinda weird?
- solid_fuel 15d ago
  > To be fair, Zitron's career is as a commentator. To some extent, I expect CEOs of companies to make ridiculous claims. This is not a comment directly at you, because I understand where you're coming from, but I think this attitude shows how far leadership and our expectations of the professional class in America have deteriorated. My expectations are inverse to yours. I don't care if a commentator makes a claim that's wrong, if they keep being wrong people will stop listening. (In theory. Jim Cramer still has a job so who knows, really.) I certainly don't expect a commentator to have accurate internal information about a company. CEOs on the other hand should be expected to be honest and accurate in their claims. The information a CEO shares should be accurate so that investors can make informed decisions. Instead, we seem to accept CEOs who act as salesmen first and leaders last. If a CEO claims a product will be out later this year, and the stock goes up, then they announce actually things are delayed, and the stock still goes up, what is actually being rewarded here?
xgulfie 15d ago
Here's an example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_predictions_for_autonomous_Tesla_vehicles_by_Elon_Musk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_predictions_for_autono...
- xgulfie 14d ago
  I'm curious about why this got downvotes for literally answering the question
deleted 15d ago
[deleted]
ElProlactin 15d ago
> Ed Zitron is a blow hard and frequently overstates things to the point where it is hard to take seriously, but so are the AI industry leaders. Except that the AI industry leaders actually have skin in the game/are in the trenches and competing in the market. Ed Zitron wants you to subscribe to a newsletter so that you can read doom and gloom and...? If you invested based on his advice, you'd have missed huge gains and/or lost money. And I say this as a person who thinks most of the "AI industry leaders" are ethically questionable, at best, and ethically bankrupt, at worst, and that the stock market should be approached with caution due to valuations.
- RachelF 15d ago
  The fact is there is BullSh_t and hype on both sides. Both Zitron and AI execs have good points, but both are trying to sell you something. The murky truth lies between the two extremes. IMHO, having Zitron around is a counter to the AI leaders. Is he the best? No. Is he the loudest? Yes.
  - ElProlactin 15d ago
    Anthropic's ARR is reportedly now above $60 billion. OpenAI's is reportedly above $40 billion. Countless people and businesses are using AI to create tangible value and reduce costs. We can debate whether the level of investment in AI is excessive and what any malinvestment will eventually cost when the market has to recognize it. But Zitron is selling you a $70/year subscription to a newsletter that constantly reminds you that AI is a bubble and the technology is worthless. The AI people aren't selling you the same thing Ed is. And let's be honest here: it's not like Zitron has any credentials of substance that are relevant. He's not an accountant and constantly demonstrates that he can't read a balance sheet or financial statement, doesn't understand basic account principles, etc. He's not a technologist, so he can't speak credibly to AI tech and how it's being used. He never worked in AI, even in a non-tech role, so he has no first-hand experience that's unique. Basically, he's a former PR shill who, from what I can tell, saw an opportunity to profit by hitching himself to the AI zeitgeist as a naysayer. I'm sure his grift is keeping his bills paid, but anyone taking action based on his doom and gloom thesis has missed out on one of the biggest investment opportunities in history. And just to be clear: this is not to say that stocks will go up forever, that valuation concerns aren't legitimate, or that there aren't aspects to AI infrastructure financing that are a bit concerning. But if you had ignored Ed from the minute he started whining and sold all of your AI investments tomorrow, you'd be much wealthier.
nl 15d ago
> multiple breathless press releases warning that the end of white collar work is "just 6 months away" I'd like to see an example of this. I think Altman and Amodei have been quite sober with their actual predictions. They've said things like "models can now do white collar work" but haven't yet said it is the end of white collar work. The closest actual quote to this was in In March 2025, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei told a Council on Foreign Relations audience that AI would be writing 90 percent of code in three to six months, and essentially all of it within twelve months. I think that he underestimated how long it takes for technology to get uptake but in terms of capabilities he was perhaps 6 months out. I'd say that Fable class models are definitely capable of writing essentially all software, and that was released June 2026.
- solid_fuel 15d ago
  You could try checking the news. > In a remarkable interview with Y Combinator in November 2024, Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, shared a vision that could redefine the technological landscape as we know it. Altman confidently revealed that OpenAI has a clear roadmap for achieving AGI by 2025. https://www.tomsguide.com/ai/chatgpt/sam-altman-claims-agi-is-coming-in-2025-and-machines-will-be-able-to-think-like-humans-when-it-happens https://www.tomsguide.com/ai/chatgpt/sam-altman-claims-agi-i... Now Altman is claiming it'll be this year for sure: https://www.msn.com/en-in/news/other/sam-altman-makes-bold-agi-claim-says-openai-could-achieve-it-this-year/ar-AA2b0M1N https://www.msn.com/en-in/news/other/sam-altman-makes-bold-a...
  - nl 15d ago
    What specifically was he wrong about in either of those? I.e, something that can be falsified. > Altman claimed that AGI could be achieved in 2025 during an interview for Y Combinator, declaring that it is now simply an engineering problem. He said things were moving faster than expected and that the path to AGI was "basically clear." "AGI" isn't a useful term because - as noted in the article you linked - people disagree about what it means. Also his actual claim here seems to have been that the path to AGI was "basically clear." That isn't a prediction that can be falsified.
melagonster 15d ago
The end of white collar work mean that company can finish all jobs by new model.
ALittleLight 15d ago
The big difference is that Altman et al aren't just, or even mainly, pundits or prognosticators. Zitron's whole thing is commentary and predictions about AI and his predictions are almost all wrong. Altman and friends are mainly actually making and delivering AI. If they also hype their timelines/valuations, they also seem to make directional progress on the goals.
sanderjd 15d ago
Yep I distinctly remember at the beginning of 2023 that folks were predicting that we were less than two years away from there being no jobs for software developers. Pretty soon we'll reach double that timeline. And of course it really has changed everything! But that was not all that a lot of people were prognosticating.
Danox 15d ago
The 5090 Nvidia card evidently is selling for five grand now! It’s just a question of when the bubble burst….

