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Comment by AgentME | Hacker News Reader

Hasn't he been saying that OpenAI is going to shut down every year for the last few years now? And that models are never going to get better than they were in 2022? I think he's pretty clearly a grifter chasing an audience that wants to be reassured that big tech is going away soon.

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Ed Zitron may be many things but he is no grifter. He writes what he believes and believes what he says, and I basically agree with all of it. The chattering class in SV has been wildly wrong for years, and they'll really look foolish when the market crashes horribly and these companies collapse.

He's saying more than that the companies are going to collapse; he's making pronouncements about the underlying technology, which are claims that are much harder to defend. I'm not entirely sure he understands the distinction between the companies and the technology, though.

Respectably...what?? Ed at this point is one of the most well read people on Earth for this topic. Of course he knows the difference between the companies and the technology. He goes in depth both on why he think the companies are financially unviable AND why he's unimpressed by LLM's technologically alllll the time.

Even as someone who is generally inclined to agree with his thesis, I find Ed Zitron's discussions as to why AI does not and will never work deeply unconvincing.

I don't think he fundamentally gets what's going on with AI on the tech level and how the Moore's law type improvements in compute have driven this and will keep doing so. He just kind of sees that LLM chatbots are not much good and assumes things will stay like that. If that were so investing $1tn would make no sense. But it's not true.

Having a large audience does not imply being the most well informed or correct.

"Saying what a lot of people want to hear" is not a good proxy for truthfulness or correctness.

Lecun pretty much says the same things, as most experts actually. Only the execs and marketing teams keep yapping about AGI

I didn't say anything about AGI. I think AGI is very silly.

The original meaning of AI is what some now call AGI. Some don't choose to follow meaning shifts forced by large companies for advertisement purposes. Same like Full* Self** Driving***.

How do you want to define grifter? He shows up, makes a lot of big promises, talks a lot of shit, doesn't actually engage with any real criticism, gets paid for it, and then exits, stage left. He could be right, he could be wrong, but he leaves no room for debate. If all you want is someone to yell at you about how right your feelings on something are, I mean, hey, I have a therapist too. I don't ask her for financial advice though.

Does Ed produce anything other than a newsletter?

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