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awakeasleeptoday at 3:43 PM8 repliesview on HN

Read a little more of what he's written before you praise him, so you don't end up looking as dumb as I did.

Ed may be right about some of his claims, but he is 100% a crank, and he makes so many incoherent claims I'd say that if he's right, it's in the nature of a broken clock.


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rdedevtoday at 4:36 PM

If you want to dismiss him for being hyperbolic or under estimating the usefulness of AI go for it.

If you are making the case that he is full of shit, please provide some actual evidence of his main thesis that AI companies are not going about this in any sustainable way

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PaulRobinsontoday at 4:27 PM

Can you provide evidence of where he's been wrong?

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NordStevetoday at 6:40 PM

Ed's not a crank, but you need to pay close attention to the topic of his proclamations to separate the wheat from the chaff.

He's right about some things -- off the top of my head:

-- OAI's perpetual fundraising, due to their losses

--Coreweave

--Circular financing

--Revenue/capex imbalance

...all forensic economics analyses.

He's often wrong when on the topic of capabilities and adoption -- he mistakes a snapshot for a trajectory, and treats current limitations as permanent:

--Hallucination/unreliability an unsolvable problem

--OpenAI failing

--AI capabilities have plateaued / models will stop getting better

--Saying Microsoft's cancelled leases meant the bubble was popping

--Agents a marketing fad

--Gross miscalculation of OAI 2025 revenue

--Lack of adoption

--AI not getting more efficient (compared to 10-40x reduction in inference costs YoY)

--Repeating "95% of pilots fail" but ignoring massive bottoms-up adoption

Christensen got this right when he had the insight to judge a technology by its rate of improvement relative to what a market needs, not by whether it's good enough today.

Put Zitron back at the early days of the integrated circuit and imagine what he would have written about the technology.

Some open predictions:

--Bubble is going to burst -- I tend to agree with the thesis that "there is some marginal capacity being planned/built today that will never pay back its capex"

--Losses mean there's no viable business here -- the recent moves by all of the players to some form of usage based pricing show there's price discovery occurring. I don't know of anyone who is stopping using LLMs because of the pricing changes...it's just changing their behavior.

Jackpillartoday at 4:23 PM

Let me guess, you disagree with his views on the utility of Ai (which he's pretty bad about) and you use that as cover and/or to negate his real journalism that is based in facts (Ai being an unprecedented & unrecoupable bubble littered with unprofitable companies thats likely to crash our economy unless these Ai conglomerates cozy up lawmakers to situate themselves for a bail out)

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6stringmerctoday at 7:03 PM

Okay, but what’s your counter argument to Jim Chanos? Oh, that’s right, you don’t have one because he’s a tried and true Wall Street heavy who speaks in plain English. Ed and Jim are on the same page looking at it through different sets of prescription glasses. I hope you have your money where your mouth is, so to speak, because I certainly do (avoiding AI trade) and good luck with the SNAP paperwork in two years.

dan_geetoday at 3:53 PM

Can you elaborate on what happened that made you look dumb?

Frickentoday at 4:10 PM

[flagged]

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