Ed Zitron also said that consumers were losing interest in ChatGPT in January 2024, that AI models were reaching their upper possible limits in Feburary 2024, that ChatGPT and similar products were "not particularly useful for anything", that hallucinations could not possibly be reduced in models, etc.
He's a churlish AI skeptic that isn't worth listening to.
There's a huge crowd of "wishful thinkers" that want to see AI collapse and will cling to any rationalization that it will do so. This is Zitron's audience.
How exactly is AI "succeeding?" By the numbers, every AI company is on a fast track to going bankrupt at record speeds. All while burning the planet down and making electronics unavailable to literally everyone. This is not sustainable.
Keep a close eye on the "Is AI Profitable Yet?" website. The numbers will open your eyes. Please, enlighten me on how AI is successful.
AI would be profitable today if all companies weren't constantly racing to train the next biggest model, that's the whole reason the numbers look whack.
This is basically the first time we're seeing true competition between massive tech companies, the previous state had each one of them clinging on to their own separate monopoly.
And if the training stops, the existing LLM models will fairly quickly decay in usefulness.
There's no free steady-state of high-quality current models for this; it's either keep investing forever or deal with models that stopped gaining new information in 202X.
Anthropic's Q2 was allegedly profitable, and OpenAI is allegedly pretty close to profitability.
Spending way more money than you earn is pretty common for startups anyways, "going bankrupt" is a silly thing to say when the whole point is to spend more than you earn
Anthropic is profitable, running at ~$75B ARR, and has 80+% gross margin on their API products.
OpenAI is not yet profitable, but is running at ~40B ARR and their revenue is growing rapidly at >200% YoY.
People still believe that the model intelligence has plateaud and I feel like they live under the rocks. I get the insane capex spend, I get the hype, I even get certain company will go under but to ignore the capability jump in a year is absurd.
The only honest benchmark is "has it cured cancer yet?". It has not, nor moved close to doing so.
People are doing great at marketing the diminishing returns as breakthroughs though.
It hasn't plateaud but the generational leaps are definitely getting smaller.
He's been mostly wrong about the potential for AI, but mostly right about the financials. Don't listen to him for opinions, but don't discount his factual reporting because his opinions are off.
I am very impressed with LLMs, but.....
I don't think we are seeing productivity gains due to LLMs in the general economy yet.
Even in software development, are we seeing an increase in the number of products or features shipped?
I agree. I think LLMs do make specific tasks much faster (like typing code), but these tasks usually make up a small amount of people's actual work.
What I mostly meant was that Ed's view on LLMs is that they won't get much better than they are now, which—so far—has been incorrect every time he made the point. I also think he puts too much weight on things like hallucinations, which aren't much of an issue for many applications of LLMs.
For someone like Ed, it feels like way too much effort to wade through the muck.
I personally can't stand anything that whiffs of "outrage content" . Doubly so if they are stupendously wrong on a regular basis. Triply so if they never own up to those bad calls.
If someone else wants to get their hands dirty, more power to them. I'll wait for anything useful to filter through other sources.
Life is short, and there's so much other high quality material I'd rather give my limited attention to.
This is not a complete picture. I use Zed daily and I have the AI features enabled, but I never use the built in agent in Zed. I reach for an agent in a separate terminal session.
More people are probably using stuff like Claude Code, Codex etc from the CLI or desktop apps, meaning they’re actually using more AI and skipping Zed altogether
Anecdotally: I disabled Zed’s AI features, but I use LLMs more extensively than ever outside of my IDE. So the numbers may not paint a clear story here.
I love zed but it’s become just a terminal and markdown editor. All of my LLM usage is outside of it.
It's summer vacation time.
If you're wondering why these "churls" are increasingly popular, it's the reality that far from being mobbed by skeptics, the entire market economy is being taken for a ride in the name of AI. It's very much like the febrile environment that developed about Crytpo, in which anyone who expressed concern that maybe this tech wasn't going to revolutionize money, programming, and society itself was a "churlish skeptic".
I certainly wouldn't credit Ed Zitron with timing his predictions very well, but that doesn't make them wrong, and it certainly doesn't support the AI maximalism we're all forced to endure.
Agree. I don't pay attention to people trying to call the top, but I do pay attention to profitability/sustainability concerns.
