Ed's whole cornerstone thesis is that "AI doesn't work." Like, if I had to sum him up in a short sentence, that's what it'd be
that or "Angry but doesn't know much"
that or "Angry but doesn't know much"
I don't agree with everything he thinks, but I think I agree with him more than I do Sam Altman or Jensen.
If he says AI is changing work in some places but not-at-all in most… that’s defensible. Or at least we can look at that. Did he say it about the llm offerings from one or two providers or about (broad gesture) all AI efforts, everywhere? Etc.
Certainly it’s changing sw development work. It’s less clear, most everywhere else.
- LLM’s potential and capability are dramatically overstated
- Business leaders are either driven by the Emperor’s New Clothes effect, or the legitimate fear of stock price or valuation drops, to admit it.
- The amount of money being dumped into this industry will never pay off.
He’s snide and condescending, to the detriment of his message. I can completely understand why people aren’t interested in listening to him. However, straw-manning his stances by oversimplifying or flat-out making uninformed assumptions about them isn’t a useful response to what he’s saying.
Frankly, this industry squirts out enough bullshit to smother an active volcano every single day. If you think Ed isn’t credible, I sure hope you dismiss the industry leaders just as readily.
He’s a scam artist. So is Altman. The correct answer is to not listen to either one, at least not on a regular basis and certainly not as a source of truth.
> straw-manning his stances by oversimplifying
He literally lies about numbers. The spreadsheet errors the article describes are either gross negligence or simple evidence of lying.
That has only been a cornerstone of his thesis for the last 10 months or so, once Claude Code and Codex began making gobs of revenue. Before that the cornerstone of his thesis was "nobody will ever pay for AI" and then he silently pivoted, without acknowledging any error, once it was clear that was not true.
This is what bugs people about Zitron and why people aren't listening to him. He's has repeatedly been proven wrong, and every time it happens he just silently moves the goalposts and never admits any mistakes. It's fine-- actually, correct-- to write someone off once it's clear that every time they get disproven they'll just move to a new thesis instead of reflecting on what went wrong and what assumptions might be fundamentally incorrect about their thinking.
To me, that’s not only not a credible stance, it’s immensely stupid.
The only way anyone could logically take that stance in the face of all the evidence otherwise is if their entire livelihood depended on it.
Oh… wait.
What specifically about the criticism do you find stupid? That’s a very general dismissal of some pretty specific criticism.