> Following HNs guidelines, my most charitable interpretation of your response is that you don’t understand the arguments or numbers behind them and you aren’t just dismissing the arguments because you don’t like them. For that I’m saying you need to feed the article to the LLM of your choice and work back and forth until you get to an understanding of what’s being argued.

That definitely does not follow HN guidelines.

A simpler answer to why people always accuse him of being a bad writer is that he’s a bad writer, not that they’re too dumb for his genius.

> For that I’m saying you need to feed the article to the LLM of your choice

Ahh, the daily cry of the AntiAI crusader. Pretty fun to see it over here, tho! Usually it’s confined to reddit and bsky.

> AI is dumb and will never work and the scientists are lying

I don't see him making that claim, though.

Screwdrivers aren't useless. Screwdrivers have gotten a lot better over the decades. Everyone uses screwdrivers these days. Investing $500 billion into screwdrivers and expecting the screwdriver industry to grow to a double-digit percentage of GDP is still a really stupid idea. Let's face it: Universal Screwdriver[0] isn't going to happen.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Paperclips

On the contrary, he's more obviously right every day passing.

Here, if this is just misrepresentations and logical fallacies than it should be easy to explain the main point away:

How are OAI and Anthropic reasonably and reliably going to make the profits they need to to hit these targets?

By Q1 2028: OpenAI ≳ $10B/month Anthropic ≳ $10B/month Combined ≳ $20B/month / $240B ARR

By 2029, according to their own projections: OpenAI ≈ $184B/year Anthropic ≈ $174B/year Combined ≈ $358B/year

And remember, this is also in competition with open models that are increasingly encroaching on SOTA capabilities while costing less and allowing you to do more.

Juho, you have a well known blog and enough people would read it, so please go ahead and write a rebuttal.

I agree the issue is not the scale but you're missing the reason the scale has allowed to inflate to these proportions is through purchase agreements that are enabled by other purchase agreements. Yes banks, other funders, and even the cash flow of the largest companies can provide lifelines, but why would they if the pullback begins? The problem with circular purchase agreements is the mechanism that allowed them to grow rapidly would also force them to shrink rapidly and most funders aren't going to want to catch that falling knife unless profit is near guaranteed, which it isn't. The numbers are still deeply in the world of speculative. Doesn't matter if you have a line to a bank president, they don't want to bail you out for free.

The point is that the numbers as they exist now require the industry to shoot the moon. It's not impossible, maybe the technology really is that revolutionary. But the margin for error is microscopic.

Well, how workable are they?

Let's say a kid's lemonade stand increases its revenue from $1/month to $100/month in three months. Clearly that 100x revenue increase per quarter is sustainable, so it predicts a $100M revenue a year from now, raises money at a $1B valuation, and signs a contract to buy $10M in industrial lemon squeezing machines. The squeezer manufacturer then predicts that it'll see a $500M revenue from all the other lemonade companies, raises money, and spends $1B on expanding its factories. Meanwhile, the kid is actually losing money because they are selling gold-leaf lemonade for $1 / glass while it costs $100 / glass to produce.

But the lemonade stand is making money! Worst-case scenario they'll just renegotiate the squeezer contract and slow down their growth, right? If the lemonade business goes bust they'll just sell hundreds of millions of dollars of squeezers to lime juice stands, right? The government will declare lemonade a "resource critical for national defense" and bail out the industry, right?

Yeah, sure, AI isn't 100% bullshit. There is indeed some money there, it won't be a complete collapse. But the numbers we are seeing are absolutely insane. We're already at "AI is bigger than the entire internet" levels of investments! Either we are collectively burning hundreds of billions of dollars on pure hype, or somehow every single company on the planet is hiding a secret 10x AI-boosted productivity increase.

My personal hunch is that the “diffusion curve” for AI is slower than most people in this space think. Most businesspeople I talk to have only tried a basic Copilot chat and/or free ChatGPT. Many still haven’t used anything “AI” at all. As more use cases become practicable and cost-effective, more software will include AI, and more people will use AI with or without knowing.

Also: note that the Wall Street analyst estimates Ed cites (and then declares impossible targets) are predictions by serious people with a lot of money at stake. Of course they could be wrong, but they’re not made up.

If you believe in the notion that the technology will improve to the point of being able to replace a human employee, the increase in demand is going to come from businesses that choose AI employees over human ones. Even if the AI employee costs more than human one, it's like a car vs a horse. The AI employee doesn't get sick, doesn't get into trouble with HR for sexual harassment, never comes into work hung over. You can hire 100 AI employees for a week and them fire them the next and not feel bad about it.

Whether this comes to pass is anyone's guess, but that's the theory.

> The Gish gallop is a debate tactic where one person overwhelms an opponent with a massive, rapid-fire stream of many minor, weak, or false arguments

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop

The most charitable way I can read those paragraphs is that he's vaguely alluding to a nebulous conspiracy by a cabal of elites, which evokes a specific ideology that cannot be discussed constructively.

Ed has repeatedly done the "why are people using LLMs?" bit but ignores what well-respected software engineers have actually said about them because he thinks they're AI boosters and they are just lying. At the least, it's an obvious blind spot to explain how the AI industry is what it is despite the numbers he reports arguing otherwise, and many of his industry trend predictions have been incorrect as a direct result.