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Hah, you know they feel threatened when capitalists have to whip out the classist insults.
And you're an equity partner for a PE/VC that funds AI. And?
Any YouTube video with him is filled with fawning comments. People love it when others tell them what they want to hear. He'll be able to do his schtick for a long time, well after it should be obvious to everyone the AI is going to change things. I'm not enthusiastic about AI and wish we could pump the breaks somehow but at some point you have to recognize there's something there. I don't think it's helpful that the face of AI criticism says a lot of nonsense.
> that AI models were reaching their upper possible limits in Feburary 2024,
I’m curious, removing coding as a criterion what is more impressive about the current models than say gpt 4o? Give a prompt example. Keep in mind most consumers of AI are likely not using it for coding so this is relevant.
I doubt anyone could give a not coding example where it’s meaningfully better with current frontier than 4o.
Take humaneval. 4o gets 90, gpt 5.6 gets 94%. So what?
https://openai.com/index/hello-gpt-4o/
If an iPhone had a 4o quality model that could run locally frontier models would be finished.
Exactly. In all facets of life, it's amazing that people continue to listen to those with a strong track record of confidently wrong predictions.
This seesawing of perspectives on apple’s ai strategy reminds me of that Alan Watts story:
Once upon a time there was a Chinese farmer whose horse ran away. That evening, all of his neighbors came around to commiserate. They said, “We are so sorry to hear your horse has run away. This is most unfortunate.” The farmer said, “Maybe.” The next day the horse came back bringing seven wild horses with it, and in the evening everybody came back and said, “Oh, isn’t that lucky. What a great turn of events. You now have eight horses!” The farmer again said, “Maybe.”
The following day his son tried to break one of the horses, and while riding it, he was thrown and broke his leg. The neighbors then said, “Oh dear, that’s too bad,” and the farmer responded, “Maybe.” The next day the conscription officers came around to conscript people into the army, and they rejected his son because he had a broken leg. Again all the neighbors came around and said, “Isn’t that great!” Again, he said, “Maybe.”
Local models running on Apple hardware are definitely a thing, a low-hanging fruit they are harvesting right now while every pure-play AI company is losing money.
Ironically for home-lab users (ie those who primarily have access to consumer hardware), apple silicon is probably the best value (and also the most obtainable for running some of the smaller sized models. You can get unified memory of up to 192 GB in the mac studios. The equivalent for the "open market" is probably AMD's halo strix which offers up to 128GB unified memory, and the speed of the memory is much slower.
I guess the Nvidia Jetson AGX Thor also exists, but good luck getting your hands on that... and regardless that's also 128GB.
Put it this way, with 192 GB VRAM you can run deepseekv4... with 128gb only with lots of quantization
Edit: WTH! I was curious and i went to apple's website to price out a high end unit just to price comparison, and it looks like the high ram units are gone now, and they max out at 96GB?? Guess i missed that...
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Not supporting FP8 is a pain in the butt though. It feels like there are more compromises using Apple Silicon than just going with nVidia and CUDA.
It's not a huge thing outside the consumer/novelty sphere. Apple missed the train on the trillion-dollar ARM datacenter rollout, and will suck those lemons for the next decade.
> Zirton misses a few points…
What! Ends with a cliff-hanger!? I NEED TO KNOW WHAT POINTS HE MISSED!!!
(but not badly enough to buy a $100/mo subscription).
Zitron reminds me of that lawyer character in Silicon Valley (HBO). A ~decade later, turned influencer.
You mean the same character who plays the male lead on Superstore? They are primarily an influencer now?
The same.
That I did not say.
I think people, especially in the valley / sf, truly under estimate how much the average person dislikes AI anything. If you know anyone who does anything in marketing outside of tech they'll tell you if people see the word AI it generally means they'll hate it with out even knowing what it is.
Hosted by Apple or not, but isn’t the biggest feature of iOS 27 LLM integration?
The biggest feature is stability, but Apple Intelligence has an excellent toolkit and API.
Timing is the key: if the burst happens, let's say, in the next 12-18 months apple is very well positioned, but every month without the bubble popping add pressure on apples executives and, at some point, the pressure will be so high that they will have to do something (most probably something really silly from the business perspective).
