Ed Zitron on CNBC: GenAI Doesn't Work, and Big Tech Is Out of Hypergrowth Ideas
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But that's why some people give him the time of day. A lot of people prefer to see things in black and white because it's easier on the brain.
Basically, Ed is doing the easy part (pointing out the malinvestment) and not addressing the harder part, which is to predict what comes next in realistic terms. Because the idea that LLMs are just a $30-40 billion/year TAM and there's going to be an epic implosion that leaves only rubble is not the likely outcome.
It's a bit like the first .com boom. There was a huge amount of malinvestment and the bubble popping was painful, but there really was a business for people to buy stuff online, to consume paid content online, etc. The malinvestment got sorted and a couple decades on, immense wealth has been created.
That's the point though, isn't it? How detached from reality must you be to think this is ok?
"Painful" is carrying a lot of weight in that sentence. Painful means people lost their jobs, families broke up, depression, probably suicide, other forms of violence...
There must be a better way to go about these things.
You can view these things 100% cynically, or you can also consider the possibility that markets over (and also under) shooting are also a form of discovery in which the value of new business models, technologies, etc. are determined. While I'm not personally a fan of today's financial engineering and have concerns about direct government investments in particular, net-net it's probably better to live in economies where capital is abundant and malinvestment is possible, than to live economies where the opposite is true.
From the .com days, I personally observed four categories of outcome:
1. Total financial ruin. If we're being honest, this was often the result of individuals who got rich very quickly and spent even more quickly.
2. Survival. Lots of people got laid off and eventually found new jobs when the economy recovered. Their experience was valuable. A decent number of these people went on to ride the recovery boom and are comfortable if not "rich" today.
3. Survival with a story to tell. People who survived and came away with a story to tell ("at one point I was worth millions on paper and 6 months later I was laid off").
4. Huge windfall. Some people made a lot of money and through luck and/or smarts, managed to walk away from the implosion wealth intact.
The truth is that nobody can predict with certainty the future. Markets are the place where humans make bets about the future. Expecting entirely orderly markets in which everything moves at a predictable pace in a predictable way, where no participants win or lose too much, just isn't realistic.
This is a false dichotomy. Not everything needs to exist at the extremes.
> boom and bust cycles have existed for a very long time. This isn't a new thing today, and it wasn't new then either.
Murder and domestic violence have existed for a very long time. Racism existed for a long time. Slavery existed for a long time.
Things can be fixed, or at least improved to reduce the human cost associated with what's essentially a governance choice.
So you think there's a way to outlaw possible malinvestment?
Neolibs have the most rigid, binary and least creative minds I've ever encountered...
Speaking of rigid and binary thinking: do you think there's absolutely no value to LLMs and that every investment in them is malinvestment?
> Neolibs have the most rigid, binary and least creative minds I've ever encountered...
If it's so simple, why don't you explain how The Government is going to prevent private individuals and enterprises from investing in things that some people (who may or not be right) believe are worthless?
No, I think there is tremendous potential value in some areas.
> If it's so simple, why don't you explain how The Government is going to prevent private individuals and enterprises from investing in things that some people (who may or not be right) believe are worthless?
Honestly, I don't know.
How does The Government (which one?) prevent monopolies from forming? How does The Government prevent anti-competitive commercial practices such as dumping? How does The Government prevent any practices that are against the best interest of the people whom it's supposed to be representing?
So who is going to decide what has tremendous (real) value and what doesn't? And how are they going to force private individuals and enterprises to invest only in what has (in their estimation) value while at the same time ensuring that the level of investment permitted is sufficient to realize the value but not excessive so as to cause malinvestment?
> who is going to decide what has tremendous (real) value and what doesn't?
No one has to.
> And how are they going to force private individuals and enterprises to invest only in what has (in their estimation) value while at the same time ensuring that the level of investment permitted is sufficient to realize the value but not excessive so as to cause malinvestment?
They don't have to do that either.
Government is (or at least should be) in the business of ensuring better outcomes for the population that constitutes it, whilst reducing harm to as many of those people as possible.
Look for symptoms of things that are threatening either of those, and figure out a way to find balance.
Your argument reads a lot like "who is going to decide what a monopoly is and isn't? And how are they going to force private enterprises to break up when they are past that threshold?"
Honestly, this sounds like a cop-out. I asked a legitimate question in response to your comment: who decides what is a good investment and what isn't, and how do they determine how much good investment is needed to prevent excess that becomes malinvestment?
