At this point I have yet to hear a solid argument against his arguments that use half as much evidence as he does.
That isn’t to say that he’s right, that’s just to say that while he gets creative in his phrasing numbers don’t lie and I haven’t seen anyone else present competing numbers that make sense.
If anyone has them to the degree with which he provides them then please, by all means, I’m interested.
Ya, there are already three pure ad hominem comments here with no examples. Zitron isn't even anti-AI per se. He clearly talks out his ass at times (like AI doesn't work for developers... which he's not saying so much anymore, I don't think) but his main talking points are around numbers and profitability.
As a C++ developer, AI does not work well for software development in my experience. Maybe LLM developer tools work better if you write React or HTML/CSS, but they have been inadequate for my use case since their arrival.
Casey Muratori, who doesn't use AI, made this point on a podcast. Specifically he said that he doesn't blame web developers for wanting to use AI because it's such a mess of an ecosystem and impossible to keep everything you need to know to be successful in your head.
I'm a web developer to myself who has done zero game or systems programming so I can't speak to that side of it, but you reminded me of it!
I find it bad for generating code but alright for review, I put it as a tool to run along static analysis to catch if I missed something on a code change or merge request (being specifically about C++)
> Ya, there are already three pure ad hominem comments here with no examples.
You should probably understand Thomas' comment in part as a reaction to Zitron attacking Thomas in a pretty low-brow fashion, essentially for saying "hey folks, AI coding works and you should be using it":
The bottom line is that Ed Zitron, like Gary Marcus, built their entire brand on being AI contrarians; they can't say anything positive about it without qualifying it with a more damning negative. There's nothing wrong about having voices like that, but it makes them unreliable narrators. I am apprehensive about AI and its externalities, but I don't want to be caught citing either of them for that reason.
I swear to Christ before this comment I had completely forgotten that Zitron had ever written anything about me. Zitron isn't an engineer and doesn't code, so I'm not all that het up by his attempt to rebut me.
> You should probably understand Thomas' comment in part as a reaction to Zitron attacking Thomas
Sure, but an ad hominem is still an ad hominem regardless of one's personal feelings (it took me a good minute to figure out who "Thomas" is).
Otherwise, I agree, and I try not to cite extremists or bullies on either side. I don't even really care that much about defending Zitron, but I do put him on in the background because he does so many podcasts as I find it soothing to listen to someone rant and rave against the tech bro overlords, even if some of the shit he says annoys me. But he does show his work sometimes and wanted to point that out.
You were just attacking his character without backing it up? Do I not know what an ad hominem is? If that's the case, then that's embarrassing for me. Unless you're saying that your remark doesn't technically bash his character?
Yeah, you're off on what an ad hominem is. I would dispute that I attacked his character at all, but that doesn't matter: an ad hominem isn't an "attack on character", it's an argument that is predicated on an unrelated character attack.
My argument here is just that Zitron says things that are wrong all the time.
You could fairly rebut me by saying I didn't substantiate that argument. That's true! That doesn't make the argument fallacious; it just means it isn't facially dispositive.
And I agree that he says things that are wrong much of the time, but not all the time. I also don't like him enough to care, but I do care enough to bring it up when I see multiple random attacks.
I don’t have numbers, but I would like to point out that he's missing a crucial number as well. The fact that maxing out a subscription's limit makes a user generate an amount of tokens that costs much more than the subscription itslef isn't enough to back his claim. What we need to know, is the average use of subscriptions. Think about Gyms. My gut feeling is that, if we run the numbers, we see that by maxing out a gym subscription we can get more value out of it than what we paid for. And still, gyms are profitable because the average customer is using less than what they're paying for. Now, I still think AI companies will have to rise their prices (they are already doing that), but the situation could be less dramatic than what people pointing at those figures based on subscription maxing are claiming.
You do really need to see the useage numbers for this. Movie pass famously thought they could price movie tickets like gym memberships - I assume they looked at how often the average person watched movies in theaters at the start - but then found out having a subscription to see movies for free / cheap any time you want changed that rate substantially and they ran out of vc money.
Having a subscription might make people run agents overnight, or casually generate images for fun, or start more coding projects. The reason gym memberships work is that people like the idea of going to the gym a lot but don't really enjoy actually doing it very much and fall off over time, leaving the gym for the rare person who's really into fitness to use it cheaply.
is AI like that where most users will get bored? or is it like movies where they'll try to get their money's worth?
> is AI like that where most users will get bored?
User's getting bored will also spell trouble for the subscription model. I don't think we'll see a world where the average normie is going to be running agents in a loop overnight to make software. They'll get bored use it to cheat on their homework and as a Google replacement, generate silly images for a week then get bored of that, and then realize the have no actual reason to be spending $100/month and drop down to a lower tier or just cancel all together and live within the free-tier limits.
