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Comment by DrewADesign | Hacker News Reader

No, the cornerstones of his thesis are:

- 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.

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> No, the cornerstones of his thesis are: [...] The amount of money being dumped into this industry will never pay off.

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.

Do you know anyone whose understanding of the LLM business has remained static for the past 10 months? Would it be a positive trait?

In less than 3 years we’ve completely redefined how we interact with computers, and Zitron’s saying that there’s no way that investment in that pays off. He moves the goalposts every time something new proves him wrong.

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.

You could make the monetary motivation argument against anyone involved— much moreso Altman, et. al.

What specifically about the criticism do you find stupid? That’s a very general dismissal of some pretty specific criticism.

if you amass 115k subscribers by basically being wrong along the way just about everything and the shift as to "not remain static" and then continue to be full of shit, that is one thing - another things is going from "hm, what a great toy this is" to "holy shit, I can take on 4 contracts at the same time and run 25 terminals of CC is parallel" :)

Zitron’s superpower is to get reasonable people like you to turn his bullshit into prose.

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.

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