sarjann 15d ago

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.

iLoveOncall 15d ago
> 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.
- sarjann 15d ago
  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/shorts/QMhtTO3u61A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_ueDUrkOlQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_ueDUrkOlQ Examples of acknowledging he was wrong
  - iLoveOncall 15d ago
    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.
    - deleted 15d ago
      [deleted]
    - krcz 15d ago
      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?
      - iLoveOncall 15d ago
        This was posted in August 2026, so he's talking about the latest OpenAI models. I don't know where you got GPT4 from but clearly you are also misunderstanding everything he said. He's also just saying what he thinks people (the general population) want to hear ("AI won't take your job").
        sarjann 15d ago
        What are you actually trying to get at? Had you even bothered to watch the 2nd (short) yet? My point was that he’s willing to acknowledge that he was wrong, that is what the clip shows. Also can you read minds now? ‘He's also just saying what he thinks people (the general population) want to hear’
        iLoveOncall 15d ago
        > Had you even bothered to watch the 2nd (short) yet? Have you? He's clearly saying that it's society's fault if GPT-4 didn't lead to the great replacement of software engineers he predicted rather than the capabilities of the model. He's acknowledging absolutely no fault of his, rather blaming sOcIeTy for his own failures and lies.
achompas 15d ago
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.
- pfdietz 15d ago
  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.
- cduzz 15d ago
  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 1. they're not completely trustworthy 2. they're really expensive to train 3. it isn't obvious that anyone's willing to pay the full freight for the resulting product 4. lots of large orgs "that should know better" have gone far down the LLM "AI" road because they're looking for "the next big thing" when they should be pivoting to "mature, stable" companies instead of "hypergrowth" companies. 5. there's lots of debt and obligations and no obvious way for all of it to be paid off from revenues from openai / anthropic. 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.
greekrich92 15d ago
Humility? I don't think they know what the word means let alone possess the capacity to demonstrate it.
- CamperBob2 15d ago
  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.
  - only-one1701 15d ago
    The until Anthropic et al IPO to the tune of trillions Ed is more right than he is wrong.
  - arealaccount 15d ago
    When Altman “admits” things it seems more manipulative than humility

anonuser123 15d ago

My bet is that Amodei's claims about the dangers of AI are the most likely to come true – I'm predicticing amodei/anthropic will become the evil it was against.

ngcazz 15d ago
Those claims are warnings if you're working class, and marketing if you're corporate.
m4rtink 15d ago
I predict they go bankrupt.

tadfisher 15d ago

No, you see, they were right all along, they just "didn't anticipate the public outcry against data center expansion", thus the obviously inevitable AI takeover of the economy is being slowed by NIMBY curmudgeons who should be ignored and punished.

achompas 15d ago

But I think anyone who evaluates their claims understands that they’re talking their own books. Zitron’s problems are more subtle. He benefits financially from his own claims, while also touting his impartiality and capacity for objective thought.

only-one1701 15d ago
A person savvy enough to understand the indirect financial benefit to Dario promising that Claude is so dangerously smart it must be regulated understands Zitron’s schtick

tptacek 15d ago

Dan Luu's piece talks about this! He gives the example of Ray Kurzweil, who is similarly catastrophically wrong about everything, just in the opposite direction as Zitron. Luu's point isn't that anti-AI analysis is bad; it's that Zitron is bad. Zitron is bad in this analysis no matter what Altman says. It could be the case that Altman is also bad.

