His history of predictions about LLMs is not great and he generally seems ideologically committed to pretending they're almost useless and teetering on the edge of collapse.

For example, this article claims: "Every single story you’ve read about the “incredible growth” of these cloud platforms is an embarrassing misread of three companies that are misleading investors that will more than likely be forced in the next year or two to have to restate revenues, cut remaining performance obligations, and admit that they’ve drastically overbuilt capacity. "

In july 2024, Zitron wrote at length about how the economics of OpenAI were likely to collapse in the next 1 to 2 years [1].

It seems like the nearly inevitable collapse of generative AI is always 1 to 2 years away, but it's just the details of the intricate financial argument that change.

[1]: https://www.wheresyoured.at/to-serve-altman/

He's the Gary Marcus for this stage of the popularized denial.

He has been on the topic since a while, and has been recently picking up steam as the discourse on AI sustainability is shifting. But he’s not alone at all, quite a lot of economists have been discussing the exact same points he makes. He’s mostly gathering information and publishing

In order to be invited on TV you must be entertaining first. You don't have to be correct in order to appear more times.

Personally I'm of the mindset that the current AI prices are too rich and that AI is very useful. Much like high speed internet in 2000. The prices were too high but the services themselves are great.

I think it's mostly that he's a vocal critic of AI/big tech at a time when much of the public is anti-AI and anti-big-tech, so his message is resonating with people and he's popular.

There’s also Michael Burry and Gary Marcus, and you can sort of infer Warren Buffett believes the market is frothy

> 'm curious why there are not more people like him voicing their concerns.

I have seen such people - notably Jim Chanos.

But, Zitron was vocal at the time where fawning over AI companies was basically mandatory everywhere else. He was the one bringing in numbers and, well, passion rather then fear when arguing that point.

On security, Brucr Schneier was also calling AI threat claims overblown repeatedly.

There is a lot of demand for AI denial, but nearly everybody who is capable of writing even semi-coherently on the topic recognizes AI denial in general as cope, and has too much moral dignity to propogate their coping denial for personal gain.

So the ~one guy who doesn't gets around.