Anyway, I think they are really well positioned for local inference, if local inference will be a thing they will be fine.
Is this investment advice? Otherwise, who cares? Don't tie your identity to being a fan of a company. Apple clearly did not intend to fumble their attempts at AI they way they have. Arguments that "Actually, Apple is the smartest at AI" are boring.
Ed’s interview covered many different topics. As an aside, he was asked what he thought of Apple’s position. The juicy side quote is now what defines the interview.
It's so popular to think this is a bubble. Some aspects likely are, but the zeal for this to be a bubble is disturbing to me. I get that there will be winners and if you're not one of them, you might be more likely to want this thing to pop. In my mind, that's not the right disposition, you should want the gains to be spread as equitably as possible.
The losses are being spread equitably to anyone who has wanted to buy computing equipment over the last few years. Similarly anyone who wants to buy electricity in a region impacted by data center build outs.
Apple never needed to participate in the AI race to zero. As they were already at the finish line.
The past decade has shown people will still buy iPhones even with Siri being the worst assistant of the major players, even with Liquid Glass UI debacle, etc
Their hardware is just that good and the fact that is great for LLMs is just icing
There are three companies I am confident will survive an AI bubble popping: Google, Microsoft and Apple.
A lot has been made of Google's recent earnings being cash flow negative (I think for the first time ever?). Building data centers is something Google is very good at. They've also partially or wholly insulated themselves from a collpase by using Special Purpose Vehicles ("SPVs") where the collateral for loans is simply the GPUs. Even the physical building and the land its own is leased from another subsidiary. Google is still a cash cow. I also think they may break the NVidia mohnopoly with their own TPU hardware given enough time.
Microsoft too is a cash cow and seemingly hasn't bet the farm on Copilot.
And Apple is a real dark horse here. They, like Microsoft, don't seem to have bet the farm on AI but also, they're in a unique position to drive a move to local LLMs with their own silicon. Their ARM CPUs use a shared memory architecture. Nvidia strictly segments the market by limitng VRAM on consumer GPUs. Apple can get around that. They just don't have the raw FLOPS to compete yet. There have been rumors they're targeting the M7 series in 2028 for a big jump in AI performance.
This market is going to boil down to performance-per-Watt (IMHO) and that's going to be interesting to watch as NVidia moves up to an annual product cycle. what will the new generation do to existing deployements when hardware 1-3 years is at a severe PPW disadvantage? we'll see.
Personally I just want to be able to buy 64GB of RAM for $200 and an SSD for under $100 again. You know, like 2025.
> Microsoft too is a cash cow and seemingly hasn't bet the farm on Copilot.
I think a good follow-up question is: which Copilot?
Anyway, Microsoft seems to be leaning hard into the whole "you can't get fired for buying Microsoft" thing that used to be IBM and AWS. Normies all around the world still insist on using Microsoft Windows and Office.
Anecdotally, they supposedly lost a lot of money on GitHub Copilot's inference costs, at least until June. So they'd be far more equipped to survive an AI crash now.
Isn't saying that Apple will survive the AI bubble a bit like saying Walmart will survive the bubble? Apple isn't really involved.
AI is like Robin Hood, just proxied through China lol
if they simply stayed out of it, they would get my business from here on out. too late for that though.
"stayed out of it" needs to be considered relatively though, doesn't it? I don't see Apple spending billions in capex on hyperscaler DCs, and apart from the weird product direction that is Image Playground most of their on-device AI is for genuinely helpful uses like smart removal from images and grammar improvements.
they never had my business; their style over all else along with the combination of planned obsolescence and conspicuous consumption are obscene misuse of the human heuristics.
In September they're bringing the latest major iOS version to the iPhone 11 which released 7 years ago. And from what I've seen on the iPhone 11 subreddit, it improves performance.
What other device manufacturer does that? The Google Pixel 4 released the same year dropped major OS updates after 3 years. Same for the Galaxy S10.
They're the company that builds laptops people still use 5-10 years later. If anything they've set the standard for long lifespans when it comes to tech devices.
Well you can still run Windows 11 rev 25H2 on a Intel/AMD 2016 hardware through easily forced upgrade or install (nocpu/notpm), did it this afternoon on an entry level Lenovo laptop i5-6200u based, while you can only upgrade up to MacOS Monterey (12.x) on a late 2016 macbook pro. So rather ~5 years than 10.