dinfinity 15d ago
> He gives the example of Ray Kurzweil, who is similarly catastrophically wrong about everything Is he, though? It seems to me that a lot of his predictions were surprisingly close to the mark, especially given how long ago they were made.
- nl 15d ago
  Luu's piece linked his analysis! Kurzweil scores 7% accuracy. If you scroll to the appendix he grades individual predictions. https://danluu.com/futurist-predictions/ https://danluu.com/futurist-predictions/
  - scarmig 15d ago
    Reading through them, Luu's grades seem fair and accurate to me. Best defense of Kurzweil I can give is that if you give a grace period of a decade and scope them down substantially (to maybe a subset of well-off Americans in coastal cities), he looks much better, though still under 50%. One of Kurzweil's close-but-no-cigar failed predictions was "neural nets and genetic algorithms," killed off by the conjunction and being a couple years too early (2009 for increasing interest, and 2019 for wide use).
    - roenxi 15d ago
      Fair, sure. But it seems to be underselling how reasonable Kurzweil is. We've got things like 2009 - "Computers can recognize their owner's face from a picture or video. No." And ok, sure, but that has happened by 2026 and we have more than 2000 years of recorded history of people making predictions. I don't think that situation reflects at all badly on Kurzweil except that he doesn't explicitly say he has a 15 year error bar. Which, yes, technically inaccurate, but it seems quite likely nobody would be talking about him if he spent that much time exploring the minor caveats. And hitting him for the "and genetic algorithms" is verging on pedantry. Ok so genetic algorithms aren't a civilisation-level success that appears to be reshaping the fate of the species in the same way neural nets are. He was right that learning systems were going to be huge and he was off on a detail.

sroerick 15d ago

Man, as a former extreme skeptic, I watched a video from Eric Schmidt in early 2025 where he said that by the end of the year nobody would be coding, and that one was dead frickin on.

weakfish 15d ago
I mean, I code?
torben-friis 15d ago
I guess I don't exist...
- marcosdumay 15d ago
  I guess the GP is joking. But on the current climate, it's really hard to be sure.
meowface 15d ago
Dario Amodei and Eric Schmidt seem fairly well-calibrated, although a bit early. Elon Musk is constantly way, way overoptimistic (perhaps to the point of willful fraud). Zitron is hopelessly and ridiculously incompetent (and there are allegations he is willfully lying, too, but who knows).
- marcosdumay 15d ago
  The AGI that appeared mid 2023 and killed single every person in 8 months was neat!
  - meowface 15d ago
    Did Dario Amodei say that?
  - specialist 15d ago
    Live long enough and all these apocalypses start to smell the same.

jimmis 15d ago

To be fair, Zitron's career is as a commentator. To some extent, I expect CEOs of companies to make ridiculous claims. At the end of the day, when shareholders come knocking, what they care about is whether or not your company is growing. No such mechanism for social media personalities. You can be wrong 90% of the time, and your audience will still praise you for the 10% of the time you were right.

jgalt212 15d ago
CEOs and leaders used to trade on credibility.
Pxtl 15d ago
I don't think of Zitron as a journalist, I think of him as an entertainer, no different from all the columnists paid to tell people that what they already think is right. The fact that you're holding him to a higher standard than fabulously compensated professional c-suite officers whose products are used in matters of life and death is... kinda weird?
solid_fuel 15d ago
> To be fair, Zitron's career is as a commentator. To some extent, I expect CEOs of companies to make ridiculous claims. This is not a comment directly at you, because I understand where you're coming from, but I think this attitude shows how far leadership and our expectations of the professional class in America have deteriorated. My expectations are inverse to yours. I don't care if a commentator makes a claim that's wrong, if they keep being wrong people will stop listening. (In theory. Jim Cramer still has a job so who knows, really.) I certainly don't expect a commentator to have accurate internal information about a company. CEOs on the other hand should be expected to be honest and accurate in their claims. The information a CEO shares should be accurate so that investors can make informed decisions. Instead, we seem to accept CEOs who act as salesmen first and leaders last. If a CEO claims a product will be out later this year, and the stock goes up, then they announce actually things are delayed, and the stock still goes up, what is actually being rewarded here?

xgulfie 15d ago

Here's an example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_predictions_for_autonomous_Tesla_vehicles_by_Elon_Musk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_predictions_for_autono...

xgulfie 14d ago
I'm curious about why this got downvotes for literally answering the question

deleted 15d ago

[deleted]

ElProlactin 15d ago

> Ed Zitron is a blow hard and frequently overstates things to the point where it is hard to take seriously, but so are the AI industry leaders. Except that the AI industry leaders actually have skin in the game/are in the trenches and competing in the market. Ed Zitron wants you to subscribe to a newsletter so that you can read doom and gloom and...? If you invested based on his advice, you'd have missed huge gains and/or lost money. And I say this as a person who thinks most of the "AI industry leaders" are ethically questionable, at best, and ethically bankrupt, at worst, and that the stock market should be approached with caution due to valuations.

