Ed Zitron is mad as hell | Hacker News Reader

Ed Zitron is mad as hell

ft.com

71 pointsbishopsmother57 comments

I can’t read the linked FT article but I wanted to mention that Ed Zitron’s podcast Better Offline is interesting for me because he has a contrarian view of tech that is often different from my own. Some of his recent podcasts on the funky economics of excessive AI investments and data center investments vs. any real payoffs for society. I feel my own views slightly shifting when I listen to him.

I value material that makes me re-visit my own assumptions about the world.

I found "Better Offline" through "Tech Won't Save Us" where Ed is occasionally a guest. It also has some critical takes on technology if you are looking for more of that content.

I found him in the same way, and thought he was interesting and insightful.

But I tried listening to some of his podcasts and read his articles, but just could not suffer them at all. Tech Wont Save Us is worth people's time though - great work there.

> funky economics of excessive AI investments and data center investments vs. any real payoffs for society.

This is why I'm convinced Sam makes his money from when OpenAI spends rather than when OpenAI earns.

What a co-incidence. In the USA the GDP goes up mainly from consumers spending, and business spending to a lesser extent. Otherwise not in relation to any wealth being created or value added by those people and enterprises.

If any.

Heavily weighted toward consumers, OTOH businesses have to spend a fortune before they can make a dent in GDP.

Over any one reporting period, don't worry those periods don't last forever.

"I can't read the linked FT article ..."

No archive.ph CAPTCHA:

   curl -K/dev/stdin <<eof > 1.htm
   url https://www.ft.com/content/4c8d6420-d088-4660-8973-c4996cd990fb
   user-agent "Mozilla/5.0 (Java) outbrain"  
   header accept:
   eof
   firefox ./1.htm

Interesting if he really is more convincing in speech than in writing. His writing is certainly flamboyant, but the aggression and expletives seem more targeted at hyping up people who already believe the things he writes, not for making people change their minds. He found a niche in anti-tech grift, and is now exploiting the niche for all he can.

But you might want to actually fact-check a few of the things he says that convince you, because at least for his written articles basically everything is made up or misrepresented. There's plenty of links to sources, sure, but if you follow them down to the primary source what they're saying is very different from what Zitron is implying. It seems hard to believe that he's better at this in spoken form where citing a source is even harder.

This is exactly on point. Also, his day job is shilling AI companies.

Yeah, I have no doubt that he's got some good insights, but its crystal clear that he's just hyping it all up as part of a grift. I get serious Alex Jones vibes from him

I've tried to listen to a few podcasts and read some articles, and its just unbearable. Moreover, I find the main point that he harps on about - that none of the AI stuff is financially sustainable - to be largely unimportant. Like, if they want to burn their money, go for it.

The real issues - intellectual property, implications for the future workforce, environmental costs, or even that the money really ought to be invested in something else, whether public funds are going towards it, if taxes are being avoided etc - seem to be, at best, tertiary concerns for him. He only seems to be "mad as hell" that they're wasting money and no one else is talking about it.

He's also just plainly wrong when he keeps saying things like there's been zero discernable benefit to AI, as if it is just a creepto scam.

Distorting the economy is a real issue and should be talked about.

There is way too much front-loading of hiring strategies and infrastructure that happens on future (over-)promised capabilities, TAM and profitability projections.

If we are lucky it fizzles out into reasonable valuations and sound investments. If not we have had a giant misallocation of capital on an unprecedented scale setting us back by many many years, a diamond shaped work force in some sectors causing labour shortages and reduced growth in the long run.

The thing I find off in his analysis is he just assumes AI is rubbish and won't get better, hence all the investment in it is wasted. I don't think that's realistic. Even if you are skeptical there's some chance it'll work out.

I've read a handful of his LLM articles completely, last year and this year. What I'm getting from his articles (I think) is this:

The USA stock market is largely driven by a dozen of FAANG companies whose valuation is rising fast and who are investing tens of billions in the LLMs. And all those companies are mono-dependent on the Nvidia cards, whose valuation is skyrocketing based on those expenditures. So point 1 - if LLMs would be as profitable as expected, the whole FAANG top-10 will slow down or even drop.

Point 2 he makes - a lot of the LLM-only companies are deeply in debts, acquire more debt, and continue kicking repayment can down the road, all at the same time. So assuming (again) that LLMs are not as profitable as expected, some LLM-only companies can go bust.

I think he wasn't making a statement that LLMs are intrinsically bad or useless, at least in those articles I've seen. He was just saying that financing aspect if very iffy AND that current world IT sector is way to overdependent on LLMs.

Ed Zitron was famous for writing “The Man Who Killed Google Search” [0] (see also its HN thread [1]).

[0] https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40133976

It's concerning that FT don't take more of an econs-of-AI-investment angle, explored here

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45399893

(Maybe Doctorow has too much of a Guardian vibe, compared to Zitron?)

The Economist would argue that the investor is always right, so maybe that's too hard of a line for FT to press

The FT recently did a series on 'The AI race', which they described as 'A three-part series exploring the quest for AI capacity and the data centres at the heart of hundreds of billions of dollars in capital investment'

- ‘Absolutely immense’: the companies on the hook for the $3tn AI building boom [1][2]

- Inside the AI race: can data centres ever truly be green? [3][4]

- Inside the relentless race for AI capacity [5]

[1] https://www.ft.com/content/efe1e350-62c6-4aa0-a833-f6da01265...