But thoses past "performances" might not reflect futures ones, yep.
Writing this on a 2010 pc bought cheap in 2012. Upgraded ram, ssd added, windows 7 to windows 10 with extended updates. Yes it's time to replace but they do last.
They also glued the short ribbon cable for the screen to the front of the iPod classic so that when the spinning HDD failed if you tried to open it and weren't very careful/aware of this it would rip off the motherboard.
There was a class action because they deliberately slowed down iPhones claiming it was for battery health (anecdotally, when I had iPhones I noticed they were always a a pain to use for a month before and after the new releases, but it could be in my head).
They solder in RAM so it's difficult or impossible to upgrade.
I have an M1 MBP and the battery life is half of what it used to be. However I also have Applecare so of course the battery health is stuck at 84% (fairly sure, but not totally sure, that it was at 82% a few months ago) because they won't replace the battery unless it's under 80%. A lot of people report the battery health getting stuck just above 80% if they have Applecare.
Their hardware is great, I agree with you, but let's not pretend they don't play that game.
I'm still using my Thinkpad from 2016.
Thinkpads are saying hello :)
Not to turn this into a Web fight or anything, but come on... Even my t420S from 2011 could be upgraded with ssd and more ram and is still used :). My daily driver is t480, 8 years old, my wive's x1 carbon 7 years old, with no intention of retiring either anytime soon.
The notion of Apple, of all companies, "setting standard for long span devices", is laughable to me as I look at my ipads no longer running old software I paid for and getting slower with every forced update.
Apple makes sexy devices that match many people's requirements. Good on them! But this continued notion they invented everything is grating.
</old grouchy man's rant finished> :-)
Still got a MacBook Pro (2019) and iMac (2019) running just fine.
The iPhone 8 finally died. I think it was almost 10 years old.
> planned obsolescence
This is a criticism I've never understood. I think I know what you're referring to, but it really says more about Apple customers than Apple the corporation.
In my opinion, for all its faults, Apple makes quality hardware that can last many years when treated well. Unlike Microsoft, they don't completely shift paradigms with every OS release or new doo-dad. My 7 year old Macbook is still perfectly usable, receives updates, and can run modern software. Although I don't own an iPhone, I haven't seen anything to suggest that they are built to be immediately obsolete. Just because many Apple users are addicted to having the latest thing doesn't mean that a several years old iPhone isn't still perfectly viable in 2026.
No one owns the phone and we increasingly dont own the pc.
Ursa Ag is funny. Maybe we can have a device that runs programs the user selects.
Stock valuation has nothing to do with AI being the most transformational tech ever devised. Like who can't grasp that
I don't think LLMs can approach, in terms of transformational power, writing, printing, or even the personal computer, but I get what you're saying.
Almost all Nobel laureates of AI disagree with you but ok I get what you are saying
It hasn't even been 4 years since ChatGPT released. It's far too early to know the limit of where LLMs/LRMs will go.
Especially since they're seeing huge leaps in capabilities every few months.
It's absurd to call LLMs the most transformational tech ever devised. At a bare minimum, computers in general and electricity both beat out LLMs, as they are prerequisites.
Electricity and computers can't solve new math and physics nor make us immortal and drive humanity to the next step.
Google will win the AI war. I really don t see how things can be different. The true question is how much the involvement of Sergei Brin will have been a major part of that win.
[but now that I work in a big corp, I can understand how one smart guy saying “shut the f..k up, managers. I show the path” can be extremely disruptive in those kind of environments. For the better!]
In my personal experience, Gemini seems to have the best image editing and creation capabilities but when it comes to coding, Claude is my favorite. However, Claude is slow and errors out for me often. Grok is also very good when it comes to coding but I seek to run into their rate limits much easier, so I don't use it.
I only use free web version for all btw.
>Gemini seems to have the best image editing and creation capabilities
This was true until late April, when OpenAI's GPT Image 2 overtook Nano Banana 2.
Subjectively, OpenAI's image generation is the only one that consistently works for me and renders what I describe in the way I describe it at an acceptable level of quality. I don't understand how NB gets so much credit compared to what OpenAI is offering.