I don’t see how “This guy has no experience in the field he is actively commentating on. None of his predictions have come to pass.” is an ad hominem. The critiques are directly relevant to the subject matter.
I'm sure there weren't a ton of bankers predicting the mortgage collapse of 2008 but I, a young programmer of mortgage software could see something was weird (but didn't realize that it wasn't the norm).
People were getting multi-million dollar loans with no documentation which had affordable introductory payment and then ballooned to many times the payment.
I had no idea that wasn't normal but I was surprised when I learned that it was possible. I just lacked context and understanding of how the mortgage/banking industry really worked. Had I known as much as I do now after having been adulting for a while and become much more familiar with how banking really works, I could have seen that there was a massive pool of risk that was relying on the value of the housing market to not just keep increasing but increase at an incredible rate. All that it took was for the market to slow down just a little and then all those balloon payments would start defaulting because they couldn't be refinance again.
I couldn't have predicted everything that happened or who exactly would be holding the bag but, with just a couple more pieces of knowledge, I could have easily seen it was unsustainable.
IMO that's anti-AI Psychosis, the evil twin of believing GPT-4o was sentient. And a really bad case of it is labeling anyone who disagrees with you in any way as having AI Psychosis for doing so. And your first line sounds exactly like that to me.
IMO coding agents alone have made AI viable. Healthcare applications have done the same, but coding agents will print money as the cost of tokens drops, and it is dropping. In the meantime, max plans are obviously subsidized, but as long as most of their holders don't token max, they are the netflix of AI until that changes.
https://pricepertoken.com/trends
We needed OpenAI and Anthropic to get us there, but we're there now, and they need to adapt or they will be reduced to glorified neoclouds in the long run. I also predict publicly traded companies that are AI-first with huge PE ratios will go through some things. What I will not do is even try to pin a date on that. The market can stay irrational longer than any of us can stay solvent. But I wouldn't worry so much about companies with high gross margin and PE ratios of 40 or less. Time in the market beats timing the market and all that.
TBF my realtor was telling me about the "Got a pulse? Here's your mortgage!" issue starting in late 2004 after a bizarre conversation with his favorite loan agent after she had done too many tequila shots and started blabbing about basically giving loans to anyone. 100% true story. But again, good luck timing the crash.
> IMO that's anti-AI Psychosis, the evil twin of believing GPT-4o was sentient.
IMO that’s a particularly scraggly straw man. Even Ed Zitron, who we can stipulate is among the most cynical, thinks that some value will be left after the bubble either deflates or bursts.
So really, after all of these companies are wiped off the map because the bubble popped and they went broke, what will be left? Let's get specific here. Let's make some hard falsifiable predictions.
I predict bumpy IPOs for Anthropic and OpenAI, maybe even ending in acquisition instead. I predict anything with a PE over 100 is in trouble. But I also predict anyone with a PE of 40 or less is going to be just fine. Like Michael Burry said, just like Cisco, now running a PE in the high 30s after going through some things. Finally, coding agents are here to stay and they will only get better and cheaper, but they are unlikely to replace common sense meatbags.
So what are your predictions?
Me? I didn't downvote you for it and you are projecting a lot onto me without a sound basis.
Either way, my predictions are all personal, because as someone with his own problems I don't really have the spare energy to give a fuck what happens to the US economy or its tech industry. In practice for the rest of the world, I think it will all be dwarfed by the USA's failings in the Strait of Hormuz.
Though as a man in his fifties who has spent his life in the tech industry, I am slightly invested in the possibility of Larry Ellison's humiliation. Bring that on.
But also, if you don't want to talk about this stuff, why comment about it?
Is it? I don't think this is really true.
For example he's spent some time talking about Oracle's relatively more dangerous exposure to OpenAI. Here he is back in April:
https://shows.acast.com/the-tech-report/episodes/how-openai-...
Here's S&P in July, downgrading Oracle specifically because of their exposure to risks from OpenAI.
https://www.spglobal.com/ratings/en/regulatory/article/-/vie...
> and he's been predicting it for a while now (2024)
Like I said elsewhere, the first accurate, detailed, correct predictions of the subprime crisis were made four years before it finally unfolded. There's likely at least one more round of funding to come for both OpenAI and Anthropic. The big systemic risk to the USA is if the bubble bursts in 2028, if you ask me; that is shaping up to be a restless year.
> but if it's the gospel you want and/or need to hear,
It's not, especially? I listen every now and then; I don't even use a podcast app as a rule, so I'm far from a subscriber or follower. I am more interested in what Cal Newport has to say. I am probably slightly less bearish about AI's long tail value than Zitron is, as it goes.
> But also, if you don't want to talk about this stuff, why comment about it?
I'm happy to talk about it. I just don't care enough to make predictions beyond the personal, because I'm just not that invested and other people are better at it than me.
To the extent that I think personal observations scale up to the rest of the world, I would say that leads me to think that on-device AI will very significantly derail optimistic consumer AI revenue predictions (in particular OpenAI's), that cloud-based agentic coding is closer to its useful limits than people so far understand, that local (on-prem or boutique-hosted if not necessarily on-device) LLMs will do more and more of that work, and that as a result the total addressable market for cloud AI in the next five years is closer to its apex than people in the industry think.
But I am not going to bother to make more specific predictions about the fates of the two big AI companies or the value of the market, because I am not invested in them or the celebrity OpenAI/Anthropic employee influencer aspect of it. I have no team (and I am trying to avoid the products as much as possible).
I have learned in my life not to have too much anxiety about things that won't affect me or I am not close enough to influence.
My limited interest in AI is in the potential offered by smaller models, and I personally think people in the tech industry are thinking in a shallow, FOMO way, obsessing about shiny "frontier" model baubles and what a handful of overpaid loudmouths think, when they should be spending that energy exploring running open weights models and open source tools.