Inverse Zitron: An Investment Strategy | Hacker News Reader

Inverse Zitron: An Investment Strategy

chalmovsky.com

13 pointschalmovsky21 comments

Ed will get his 15 minutes of fame when the market finally corrects. But he'll still be completely wrong. It's hilarious how outdated his views on AI are. He literally doesn't know what people are using it for. He seems to have no clue that 50% of radiology and medical imaging labs in the US now heavily utilize AI. 40% of dental practices in the US are currently utilizing AI. Programming went the complete paradigm shift at least 18 months ago, and this buffoon still thinks it's vibe coding.

Models being capable is orthogonal to trillions of capital being incinerated.

Nasdaq 100 is down over $2.7T over the last month, so far. Still further to go. There are simply not enough earnings materializing to support the capital that has been invested. Google lost $500B in value over the last week because AI overviews, that don’t generate revenue, were cannibalizing search.

OpenAI has cut its funding target by $10B due to lack of enthusiasm by investors. Certainly, if you think AI is going to capture trillions of dollars of value, I encourage you to try to catch the falling knife. Radiologists won’t be replaced, dentists won’t be replaced, AI will get baked into their EHR or line of business app as a commodity. There will be efficiency gains, but not a revolution.

Al Enthusiasm Is Collapsing and Tech Earnings Just Made It Worse - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-10-31/ai-enthus... - October 31st, 2026

Tech Selloff Burns Al Dip-Buyers as Sector Slides for Third Week - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-10-30/ai-dip-bu... - October 30th, 2026

Gartner Survey Finds Only 13% of CIOs Say Their Enterprise Has Realized Significant or Transformational Value from AI - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50207881 - October 2026

Credit swaps and the bond market are more accurately pricing the future imho. Are capital managers smarter than HN? We’re going to find out. “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50303881

Ed is behind on model capabilities, but he’s correct it’s an irrational bubble, based on the financials and fundamentals, that will eventually end. Your similar comment from three months ago indicates you’re allowing faith and a belief system to conflict with reality: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49031793

What do we call that period where there were massive industrial efficiency and productivity gains?

It was the industrial something, oh wait! Industrial Revolution!

And a bad day on the stock market isn’t money disappearing from the economy, it’s money moving, it’s not destroyed, it moves. It can move back on Monday, and has repeatedly.

No significant productivity gains have been proven, and nowhere near enough revenue. Rely on faith if you will, markets demand proof and evidence. Will it materialize? Maybe, maybe not.

Like full self driving, “three months maybe, six months definitely.” Which was, what, a decade ago?

I think you’re lying to yourself.

You think Google just hasn’t checked the math on their spend for the fastest growing product they ever shipped?

Self driving trucks are on the road delivering things. Every day.

https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/products/gemini-app/on...

I didn’t lose $500B in value this week. Cloud revenue is up, LLMs are not.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50280564

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50280197

You know that you can buy llm access from Google’s cloud offerings right?

Does that mean LLMs are delivering efficiency gains or revenue? Or does it mean compute is being bought? You know you can spend money on cloud with nothing to show for it, right?

Maybe you should go look at the epic money fountain that grew 103% YoY with increasingly better margins?

https://blog.google/company-news/inside-google/message-ceo/a...

Would you like to revisit this sub thread after the recent $5T equity wipeout?

it’s money moving, it’s not destroyed

Couldn’t a company incinerate funds and their stock bottom out because no one will buy?

> 50% of radiology and medical imaging labs in the US now heavily utilize AI. 40% of dental practices in the US are currently utilizing AI

Is your radiologist using Claude? If so I hope he gets sued for medical malpractice, cause it's about as normal as consulting a crystal ball to find a tumor. AI is an ill-defined term referring to a good chunk of CS/statistics, not a single product like LLMs.

> Programming went the complete paradigm shift at least 18 months ago, and this buffoon still thinks it's vibe coding.

Doesn't help vibe coders still often call themselves that instead of affirming words like "agentic engineer"... As for paradigms being shifted, the dominant one is CEOs shifting into AI psychosis and shifting their IT/QA into unemployment, which is certainly a change...

You think radiologists are using Claude? That's the type of ignoraant question Ed Zitron would ask. Have you seen - truly seen - how radiologists and dentists are using AI?

That was what I asked you. Are you arguing in good faith?

To repeat myself "AI" is just a very loose subset of CS that changes with every AI winter. Have you seen Google Maps! It uses AI, better hurry for the Anthropic IPO!

The technology that was projected to "kill" radiology is CNNs, they've been around for literal decades, and are still better and cheaper than vision LLMs.

> Have you seen - truly seen...

No, the burden of showing is not on me here. Are dentists using actual LLMs, and how are they using them?

The single usecase I might imagine is transcription and paperwork, though both come with risk of introducing errors to patient files.

But I shouldn't be making your argument for you from a meaningless one-sentence quip like "X% [source?] of Y are using "AI" ".

>"The Soviets also spent seventy years predicting that capitalism would collapse any day now."

If anything has the chops to prove both Zitron AND the Soviets right, it's AI.

This seems somewhat mean-spirited and light on the sort of facts that would justify the tone. It’s also bizarre to read this as the markets begin to plummet as investors begin to realize there’s no there there.

Whatever you feel about the tech, the economics are stupid right now and seemingly entering at least correction territory.

>"All right, well, Ed knows what that means." Does he, Mr. Ludic?

I've never listened to the Zitron's podcast. But does he present himself as a financial expert? I've heard so many people that seem to think he is a financial wiz and use him to inform investment decisions.

I haven't checked, but he says himself that his background is in marketing. And no, he's not saying he's a financial or technology expert.

He does say that he talks to lots of people close to the matters, asks questions and gets curious when things don't add up. If that's true, which it seems to be from what I can check him on, I'll continue to listen to him. Though I wouldn't start any on-street protests on his word.

I can't believe more people don't point out his unbelievably bad track record of predictions. For a public figure, this should be incredibly damning.

Not sure if you're aware, but a lot of really smart people have made a bunch of wrong predictions. Turns out it's pretty hard to predict the future.

it absolutely is which makes it fascinating when you do absolutely not a thing in your life but make insanely inaacurate predictions for years on end and still have a career where instead of ocassionally be laughed at at parties you are being discussed on HN

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