Ed Zitron might be too dismissive of the potential of LLMs but he seems to be the only popular journalist holding the companies accountable for wonky reports on their profitability.
I'm not sure if I can express how different the dot com boom era was to someone who didn't live through it. America Online kindasorta brought the Web to everyday people's homes around about the beginning of 1995, except that at that time everyday people didn't necessarily even have computers at home. Four years later we were almost living in a different world. Darn near every college student had a computer connected to the Internet in their dorm room. Every office worker had a computer on their desk and conducted at least some of their work in a Web browser. My grandmother was trying to chat me up on instant messages so many times per day that it was starting to get annoying.
It really was quite remarkable. Compared to it, the AI "boom" has been more like a wet diaper fart.
And the population at large really resents it. I have not talked to a person under the age of 30 and outside of tech who has anything good to say about AI. That's a group that doesn't vote very reliably but if AI concerns motivate them to do so, they could have an overwhelming impact.
I don’t know if/when AI will ever become indispensable to normies but it’s clearly making a difference in fields that are highly technical.
The elephant in the room here is that these discussions are still happening at all. In 1999 there was no question of whether the web was going to completely reshape the world, because it already had.
I think we're probably more in the early nineties for AI, rather than the late nineties where everyone (for certain values) is getting some value from it.
The tech is definitely going to have a large impact, but the inherent limitations of it (stochastic and expensive) means that we'll need a bunch of downstream tools and deterministic software to make the most of it.
Which means that a lot of "value" is gonna get vaporised before we reach that point.
In '93 people were still complaining that computers weren't bringing in productivity improvements (Solow paradox):
> You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.
The big change is that we now (due to the internet and interconnectedness of everyone) learn about the technology much faster than before.
But diffusion through business and population still takes time. Especially if there's a hardware crunch that acts as a brake.
I lived through the dotcom boom era (went online in '93 or so). If you can't compare that change to the magical science fiction we're living through (I can press a button, speak to my computer and tell it to build me a 3d game, then play through it 15 minutes later), I beg to differ.
(edit to add: not to mention the existential crisis many artists, developers and mathematicians are going through right now...dotcom was nowhere near that in terms of psychological impact)
Future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed (also said in '93, and I believe it's applicable again).
Posting this nice list of his failed predictions and bad analysis someone put together: https://danluu.com/zitron/
I think he's a broken clock that's right twice a day.
What Dan Luu is doing with that post is an act of misdirection (if not clumsy attempt at character assassination): avoiding the entirety of Zitron’s numbers and analysis (which can’t be refuted) and instead narrowly focusing on “predictions” that one can spin a hundred different ways.
If that’s convincing to the extent that you are dismissing Zitron’s numbers and analysis, you have a major critical thinking problem.
I like both Ed and Dan (for very different reasons), but I note that the financial side isn't really covered by Dan, and that's probably where Ed has been strongest (to the extent that much of the rest of the financial world is now picking up on it).
So I don't understand why there's fear and disagreement over a correction. Both sides should welcome it as there is some benefit to everyone. Well, most of everyone.
Not only is he not a shareholder, but based on his opinions, he clearly isn't a user of modern models either. Somehow he still thinks they are party tricks and that "They will never be AGI," with no elaboration on _why_ they _can't_ be AGI, and why that actually matters for these companies (hint: it doesn't really matter much. As it turns out, you could replace a lot of humans with a modern LLM and have a reasonable comparative advantage in doing so, even though the models are ostensibly not "AGI.").
His predictions have also historically just been bad (https://danluu.com/zitron/). Even AI 2027, which is basically semi-fictional, is more accurate and worth paying more attention to than this guy. And the superforecaseters which actually made AI 2027 and actual futurists are generally higher signal.
There's other avenues which are probably needed to make the cohesive AGI picture come true, such as World Models. Simply learning from text and being able to generate language is not, in my mind, the end-all-be-all for intelligence.
There are a bunch of ways that AI the technology could be massivly successful, while AI the industry crashes.
As I noted upthread, those predictions don't cover the financial side, which is where a lot of the issues currently are.
Like, LLMs/AI are definitely going to have large impacts, but those impacts will take a long time to materialise (outside of software, and even there we'll need much better tools to make good use of agents), and the financial investment are predicated on near-term returns from the tech that seem wildly implausible to me (and others).
The bunch of crypto miners getting multiple billion dollar valuations should be a clue here that all is probably not well.
And fundamentally, I don't see model building as a very good business. It's incredibly expensive, and it's hard to maintain the margin in a very competitive space. This is probably good for the world, but very bad for the investors into these model companies.
To me the AI stuff is scarily good now, don't see many software jobs holding up for long and other fields will follow, and he might be right about the financials but it doesn't change anything to me the AI is here, getting better and better and is going to take our jobs.
He is arguing financials and companies failing, but his followers see it as AI sucks and is all hype and nothing to worry about.
Idgaf if model building is profitable, the genie is t going back in the bottle and hoping it back in is definitely not the solution
They'll definitely change, but I'd be really surprised if people stopped hiring software engineers/product/data people.
The agents are useful to the extent that you can sense-check them, and that's a big part of what the humans do in this loop.
> the AI is here, getting better and better and is going to take our jobs
As above, I feel it probably won't take software jobs, but the situation in the rest of the economy is far worse. The labs simply cannot get the kind of data that they would need to train the models to do this.
Barring super-intelligence (which I'm not even sure is a coherent construct), I don't see how that happens.
Loads of stuff is gonna change, but it'll take longer than a lot of people around here expect (rather like the Internet did change the world, but the dot com bubble was still a bubble).