#ed zitron

[mostlysignssomeportents]

"Spending money makes a CEO look busy. And at a time when there were no other potential growth avenues, AI was a convenient way to make everybody look busy."

-Ed Zitron, "NVIDIA Isn't Enron - So What Is It?"

[river-taxbird]

AI hasn't improved in 18 months. It's likely that this is it. There is currently no evidence the capabilities of ChatGPT will ever improve. It's time for AI companies to put up or shut up.

I'm just re-iterating this excellent post from Ed Zitron, but it's not left my head since I read it and I want to share it. I'm also taking some talking points from Ed's other posts. So basically:

We keep hearing AI is going to get better and better, but these promises seem to be coming from a mix of companies engaging in wild speculation and lying.

Chatgpt, the industry leading large language model, has not materially improved in 18 months. For something that claims to be getting exponentially better, it sure is the same shit.

Hallucinations appear to be an inherent aspect of the technology. Since it's based on statistics and ai doesn't know anything, it can never know what is true. How could I possibly trust it to get any real work done if I can't rely on it's output? If I have to fact check everything it says I might as well do the work myself.

For "real" ai that does know what is true to exist, it would require us to discover new concepts in psychology, math, and computing, which open ai is not working on, and seemingly no other ai companies are either.

Open ai has already seemingly slurped up all the data from the open web already. Chatgpt 5 would take 5x more training data than chatgpt 4 to train. Where is this data coming from, exactly?

Since improvement appears to have ground to a halt, what if this is it? What if Chatgpt 4 is as good as LLMs can ever be? What use is it?

As Jim Covello, a leading semiconductor analyst at Goldman Sachs said (on page 10, and that's big finance so you know they only care about money): if tech companies are spending a trillion dollars to build up the infrastructure to support ai, what trillion dollar problem is it meant to solve? AI companies have a unique talent for burning venture capital and it's unclear if Open AI will be able to survive more than a few years unless everyone suddenly adopts it all at once. (Hey, didn't crypto and the metaverse also require spontaneous mass adoption to make sense?)

There is no problem that current ai is a solution to. Consumer tech is basically solved, normal people don't need more tech than a laptop and a smartphone. Big tech have run out of innovations, and they are desperately looking for the next thing to sell. It happened with the metaverse and it's happening again.

In summary:

Ai hasn't materially improved since the launch of Chatgpt4, which wasn't that big of an upgrade to 3.

There is currently no technological roadmap for ai to become better than it is. (As Jim Covello said on the Goldman Sachs report, the evolution of smartphones was openly planned years ahead of time.) The current problems are inherent to the current technology and nobody has indicated there is any way to solve them in the pipeline. We have likely reached the limits of what LLMs can do, and they still can't do much.

Don't believe AI companies when they say things are going to improve from where they are now before they provide evidence. It's time for the AI shills to put up, or shut up.

[leona-florianova]

Opening bluesky every day for past few months only to check what Ed Zitron has to say about AI... I want to know all the finance numbers that tech bros really hate to hear... Its the good shit, and it actually makes some of them think. Not the environment stuff... but the discrepancy between how much they pay for the services now, and how much they would have to pay for them to actually make it profitable for the companies. And how will that actually work in the long run.

[lilithsaintcrow]

"No bailouts, no handouts, no special treatment, no tax breaks, no CHIPS act, and no sovereign wealth fund. It is time to tell the AI industry to go fuck itself, because it’s effectively done the same to the rest of society."

Let AI Burn

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[depsidase]

[certified-anti-microsoft-posts]

By the way. If you like my blog, If you hate AI, and you are curious about why the hell every company on earth is dead set on destroying themselves and their profit margins on shoving it into the faces of an unhappy customer base then you should read Ed Zitrons newsletter!

Ed Zitron's Where's Your Ed At

The Words of Ed Zitron, a PR person and writer.

(most of the pieces are paid, but the free ones are also excellent, and I've found the small price of subscribing to be worth it)

Most everything about the AI bubble I've learned from these newsletters. And even more worthwhile is that they're written with the non-technical person in mind. Fair warning, it will make you mad. This bubble is stupid and insane. But if you're already mad and want to know more beyond the gut feeling that "all of this is bad and I can't quite articulate why", then I can't recommend Ed more highly. He's been covering this era of insanity since 2021, and also, you get to read headers like this one:

(this is an excerpt from his most recent paid newsletter btw, it's excellent)

If you want a good place to start, here's some of the free newsletters you can read today:

The Case Against Generative AI

How to Argue With an AI Booster

The Hater's Guide to the AI Bubble

Happy reading! And stay mad at Microsoft. They've done a lot to deserve it

[monetizeme]

actual slides from a SoftBank shareholder presentation by 69 year old CEO Masayoshi Son

link to the real softbank presentation

link to a hilarious thread about it from ed zitron on bluesky

[thatstormygeek]

This flimsy, half-assed logic is how the AI bubble got inflated in the first place. Supposedly smart people continually show a total lack of awareness of how jobs work at basically every level

The last few years of AI hype have been built on lies. Every company has conspired to make you think that AI is affordable and sustainable, that profitability was possible, that hallucinations were fixable, and that any problems you faced today were a result of being in “the early innings.” In reality, the AI industry has absorbed over a trillion dollars, effectively all tech talent, the majority of startup funding, the majority of media coverage, the art and work of millions of people, and been given chance after chance after chance to fix the obvious, glaring issues.  ... Four years and a trillion dollars in, AI is more expensive, its companies more cash-intensive, its products just as unreliable, and its boosters more desperate than ever to make you ignore reality as a means of empowering one of a few ultra-rich oafs.

AI Doesn't Have ROI

If you liked this piece, you should subscribe to my premium newsletter. It’s $70 a year, or $7 a month, and in return you get a weekly newsl

An AI data center full of AI GPUs is useful for AI and very little else. There are GPU-powered analytics tools, GPU-powered modeling and scientific applications, but the nature of GPUs — good at doing the same thing across big data sets in parallel, but bad at handling many little independent tasks — makes them impractical for most of what modern computing demands. The entire Dot Com Redemption storyline comes from the idea that it “left behind useful infrastructure,” by which they mean “cabling that allowed hundreds of millions of people to use the internet.” While there was some amount of further construction and capex to handle, the end result was useful fiber that connected people with a faster connection at a lower cost. No such story exists for AI.