You refuse to answer this question because, I suspect, you realize that this is an impossible task.
> Your argument reads a lot like "who is going to decide what a monopoly is and isn't? And how are they going to force private enterprises to break up when they are past that threshold?"
Except that there are criteria defining what constitutes a monopoly and they're applied to the current state of a company.
Adjudicating a monopoly case is therefore a completely different matter in which regulators and courts determine whether a business, based on its current state, meets the definition of a monopoly.
The only way to establish good investment from bad is in hindsight. Unless you have a direct line to God, you can't know whether $1 billion invested into Company A or Industry B will produce a return or wipe investors out, or whether the appropriate level of investment in Company A or Industry B is $1 billion versus $1.5 billion, and so on.
But your comment hints at the idea that there's a group of people who can predict the future and accurately determine what investments are good or bad, and precisely how much should be invested in anything up to threshold where good investment becomes bad. This just isn't reality.
I didn't.
Everything else you said is dodging my main argument, and in fact pretty much everything else I've been saying in favour of your own very very narrow interpretation of the world in pure financial terms.
(to me it's a bit like criticising oil companies by claiming that oil doesn't actually produce any useful power after its refined. There's a lot to criticise about them but the fact that their product is very useful is in large part why it's so hard to do something about the rest of the problems they cause)
For whom? "Everyone". Maybe we can quote some "Everyone is better off now/the global standard of living has increased bullshit". Have you tried to get a job that pays enough to buy the average house in your area?
Sure. How did the fact that the internet was a revolutionary, civilization-changing technology that produced some of the best investments in history cause housing to become unaffordable?
If you're worried about asset prices and the affordability of housing, you should be far more upset at central banks/monetary policy than you are at the internet, ecommerce, smart phones, etc. You could also be upset at zoning laws, and tax and immigration policy.
people also tend to sheild their sacred cows with gestures toward nuance. maybe i'm misreading you, but it sounds like your criticism of him is he has correctly identified a problem and is reporting on it, but he hasn't taken the next step of predicting the next twenty years of consequences. sounds to me like a reporter doing his job well.
I don't have a problem with skepticism around AI investments (I agree with a lot of the skepticism) but if you're going to make public arguments about these investments, you should have a grasp of basic accounting principles.
> Exclusive: OpenAI Losses Increased Nearly 8X in 2025, With Spending Hitting $34 Billion
Start with the headline. He's comparing the net losses between 2024 and 2025, but $41.55 billion of the 2025 loss is a non-cash charge from "changes in fair value of convertible interests and warrant liability" tied to the for-profit conversion. He notes this but doesn't actually seem to understand (or want to explain) what that means.
It's a non-cash charge. This is not money actually going out. It's not an operating loss.
He could have used the increase in operating loss or expenditures to make his point, but he basically chose the biggest number he could find and present it in a way that distorts what it is. The only two possibilities seem to be that he is trying to be bombastic ("8X") or he actually doesn't understand what he's looking at.
> It then marked $3.74 billion of losses as “net loss attributable to noncontrolling members capital,” leaving the net loss attributable to the company as $5.09 billion.
> It’s unclear what this means, nor how OpenAI reconciled the removal of $3.74 billion in costs.
This is so strange because it's basic consolidation accounting: allocating a share of losses to minority equity holders. There's nothing sinister about it, and it's not anything that's being hidden. This is a standard practice for companies and anyone who is positioning himself as having the requisite expertise to comment about the financials of AI companies (or any companies for that matter) should know this basic accounting and an absolute nothingburger.
There are other aspects of his writing that are pretty distorted. Like, he states "I’m not sure how this company finds a way toward any kind of sustainability or profitability" while ignoring that OpenAI actually improved its gross margin from around 28% to 43%. Whether it ever becomes sustainably profitable is still a big question mark but again, someone acting as a financial commentator should know this stuff. So he's either feigning ignorance to sell his narrative (and newsletter subscriptions), or he's really ignorant.
"This time it's different" is a story told by people at both extremes.
"There is unsustainable excess and malinvestment but it's not going to be the end of the world and there will be some really important and successful things that are left standing alongside some carnage" is a narrative that doesn't appeal to the masses for a variety of reasons. And people like Zitron, who profit by selling narratives, often avoid narratives that require nuance and balance because it forces them to produce more complex and detailed, and less bombastic, analyses.
I don't think I've seen any solid argument there - just pointing out current stuff has limits which is no proof it won't improve.