So if that happens, the labs are now left only with power users that can actually generate asymmetric cost. The market will bifurcate into free-tier users and "get their money's worth" users. So the risk isn't that the top 5% of users use more tokens than the subscription has any right to give you, it's that everyone else cancels their plans and only those top 5% of users remain.
The labs will have to put stricter rate limiting and token limits on the subscription plans to avoid MoviePass style burn.
Gyms get away with it because most don't let you cancel easily. You pay monthly, but are locked in for 6 months or a 1 year at a time (Adobe subscription style). Maybe the labs will start to do the same? Let you pay $20/month, but you are forced into an annual commitment?
It could have worked if they weren't leveraged to their necks on spending. All based on the assumption that they can make something like 10x or higher in a few years.
Another point against your gym analogy. When people don't have that much disposable income why would they subscribe to something they semi regularly use? And if it becomes more expensive why would they not cancel it?
> Another point against your gym analogy. When people don't have that much disposable income why would they subscribe to something they semi regularly use? And if it becomes more expensive why would they not cancel it?
I don't see where the difference is with gym subscriptions here.
I gotta say that if their best bet is “people forget to use it” I don’t think that that’s going to drive the adoption they need.
Especially if part two of your theory comes to fruition and they have to raise prices. I might of forgotten my Netflix subscription when it was 10 dollars a month but certainly not if it was 200 you know?
You're biasing for quantity of argument vs. quality of argument. That's Zitron's MO: writing 10k word rambles that cover 20 topics, ostensibly with tons of links to sourcing, but with most of the sources not actually saying what Zitron implies they do.
Nobody has the patience to read a comprehensive point by point rebuttal to any of it, it's just too tedious.
You say "numbers don't lie". But they do, when the numbers being presented have been adversarially chosen. You just find numbers (no matter how low quality) that fit the chosen narrative, you throw out the numbers (no matter how high quality) that rebut it. If you're trying to predict the future, you can't afford that of bias. If you're an anti-AI grifter, you can't afford to not have that bias, your entire livelihood depends on only showing things that support the narrative.
So I’ve heard this argument before but I’ve not even seen someone demonstrate HOW the numbers are “adversarial”.
This is the crux of my argument: Zitron provides numbers and he provides a lot of them sourced from reliable and trustworthy sources. He provides counterarguments to numbers-sparse arguments by using even more actual, real numbers with a logical theory formed from them.
This should make it rather easy to dispute his claims, no? So then where are the equally rational disputes?
Some of his numbers are rebutted all the time. It doesn't matter, because he will just ignore the rebuttals and just keep repeating the invalid or irrelevant numbers. For example, a few months ago he did some bad math with a broken spreadsheet to prove that Anthropic's ARR numbers had to be incorrect. That was quickly rebutted[0], but Zitron continued repeating the argument anyway.
Just this article has a dozen instances of numbers being used to prop up the argument. They're mostly irrelevant to whatever argument Zitron is trying to make at the time. Some others are straight up misrepresentations. HN really is not a good forum for point by point rebuttals for that many cases. Do you think there's a particularly high impact use of numbers in this article?
I thought Ed Zitrons argument was just corroborated by Nikkei last Friday with the new report that 1.6 Trillion in SPVs accounts for off-books debt, on top of the $1.4 Trillion of on-books debt that's in these AI companies?
The main argument of Ed Zitron is just that. Huge huge amounts of debt that's due "soonish". Every SPV is different but we are fast approaching the point where this all starts to become real.
Now I dunno why Ed Zitron feels the need to write 10,000++++ word articles that only says "more leverage than people expect", but that's really the crux of things.
It all comes down to the fact that Zitron thinks these AI companies are over levered and have significant chances of collapsing industry wide.
Yeah he uses more words to say it and bad arguments as part of it. But so did Galileo's "The tides prove that the Earth is moving around the sun" argument. Some arguments are bad, even if the overall point was correct.
I think given the new Nikkei report from last week, we are seeing more and more of Ed Zitrons arguments bear fruit, after years (literally) of him calling wolf.
It all is crazy talk until real numbers come out and prove him correct. But it seems to take a long time for those numbers to materialize.
And I'm sure Galileo didn't like the idea of geocentrinism either for irrational reasons. Seriously, good enough telescopes havent been made yet and he's all confident etc. etc.
But Galileo was still had a useful framework for his criticisms despite all of his faults.
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I see Ed Zitron in virtually the same spot. Especially now that the SPVs thing is publicly confirmed by 3rd parties. I agree he made a bunch of shitty arguments over the years but Ed Zitron has seemingly stumbled upon something true and worth investigating now
Maybe what's become more public is the scale of these SPVs, but Matt Levine's writing makes it seem like a sensible thing to do given the $$$ amounts involved.
