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Comment by lz400 | Hacker News Reader

I guess what I'm saying is that I won't look at his numbers since he's an unreliable source from my point of view and there's a chance that he's going to try to deceive me and it's a waste of time for me to listen to him.

I do have other sources of information and I probably agree in general that AI companies are doing pretty shady financial shenanigans. I even think it's possible that openai is in real trouble. But I don't extrapolate that into "AI is useless", which is what he does.

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> I guess what I'm saying is that I won't look at his numbers since he's an unreliable source from my point of view and there's a chance that he's going to try to deceive me and it's a waste of time for me to listen to him.

But he's linking out to sources

I would agree with you that extrapolating to “AI is useless” is definitely a giant step too far, and that part of the article ruins a lot of the other interesting bits of it.

It’s great that he cites a lot of sources but some of them aren’t great, like the Microsoft story about canceling their Claude spend. I think that particular story isn’t much of an indicator of anything, and it might not even be true.

But the financial part…this guy isn’t the only person out there sounding the alarm about the math not mathing.

FWIW I agree the financials are a bit crazy and OpenAI went a bit nuts with the circular deals. That said, honestly, I don't think it's the end of the world. I think there will probably be some correction/crash and it will probably be healthy. A lot of these circular deals will get canceled, but it's at the end of the day people changing imaginary numbers with each other. The underlying tech I still think it's revolutionary regardless, the same way that the internet was and the tech boom crash at the end of the day was a distraction from the fact that these companies did end up "ruling the world"

This is what critical reading is for. It requires you examining your own assumptions as much as the text's. If you don't engage with something or someone because of your own bias or assumptions, that is also willful ignorance; you also might end up never updating your prior stance when new information emerges.

There is a financial argument and capability argument.

In this case, he doesn't make the claim one follows from the other.

There's no shortage of sources of information. I'll exercise "critical reading" with sources I consider trustworthy to begin with. I've no time to engage with difficult analysis from people who are not worth the effort. You wouldn't engage with every lunacy you read on a tabloid, right? similar principle

Fair enough. I won't debate preferences or how you choose to spend your time. I think one of the merits of his articles is that he surveys and gathers sources that others can engage with. Even if we admit he is biased, that exercise (his writing) alone is valuable because one can contradict or reassess his claims.

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