RachelF 15d ago
The fact is there is BullSh_t and hype on both sides. Both Zitron and AI execs have good points, but both are trying to sell you something. The murky truth lies between the two extremes. IMHO, having Zitron around is a counter to the AI leaders. Is he the best? No. Is he the loudest? Yes.
- ElProlactin 15d ago
  Anthropic's ARR is reportedly now above $60 billion. OpenAI's is reportedly above $40 billion. Countless people and businesses are using AI to create tangible value and reduce costs. We can debate whether the level of investment in AI is excessive and what any malinvestment will eventually cost when the market has to recognize it. But Zitron is selling you a $70/year subscription to a newsletter that constantly reminds you that AI is a bubble and the technology is worthless. The AI people aren't selling you the same thing Ed is. And let's be honest here: it's not like Zitron has any credentials of substance that are relevant. He's not an accountant and constantly demonstrates that he can't read a balance sheet or financial statement, doesn't understand basic account principles, etc. He's not a technologist, so he can't speak credibly to AI tech and how it's being used. He never worked in AI, even in a non-tech role, so he has no first-hand experience that's unique. Basically, he's a former PR shill who, from what I can tell, saw an opportunity to profit by hitching himself to the AI zeitgeist as a naysayer. I'm sure his grift is keeping his bills paid, but anyone taking action based on his doom and gloom thesis has missed out on one of the biggest investment opportunities in history. And just to be clear: this is not to say that stocks will go up forever, that valuation concerns aren't legitimate, or that there aren't aspects to AI infrastructure financing that are a bit concerning. But if you had ignored Ed from the minute he started whining and sold all of your AI investments tomorrow, you'd be much wealthier.

nl 15d ago

> multiple breathless press releases warning that the end of white collar work is "just 6 months away" I'd like to see an example of this. I think Altman and Amodei have been quite sober with their actual predictions. They've said things like "models can now do white collar work" but haven't yet said it is the end of white collar work. The closest actual quote to this was in In March 2025, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei told a Council on Foreign Relations audience that AI would be writing 90 percent of code in three to six months, and essentially all of it within twelve months. I think that he underestimated how long it takes for technology to get uptake but in terms of capabilities he was perhaps 6 months out. I'd say that Fable class models are definitely capable of writing essentially all software, and that was released June 2026.

solid_fuel 15d ago
You could try checking the news. > In a remarkable interview with Y Combinator in November 2024, Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, shared a vision that could redefine the technological landscape as we know it. Altman confidently revealed that OpenAI has a clear roadmap for achieving AGI by 2025. https://www.tomsguide.com/ai/chatgpt/sam-altman-claims-agi-is-coming-in-2025-and-machines-will-be-able-to-think-like-humans-when-it-happens https://www.tomsguide.com/ai/chatgpt/sam-altman-claims-agi-i... Now Altman is claiming it'll be this year for sure: https://www.msn.com/en-in/news/other/sam-altman-makes-bold-agi-claim-says-openai-could-achieve-it-this-year/ar-AA2b0M1N https://www.msn.com/en-in/news/other/sam-altman-makes-bold-a...
- nl 15d ago
  What specifically was he wrong about in either of those? I.e, something that can be falsified. > Altman claimed that AGI could be achieved in 2025 during an interview for Y Combinator, declaring that it is now simply an engineering problem. He said things were moving faster than expected and that the path to AGI was "basically clear." "AGI" isn't a useful term because - as noted in the article you linked - people disagree about what it means. Also his actual claim here seems to have been that the path to AGI was "basically clear." That isn't a prediction that can be falsified.

melagonster 15d ago

The end of white collar work mean that company can finish all jobs by new model.

ALittleLight 15d ago

The big difference is that Altman et al aren't just, or even mainly, pundits or prognosticators. Zitron's whole thing is commentary and predictions about AI and his predictions are almost all wrong. Altman and friends are mainly actually making and delivering AI. If they also hype their timelines/valuations, they also seem to make directional progress on the goals.

sanderjd 15d ago

Yep I distinctly remember at the beginning of 2023 that folks were predicting that we were less than two years away from there being no jobs for software developers. Pretty soon we'll reach double that timeline. And of course it really has changed everything! But that was not all that a lot of people were prognosticating.

Danox 15d ago

The 5090 Nvidia card evidently is selling for five grand now! It’s just a question of when the bubble burst….