That's totally fair, I was saying that Zitron has not discovered anything new, he just seems to have latched on to the next thing that lets him harvest anti-AI sentiment.
What I meant by "sensible" is, if you were in the hyperscalers' shoes and wanted to spend a trillion dollars that you didn't have while minimizing your risks and it's all legal, why would you NOT engage in this kind of financial engineering?
(I know the answer is something like "to avoid a potential economic crash," but hey, we're playing Capitalism here!)
I don't have a direct opinion about Zitron's economic takes. I don't have a stake in that argument, I don't do financial planning for inference providers or training, I'm open to a variety of arguments, in either direction, about viability.
But I have direct subject-matter expertise with software engineering, and too much of what Zitron has to say about AI-mediated software development is clownish. Not wrong (everyone's wrong all the time), but literally risible. I can't get past that.
My thing is: there are smart people doing analysis with skeptical takes. Zitron gets cited because he has a business engine going revving people up and arming AI skeptics with (what I believe to be) Gish Gallup takes. It's profitable for him, and I don't begrudge him, but when people I otherwise respect cite Zitron it makes me sad: Zitron is going to make fools out of them. Cite better skeptics!
“Per my own analysis, NVIDIA’s predicted $1 trillion in Blackwell and Vera Rubin GPU sales (by the end of 2027) represents around 40GW of data center capacity, which will, assuming a PUE of 1.35, result in around 30GW of usable capacity. At a cost of around $12 million a megawatt, that works out to around *$435 billion in global annual compute revenue to make these data centers necessary.*“
> He's a college drop out with no experience in programming or technology.
I mean Zuckerberg is a drop out.
zitron has been around since before flash was dead, more over hes worked in PR so like anyone with heavy involvement with c-suite, sales and journalism, you get a good nose for bullshit.
That said, do I agree with his assertions? no not entirely. But. I suspect its a bit of an audience capture thing. He makes wild statements, then goes on a flight of fancy to back them up. I appreciate that, but it also lets me decide that he's going down a path that I feel is not backed up by his data.
"The biggest thing we’ve learned from the large language model generation is how many people are excited to replace human beings, and how many people just don’t understand labour of any kind"
Really? I think we've heard C-suite blabbermouths and borderline nontechnical tech CEOs being amplified by social media making these assertions, but boy did the weakly efficient market deliver a relatively swift correction to that mindset, no?
Q: "What would it take to change your point of view?"
A: "[AI] would have to solve all hallucinations forever, which they are completely incapable [of]."
Can you produce a human that is infallible? I'll wait.
My hot take is AI is increasingly less unprofitable as the cost of serving tokens drops and Nvidia's ongoing offers to guarantee profitability is a sign that it isn't stopping anytime soon.
You either believe in the underlying science and technology or you don't. But in a world where AI is a fad like cabbage patch kids and beanie babies, what's next?
> But in a world where AI is a fad like cabbage patch kids and beanie babies
AI will almost certainly not be a fad for software developers, or at the very least for web developers, but it's certainly possible that other industries will look back on "experimental AI days" and chuckle.
Even if there is a financial bubble (that pops), the technology is still not going away.
As for what's next, I dunno. I've heard people talking about similar tech that doesn't use neural nets/etc, but that is out of my wheelhouse.
The possibility of AI sticking around is apparently pretty threatening to the Zitron cult or what seemed like an innocuous response wouldn't be in such negative territory so quickly.
But I think AI is here to stay and it has already proven useful. And sure, we will look back on today's models like we look back upon Gordon Gekko and his giant early cell phone. And I cannot fathom how one can not separate AI the science and technology from AI tech bros and CEOs. I agree the latter are going to go through some things as the AGI fails to arrive on their schedule, but IMO there's no turning back on the technology nor should there be.
> But I think AI is here to stay and it has already proven useful.
Yes, I said as much. I've said this is two other places in this thread, but when they are talking AI being useful, they aren't just talking about for software development. The software industry is seeing far more AI adoption, by a very large margin, than any other industry, and the success of the current companies hinges on it being heavily adopted everywhere. I don't really care to defend Zitron because he does speak out of his lane far too much, especially when it comes to software, and those are the points the HN crowd latches onto. But that's not the bulk of what he talks about.
So then what is the deadline for AI reaching into all these new industries (or are you asserting it will never happen)? And you're right, technical people latch onto him sounding like a horse's ass on technical subjects and why shouldn't they? IMO this isn't the same as Elon's endless empty FSD promises (which I called out the whole danged time from the beginning FWIW), but I get why people assume it is, I just don't agree.
I didn't have a lot sympathy for the guy who described the Internet as a series of tubes yet I believe Al Gore caught far more flack for that bit about inventing the Internet than he deserved given the inventor of the Internet defended that very claim.
