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Comment by overgard | Hacker News Reader

Ed actually provides sources and goes into an incredible amount of detail as to how he came to his conclusions. The average AI booster just goes "I totally built ten businesses off vibe coding but I can't tell you anything because it's a SECRET!". And the mainstream tech media is so in the pocket of big tech and AI corporations that they might as well just publish their PR emails at this point. Yeah, I'll listen to Ed thank you very much.

I think it's telling that most critics don't address his actual points, but instead his credibility because he's a "hater".

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Ed actually seems to make some really serious errors in his work. Tim Lee called out a particularly egregious one here, though it's one of many: https://x.com/binarybits/status/2050562429709377986

That said, I really mean it when I say that I don't actually think Ed is a good choice for the anti-AI movement. I think an actual opposition is useful, but he ain't it.

I really recommend you read the Wired profile if you haven't yet and form your own opinion: https://www.wired.com/story/ai-pr-ed-zitron-profile/

I read the profile and didn't see anything really wrong. Why would PR companies have to believe in their clients? Why does he have to be held to higher moral standards than Sam Altman who’s a total lying snake?

The error you call out is hardly “serious”, as the whole argument is uninteresting. It is a stupid indefensible error but the argument about revenue being 20% or 30% lower than reported isn’t that central to his overall thesis. Stuff that matters is inference cost, profitability, actual training costs.

It's an interesting profile, but I don't see why it would change my opinion of him. I already knew he works in PR, it's not like a thing he hides. I don't think one error in a spreadsheet really proves anything (plus he's pretty honest about being an amateur at financial analysis -- but most of what he's looking at is pretty basic math and it's baffling that nobody has an answer to his pretty straightforward questions of how-will-this-ever-make-money)

I guess like, I don't know about an anti-ai "movement", personally I like AI-the-product but I think AI-the-industry is extremely sketchy and has motivations that I think are awful. As with all technology revolutions, my issue is more with the people than the technology itself.

I don't really like how this whole thing has become "pro ai" vs "anti ai" though. For me, I'm just really irritated when I use AI every day, I'm a professional software developer, and all my experiences with it do not match the (very annoying) hype. I kind of wish we could just go back to talking about software engineering and if people like vibe coding, great, go do that and stop all the annoying think pieces that just give CEO's even worse AI psychosis.

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