With barrage of pro-ai content, I like to add some opposing views to my watch/read queue. Ed comes up a lot with comments on the other side, but after watching him once or twice I have lost any interest in his view as he seems to basically just be AI bashing rather than providing good counter arguments to the more bombastic points.
It's a shame that middle-of-the-road, reasonable takes don't seem to cut through to the public's attention. I would love to see someone popular enough and sensible enough advocating for a measured approach to the rollout of new tech and an approach to manage the risks and capture the opportunities.
Is AI transformational and can it impact 'most' white-collar jobs? YES. Is it going to leave us all without jobs? 'Likely' NO, but it's worth assessing and preparing for if it does...
I truly feel like our system of laws and government is failing us in providing a rapid response and guardrails to safeguard the public from new and rapidly advancing tech. The advancement of tech seems to be accelerating while our approach to responding to it properly has not really kept up. Things like microtransactions, BNPL, AI, ridesharing, prediction markets etc. have all been able to perform a form of regulatory arbitrage and have been a vast net negative to some segments of society (mostly those that need the most help and support), yet it takes years to implement the most basic of protections.
Something Big Is Happening - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46973011 - Feb 2026 (73 comments)
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Ummm. Yeah, no. This actually works. No idea why bozos who obviously don't use the tools write about how the tools don't do this or that. Yes they do. I know because I use them. Today's best agentic harnesses can absolutely do all of the above. Not perfect by any means, not every time, but enough to be useful to me. As some people say "stop larping". If you don't know how a tool works, or what it can do, why the hell would you comment on something so authoritatively? This is very bad.
(I'll make a note that the original article was written by a 100% certified grifter. I happened to be online on llocallama when that whole debacle happened. He's a quack. No doubt about it. But from the quote I just pasted, so is the commenter. Qwaks commenting on qwacks. This is so futile)
The original article is also silly, as you say. It's just two tiresome cranks barking at each other. (Though I think I find Zitron's commentary less tethered to reality than what it's critiquing. Hypomanic exaggeration vs. deeply incurious pedantic skepticism.)
1) faking benchmarks and lying about a model he profited from commercially (ie. fraud)
2) implying that only a few people (like himself) saw COVID coming. This is a lie: it was the New York Times that published a huge article on the coronavirus at the time indicated, and he, of course, didn't see it coming
3) he doesn't just fail to disclose his commercial interests in what he's peddling, he denies them
4) he confidently states that AI builds the next generation of AI, which he can't know, and has not been stated anywhere
The list goes on.
> implying that only a few people (like himself) saw COVID coming
Nowhere does the post imply this. The post says COVID was an exponential curve, and he thinks that AI is a similar curve. There is nothing in there saying that only he was the one to see this. The comment, and you, are responding to a sentiment that doesn't exist in the document.
> he confidently states that AI builds the next generation of AI, which he can't know
Anthropic reports 55% of engineers use Claude for debugging on a daily basis in December[1]. I am not sure how you come to the conclusion that "has not been stated anywhere".
I would respond to your other points but I feel like these are so thoroughly incorrect that I should probably stop here.
[1] https://www.anthropic.com/research/how-ai-is-transforming-wo...
The post is silly, but I do not expect Zitron's commentary to be particularly illuminating as he is a charlatan himself. I could point to many examples, but here is a blog post I wrote about one case of him trying very hard to not understand a simple and familiar situation: https://crespo.business/posts/cost-of-inference/.
What's the evidence for that?
I still fear for what AI training will cost (financially and ecologically). The outputs also seem like a force multiplier that's more likely to be used for bad than good, at least without better guardrails. And it doesn't seem to make people any better, aside from a narrow view of productivity.
Hopefully Ed is wrong. Or at least there are more articulate and methodical skeptics who can keep us grounded.
This could be said about almost any new technology. Spreadsheets, word processors, nearly any tech startup.
People who use LLMs daily generally feel their lives are better because of them. Yes, including the non-"4o cultist psychosis" types.
As for harms: thoughtful AI worriers and doomers have been trying to sound those alarms for decades, but AI skeptics generally shoot it all down because it would require accepting what "hype" and "boosters" say about likely future capabilities, or something like that.
Note the date, then imagine this take repeated every single month up to now: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-a-i-bubble-is-burs...
Not to say all AI skepticism (especially concerning very short timelines) is necessarily unwarranted, but Zitron and Marcus are just professional contrarians selling a message to people who want their biases and priors affirmed.
If the prediction is "there will be a recession within the next 20 years", then, okay. If it's https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-a-i-bubble-is-burs... every single month...
I do know that Suleyman, Altman, and Amodei have lied, lied, and lied repeatedly, whether intentional or not.
For that matter, I do not believe AGI will happen in our lifetimes. https://timdettmers.com/2025/12/10/why-agi-will-not-happen/