Two things can be true:

1. LLMs are remarkable and they've uncapped a supply/demand loop for software that has previously been much more tightly constrained than anyone realized. It turns out that if software is much cheaper and faster to make, people find ways to use a lot more software, so much so that the world is temporarily completely out of all the parts you need to make the machines that turn electricity into software.

2. The leading tech companies have spent wildly on something that seems likely to turn out to be a commodity that sells for a few points over what it costs to provide it on the expectation that the gains in software developer productivity would also apply to every other industry in a reasonable time, replacing human workers and increasing productivity.

Recklessly taking a trillion+ in debt to corner the market, only to find you can't actually corner it and can't built a real moat with this technology as long as everybody knows how it works (and everybody that wants to know, knows how it works), seems precarious, to me.

They have to make a lot more than $100/month off of everyone using their services for this to work out for them, and nobody wants to spend a lot more than $100/month for these services. People start looking around for alternatives the moment Anthropic says, "Well, first one's free, but we're going to take away the best model on the subscription plans pretty soon, of course."

Ed may be wrong on some points. But, it's hard for me to look at how much money the big guys have spent and not wonder, "Who's going to buy the services at the prices they need to charge?" It isn't going to be me.

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."

Hard to know of Zitron actually believes what he writes, is trapped in some type of mania, or keeps doing the same bit to pay the bills. Probably a mix of all 3.

Ed mostly avoids talking about LLMs and instead talks about money.

Because he‘s not?