Ed Zitron might be too dismissive of the potential of LLMs but he seems to be the only popular journalist holding the companies accountable for wonky reports on their profitability.
I don't consider him a journalist that I would listen to ever.
Posting this nice list of his failed predictions and bad analysis someone put together: https://danluu.com/zitron/
I think he's a broken clock that's right twice a day.
Wouldn't a "correction" be something _all_ AI users (not producers!) celebrate though? That would mean cheaper hardware and access to open models. The dotcom bubble keeps being compared, and the present we have now is a result of that post-dotcom bubble!
So I don't understand why there's fear and disagreement over a correction. Both sides should welcome it as there is some benefit to everyone. Well, most of everyone.
The sensibility remains intact when you’re not a shareholder.
He is totally uninformed about even basic progress in the performance of these models. Seems like used free ChatGPT in 2022 and never updated once.
Though, as time goes on I am increasingly sympathetic to Zitron's take on the potential of LLMs. Because 4 years later it's still just a potential that's perpetually around the corner. Most people I know in meatspace use it rarely, and, outside of coding, the ones who are expected to use it at work tend to resent it.
I'm not sure if I can express how different the dot com boom era was to someone who didn't live through it. America Online kindasorta brought the Web to everyday people's homes around about the beginning of 1995, except that at that time everyday people didn't necessarily even have computers at home. Four years later we were almost living in a different world. Darn near every college student had a computer connected to the Internet in their dorm room. Every office worker had a computer on their desk and conducted at least some of their work in a Web browser. My grandmother was trying to chat me up on instant messages so many times per day that it was starting to get annoying.
It really was quite remarkable. Compared to it, the AI "boom" has been more like a wet diaper fart.