Zitron: "Everyone Has Been Sold a Lie" on AI(www.youtube.com)
50 pointsby tcp_handshaker8 hours ago6 comments
  • ikidd6 hours ago
    I don't think Zitron has been right about anything in the last 5 years. But he talks a good talk.
    • piloto_ciego3 hours ago
      I cannot understand why people listen to him? I feel like I must be living in an alternate universe to a substantial amount of people? It's bananas...
  • tolugenius7 hours ago
    I don't fully agree with Zitron on all his points but it's very hard to disprove the larger points will somehow resolve themselves. One point that I think will determine the future, moreso with data centers, is politics. Laws are not unchangeable and making decisions that determine the next 5-10 years of action based on the current law is a recipe for disaster. "Buying" a politician still has to account for the fact they can be voted out.
    • perpetuallunch7 hours ago
      > making decisions that determine the next 5-10 years of action based on the current law is a recipe for disaster.

      How else can one make business decisions? Or any long term decision, financial or otherwise.

      If you are correct, which I fear you may be, then we, in the West generally, are now living in a low trust society.

      Which is not a good thing at all, and should be of utmost concern.

      • DanHulton5 hours ago
        I feel like it’s been understood that we live in a low trust society for a while now. If not for all of us, at least for a LOT of us.
      • HWR_145 hours ago
        In a newly evolving situation, you have to assume that it's possible that the laws will change. Typically the way you account for this is hedging or keeping reserves to adapt.
      • toomuchtodo7 hours ago
        Let us assume a person cannot change society, they simply do not have the leverage, even if they are a billionaire or most politicians. This is a systems problem, requiring enormous investment of time and resources to change trajectories of. Therefore, the choices available are to continue to live in a low trust society, or move to a high trust society and minimize your exposure to low trust society impact on your life. It's unfortunate. I would very much like to be wrong, please correct me if I am mistaken.

        https://www.visualcapitalist.com/mapped-where-people-trust-e...

        https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/self-reported-trust-attit...

        • landedgentry6 hours ago
          This data conflicts with my image of Japan and China, and I wonder where the discrepancy lies.
          • perpetuallunch2 hours ago
            The propagandised idea that living in China means living under an oppressive communist regime, runs counter to the countries wild success at pretty much everything it does.
            • landedgentryan hour ago
              I don't think success directly translates into high trust.

              I think of China as a hypercompetitive place, which to me should mean lower trust.

          • toomuchtodo6 hours ago
            I cannot speak to China, but my recent personal experience is that Japan is high trust throughout Tokyo, Kyoto, and Osaka. Would love to hear about the trust situation in China from anywhere who has recent ground truth.
  • sublinear7 hours ago
    Even if we don't consider economics, the reason "AI" has not increased white collar productivity is because it's not necessary for knowledge work beyond aggregating information for research. Knowledge work has always been a lot more arguing than "doing".

    Google was already the default option for this, and Google Gemini is a genuine improvement for Google Search. Google (and Apple) have sidestepped all the drama by just improving their existing products. Sometimes that's the right call in the shorter term, and this is one of those times.

    • jay_kyburz7 hours ago
      Yes, and the scary thing is, when Google starts selling ads in Gemini results, you wont be able to see them, it will be a bigger business that Google Search ever was.

      Update: Perhaps this is what Zitron doesn't want to say out loud, (and why investors are confused), the return on investment is going to come from having the largest mind control machine the world has even known.

      • flextheruler6 hours ago
        There's just no easy way to see what makes LLMs able to duplicate the profits of the entire existing tech sector of the economy. This is the return they need to make based on what they're currently expensing and projecting. Couple that with the circular financing agreements and it's just preposterous. Zitron may have been first and most outspoken to this argument, but like all bubbles it's an open secret.
        • HWR_145 hours ago
          LLM advertising consuming all current advertising dollars plus more is realistic. That's a solid chunk of the entire tech center it eats right there.
      • sublinearan hour ago
        > the return on investment is going to come from having the largest mind control machine the world has even known

        This is what Google already was and continues to be. They didn't need OpenAI and Anthropic as foils to maintain that position or expand Google Cloud. If anything, they did all this work with Gemini despite what's happening on the sidelines.

        OpenAI secured their multinational defense contract with Project Stargate. I can easily see the extremely high demand to get rid of so many contractors with security clearances. No government believes that the risk of another Snowden-like whistleblower is worth the mediocre intelligence summaries.

        The loser will be Anthropic unless Microsoft buys them out for a lowball price at the last minute in an attempt to make Copilot less terrible. For everyone else, it's business as usual.

  • periodjet5 hours ago
    Only a person who does no actual work could hold this opinion.
  • jxy64 hours ago
    The chimp brain cant handle unpredictability for too long. Just keep pushing people into unpredictable situations or specifically try getting someone to say I dont know constantly. Beyond a point story generation starts, to feel sane within an "I dont know" reality.

    Truth is things are unpredictable. Predictability of anything hasnt increased.

    Stories/Lies exist for cope. Cause of chimp brain dynamics responding to unpredictability.

  • jay_kyburz7 hours ago
    So right towards the end Zitron says it isn't clear what Google, MS and Amazons plan is. But he just finished explaining that Anthropic and Open AI are paying for them to build data centers, and implied that on face value, this was to rent the data centers back to Anthropic and Open AI.

    Seems to me they are just bleeding them dry so that when the money runs out for Anthropic and Open AI, they will be left with data centers that the can run their own (or open) models.

    • dd8601fn5 hours ago
      His follow-up point was, "that seems like a ridiculously nice double-dipping situation" until you realize that money depends on only two "unsustainable" customers, spending other people's money, that now have to become absurdly massive to ever make this work.
    • Driver47327 hours ago
      If you read more of Zitron's work, he says that there's little demand for the AI compute power outside of OpenAI and Anthropic. If they are bled dry, then the hyperscalers will not have enough customers for the data centers which they have blown so much capex spend on and will have to soon go into debt to ensure they can be built. The GPUs and the high bandwidth memory they use have little use other than to run and train these LLMs.
      • jay_kyburz5 hours ago
        > little demand for the AI compute power outside of OpenAI and Anthropic.

        I think every other business is going to slowly wake up to how powerful machine learning can be, and or, how important it will be to run your own models you can trust.

        I don't doubt that there is a bubble, but once the hardware is built, there will be plenty of customers.

        I guess if you overpay for hardware, you can be undercut by data centers built after the bubble pops, but that might just mean your return on investment is slower.

        • Driver47323 hours ago
          I don't think so. AI is a general purpose tech and you have many companies still doing discoveries on how to apply the technology in a useful way. It's an expensive solution in search of a problem. Not to mention no one wants to pay the actual cost of what it takes to deliver the technology. The whole business model is unsustainable.
        • jay_kyburz5 hours ago
          Go have a look at that Seedance thread. Movies and TV will be completely AI in the future.
      • bdangubic6 hours ago
        and he wrong on all of those accounts. but he’s got the best gig, he has been writing literally one same article for years, gets LLM to shuffle the words and publishes it under a different title :)
        • jsnell2 hours ago
          Now, now, let's be fair. I don't think LLMs are used for writing or editing the articles in any way.

          (Each reader can decide themselves whether what you wrote is unfair to Zitron or to LLMs.)

    • JoeAltmaier7 hours ago
      Another view of that is, hedging their bets. Which businesses do all the time.