So if the bulk of what Zitron's talking about is valid, then what are the main points that aren't self-evident i.e. there's definitely either a buildout or a bubble in CapEx and only time will answer that question, not hot air and blatant market manipulation. What is he bringing to the conversation that we're all missing? Seriously, educate me.
Sorry, you're taking this up way too many notches for me to want to continue this convo. But as I said, I have no interested in defending Zitron in general, I made no claims about him being groundbreaking, and I don't even take him too seriously. I was responding to your points around AI's usefulness and how the discussion is almost always localized around "AI as a software development tool" here on HN. For me he's just a soothing counter-voice to the awful and inescapable hype and doomerism coming straight from the American AI companies themselves (as well as people I've been forced to interact with in the programming community). He does show numbers about why he thinks some of them aren't aren't going to survive. This is all speculative (not sure why I feel I have to say this but I feel I do).
> So then what is the deadline for AI reaching into all these new industries?
Obviously the "deadline" would before the US companies go bust (again, IF they do). And I'm confused about your use of "new" here but I'm going to assume you mean "other existing industries that haven't adopted yet." The discussions around this are that several industries already jumped on AI then walked it back, so it's more that we're already past the "reaching in" stage. I don't have links for you but there have been several articles about companies firing people "because AI" then hiring them back. I suppose AI drive-thru order takers would work as another example. Again, I don't have the numbers on this myself. And again-again, none of this is "in defence of Ed Zitron" or "this is why Ed Zitron is great" or any such thing, but these are the things he talks about (and once again, no, it's nothing groundbreaking).
So saying you like his vibes and feels is cool, thanks, genuinely. FWIW I avoid AI shills and doomers myself and focus on developing my skills working with the technology. The comp for that doesn't suck either.
That, and he has numbers to back up the possible downfall. My issue with AI is how it's used in art and content generation. I resisted it for code for a while, but eventually came around.
> FWIW I avoid AI shills and doomers myself and focus on developing my skills working with the technology.
I did a bit of that but I'm no longer employed and have been taking a break from programming for a few months.
Those sorts of numbers apply to the common folk like you and me IMO.
They do not apply to the billionaire class. They just don't. The CapEx play either pays out when the buildout is justified or it soft lands for them with a bailout like we just saw NVDA do today with OpenAI. No matter what, in the end, we'll be holding any bar tab in our retirement accounts if they're being "managed." How many times must this game play out for the unchanging outcome to settle in?
What I do think is that datacenters will now end up in other less-regulated countries just like California's plastic "recycling" ends up getting burned as garbage in the third world. So there's that I guess.
> Those sorts of numbers apply to the common folk like you and me IMO.
Oh, I understand that. I'm not American, but I know I will still be affected if this all goes bust. I'm not in the best state of mind right now, though, and the thought of everything burning to the ground isn't really concerning me.
Also, interesting article. I was aware about plastics getting shipped to other countries but had no idea they were starting to refuse.
So like I said, he's feeding you what you want to hear at this moment in your life. And I think a lot of people in the west feel similarly so it's viralAF. And even if it busts, your corrupt politicos can only let you suffer so much before the pitchforks and rope emerge so it will be contained. 2008 sucked and the failure to clean it up and punish the guilty is the road to 2026, but even now, AI is a well compensated skill in an age of agents that isn't that hard to pick up after you've processed whatever is going on with you.
I don't think the AGI is nigh, it may even be far, but there was an article today that demonstrated something close to the path I've long believed AI will take into industry and it scares the Bejesus out of Anthropic and OpenAI because it reduces them to glorified neoclouds in the long run if one can replicate this process with open weight models. And oh no, Dario Amodei and his ilk will have to settle for being centi-millionaires. Tragic.
> So like I said, he's feeding you what you want to hear at this moment in your life.
Yep! I'm a pretty self-aware dude, I like to think :)
The YouTuber I actually pay attention to is House of El who is an up-and-comer, doesn't pander to either side of the debate, and is very pro-AI software engineer. She also shows her work.
> 2008 sucked and the failure to clean it up and punish the guilty is the road to 2026
I'm in Canada which was not hit as hard but ya, I hope your next administration actually holds the guilty accountable. Though I've seen people loudly argue that will result in an endless war of retaliation? Honestly, I only started paying real attention to American politics in January 2025.
> I don't think the AGI is nigh, it may even be far
Not according to Sam Altman as of today! Just in the nick of time too when the cheap Chinese models showed up! What luck! XD
I have not yet read the article you shared but have it opened in a tab for later. Probably should have waited to respond until later but trying to reduce my screen time today.
That isn’t to say that he’s right, that’s just to say that while he gets creative in his phrasing numbers don’t lie and I haven’t seen anyone else present competing numbers that make sense.
If anyone has them to the degree with which he provides them then please, by all means, I’m interested.