Only to be re-malinvested in the same garbage hype that created it
Aside from Amazon, who shifted from selling books online to becoming a middleman for sales of others' products, and eventually to selling "cloud" services, is this wealth really derived from "buying and selling stuff online" as envisioned at the time of .com boom
The truth is that no one at that time would have defined "stuff" as advertising services, "cloud" services, etc., and that is where most of this wealth has come from
The so-called "tech industry" is not comprised of the "buying and selling stuff online", it is comprised of offering software for free, e.g., in the form of a "web app", a remote "service", etc. This is used as bait, a Trojan Horse, with the goal of intermediating other peoples' use of the internet, collecting data and performing surveillance
The focus of this "industry" is not on deriving revenue through "buying and selling stuff online", it is on collecting data. The data collection and surveilllance is not only applied to commercial use of the internet, e.g., "buying stuff online", it is applied to all use of the internet
Anyway, I think Zitron is wrong on the usefulness of AI, but I don't need to agree with him on everything. That is the weaker part of his arguments anyway (and, unsurprisingly, where critics here choose to engage with).
He has a very solid point on the viability and economics of AI, and I am still to see facts that contradict his analysis there.
In fact, what spooks me about AI is not that it can replace me. It can't, that much is clear. I am spooked about the probable economic downturn that it will spawn. All the reckless spending is fun until the bill has to be paid.
This is hillariously self referential.
Is it a panacea? Of course not, but it is potentially a sustainable business.
Except - open models are barely months away from the same performance and there is no moat, so we will see commodity pricing, and the billions being heaped on the fire currently will probably not see a return, unless someone comes up with a genius trading bot perhaps.
https://www.precedenceresearch.com/large-language-model-mark...
The TAM figure they arrive at is ~$36 billion by 2030. And for 2026 they claim a TAM of $10.6B
OpenAI alone is rumored to be on track for $30B of revenue in 2026. Add in Anthropic, Google, Microsoft, Meta, and Chinese providers, and the revenue being generated from LLM's in 2026 is plausibly in the range of $50-100B already.
Whatever your thoughts are on the cash burn to get there are irrelevant. There's at least $50B of LLM usage being paid for in 2026. 5x higher than the figure these research report companies are providing.
Just out of curiosity, where did you get the 50B figure?
[1] Actually I think it's right on the overinvestments and ROI claims
Ed Zitron is a journalist. Do you say that about every journalist?
He gets things others are missing.
He also misses things others are getting.
I think it’s nice to have a voice criticizing the fundraising aspect of these companies. I do think we’ll see at least one of them blow up. The technology is obviously useful though. Hundreds of thousands of developers have already changed the way they were working for decades. Some of the criticisms that the technology doesn’t work at all go a bit too far.
Token rates need to double in order for the industry to "break even".
In reality, just "breaking even" is not enough. Venture capital expects a sizeable return on their investment. So look for token rates to triple.
In reality, most companies are not at all prepared to feed AI vendors what they need in order to become profitable.
Uber is an early example of what is in store.
https://aimagazine.com/news/why-uber-has-already-burned-thro...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/janakirammsv/2026/05/17/uber-bu...
This seems like common sense to me.
I agree on this, but it doesn't mean that there is an automatic benefit on business side ... and business is what is paying our wages & tokens!
We are still in the discovery phase, but we don't know yet if there will be enough return to repay those hundreds of billions already invested and other few trillions that will be invested in the near future.
It's not enough for it to "work". It has to work in a way that is affordable and cost effective for widespread use.
Otherwise, people/companies will use it sparingly or not at all. Anything less than widespread, "universal" use is a big problem for those investing $ trillions in AI.
Guaranteed defensive replies, usually personal attacks, HN commenters cannot seem to ignore him
He must be on to something
Big Tech is a slave to the dynamics of attention and popularity. They monitor these dynamics in real-time
Perhaps Zitron is getting more attention and becoming more popular
He was recently on Bloomberg and now CNBC
You know being a Ycombinator proxy, you would think you guys could take a little bit of shit. You certainly don’t hesitate to shove ai down the throat of everyone, without consent obtained.
when the comments under a post become ideological, as they have here, there is high probability we will flag the post, regardless of the OP content
LLMs are big, Codex app is huge. You can control the browser from within codex app with just natural language.
Tell codex to perform a few actions, you go get coffee and come back to work done. This is real boost in productivity.