alt Hacker NewsHis 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.
Replies
>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].
One of my clearest memories of the first tech bubble was of a number of people who accurately identified that it WAS a bubble and then predicted it would go pop 12-18 months before it did.
They attracted plenty of scorn and derision for being 80% right from people who were 100% wrong.
Some also lost a bunch of money - short selling really explodes in your face if you time it badly. It's not enough to know that it is a bubble, you have to be able to know when market sentiment will finally turn which is a gigantic gamble.
He said:
> I am hypothesizing that for OpenAI to survive for longer than two years, it will have to (in no particular order):
And listed various things like a technological breakthrough or more fundraising. I would bet he’s right that they’ll fundraise by the end of the year if they can’t IPO and pass the bag to retail investors.
What the AI bulls don’t seem to understand is that AI could be a great technological achievement AND an impending economic collapse because the valuations of these companies are absurd, basically requiring them to fulfill 10% of the country’s GDP within the next couple years. The achievements are impressive but vastly outpaced by the mania.