[2] https://archive.ph/sn3lT

[3] https://www.ft.com/content/0f6111a8-0249-4a28-aef4-1854fc8b4...

[4] https://archive.ph/10tca

[5] https://ig.ft.com/ai-data-centres/

I've said this many times but I'll say it again. The FT is not some single opinion org. It has many writers and many editors of various opinions. The FT itself does not take any angle, only it's writers and editors, who can have contradictory views and still publish articles in the same media org.

To add color to your opinion: this piece was written by one of the financial editors

https://www.ft.com/tabby-kinder

No "unified opinion" but an editorial stance

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_Times#Editorial_stan...

you want to open a wikipedia debate on that :)?

If I were you I'd point to the FT [Weekend] Magazine marquee instead

What are the chances of reading an FT article stating that the financial sector, and financialization, are creating some of society’s core problems?

They do occasionally, with reservation. Though obviously pro-finance they also don’t want total financial collapse.

> FT is not one single opinion

This holds for most newspapers and makes that whole fake news argument so infuriating. As if journalists had even 15 minutes in a day to coordinate how to present an issue.

Journalists don't have to spend 15 minutes to coordinate how to present an issue. The phenomenon has been described as journalists writing for other journalists as their audience, rather than the general public. It's about sending a signal that you're part of the in-group.

Newspapers employ journalists that write only within certain range of opinions. I am not saying it is evil or something, but there is absolutely selection of which opinions can be show and which cant.

I tried listening to a few episodes of his podcast a while back. I stopped because he was spending more time on how mad he is about some problem with big tech than he was on the problem itself.

I'd like to hear stories about big tech abuses, but I don't care much about some random podcaster's anger.

I started reading and listening to Ed after "The Man Who Killed Google Search" but grew tired of him ranting on and on about a technology that "brings no value to the world" while I use it to great effect many times every single day (LLMs).

Yeah, he's a lunatic and/or grifter for that and many other reasons

Serious question – what’s the grift?

Ad revenue from podcasts? Building up a personal brand to monetize in arbitrary ways later?

He’s flogging a paid newsletter.

Is the "mad as hell" an allusion to the movie Network?

> In one impassioned diatribe, Beale galvanizes the nation, persuading viewers to shout, "I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!" from their windows. He is soon hosting a new program called The Howard Beale Show, top-billed as "the mad prophet of the airwaves".

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_(1976_film)

Scene:

> It's like everything everywhere is going crazy, so we don't go out any more. We sit in the house, and slowly the world we're living in is getting smaller, and all we say is, "Please, at least leave us alone in our living rooms. Let me have my toaster and my TV and my steel-belted radials, and I won't say anything. Just leave us alone."

> Well, I'm not going to leave you alone.

> I want you to get mad!

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_RujOFCHsxo

* Transcript: https://www.americanrhetoric.com/MovieSpeeches/moviespeechne...

Satya is not an idiot. He's just doing the things that make the investor class idiots ecstatic.

I don't know. If it's an act it is very convincing.

Most HN criticism of Zitron appears to fall into one of two categories:

1) He uses expletives and is “too angry” 2) He runs a PR firm and has no experience working with LLMs

Which I think says a lot more about his detractors than it does about him. Time will tell all, and I think he will be remembered as a prescient individual. It’s undeniable that these financial games that OpenAI, Oracle, and now Nvidia are playing are unsustainable and indicative of a large upcoming crash.

Yeah, his financial arguments are good. But I did listened a but to his podcast ... and good bulk of it is pure ranting. There are episodes with no economic analysis as far aw I can tell, but a stream of complains about Sammy Clammy being idiot and people whose names I dont remember being idiots.

He has literally hours and hours of that.

Even his financial arguments are often weak. Of late he’s been constantly ranting about the use of ARR, like that hasn’t been a norm in SaaS businesses for almost two decades now. And that they’re using it to fool… who exactly? Wholesale investors on their current investor roadshow who deal with these things literally every day?

The episode with Shingy also really rubbed me the wrong way too. Just constantly “yeah, but it still hasn’t done anything useful” followed by Shingy relaying numerous examples over and over of how AI has transformed our he things he does, followed by “yeah, but when is it going to do something actually useful?” over and over.

He’s become some one note on the AI stuff it’s tiresome. Moreso given he’s unwilling to actually listen to any other perspective. I wish he’d go back to talking about literally anything else.

When he's making arguments and offering analysis, I think they're very often sound. That's why I (at least sporadically) continue to listen to episodes of his podcast, or read his pieces.

I'd love to read/listen to one that he worked on with a talented editor. I don't mind the swearing or the tone, and I enjoy a good rant here and there, but for me the amount of rambling and ranting obfuscates the good points he's making, just by sheer volume.

The key problem is that his economic analysis is absolute trash. I used to think he was just totally incompetent at it, but given the bias in the errors, it is pretty clearly intentional deception. But it's often pretty hard to address that, because every article he writes is a 10k word gish gallop. I've tried debunking key points a few times in HN comments for just one of the intentional mistakes he makes, and people complain about the reply being too long.

But is he not gonna take it?

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