Ed Zitron is mad as hell(ft.com) |
Ed Zitron is mad as hell(ft.com) |
I value material that makes me re-visit my own assumptions about the world.
But I tried listening to some of his podcasts and read his articles, but just could not suffer them at all. Tech Wont Save Us is worth people's time though - great work there.
This is why I'm convinced Sam makes his money from when OpenAI spends rather than when OpenAI earns.
If any.
Heavily weighted toward consumers, OTOH businesses have to spend a fortune before they can make a dent in GDP.
Over any one reporting period, don't worry those periods don't last forever.
No archive.ph CAPTCHA:
curl -K/dev/stdin <<eof > 1.htm
url https://www.ft.com/content/4c8d6420-d088-4660-8973-c4996cd990fb
user-agent "Mozilla/5.0 (Java) outbrain"
header accept:
eof
firefox ./1.htmBut you might want to actually fact-check a few of the things he says that convince you, because at least for his written articles basically everything is made up or misrepresented. There's plenty of links to sources, sure, but if you follow them down to the primary source what they're saying is very different from what Zitron is implying. It seems hard to believe that he's better at this in spoken form where citing a source is even harder.
I've tried to listen to a few podcasts and read some articles, and its just unbearable. Moreover, I find the main point that he harps on about - that none of the AI stuff is financially sustainable - to be largely unimportant. Like, if they want to burn their money, go for it.
The real issues - intellectual property, implications for the future workforce, environmental costs, or even that the money really ought to be invested in something else, whether public funds are going towards it, if taxes are being avoided etc - seem to be, at best, tertiary concerns for him. He only seems to be "mad as hell" that they're wasting money and no one else is talking about it.
He's also just plainly wrong when he keeps saying things like there's been zero discernable benefit to AI, as if it is just a creepto scam.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45399893
(Maybe Doctorow has too much of a Guardian vibe, compared to Zitron?)
The Economist would argue that the investor is always right, so maybe that's too hard of a line for FT to press
I'd like to hear stories about big tech abuses, but I don't care much about some random podcaster's anger.
> In one impassioned diatribe, Beale galvanizes the nation, persuading viewers to shout, "I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!" from their windows. He is soon hosting a new program called The Howard Beale Show, top-billed as "the mad prophet of the airwaves".
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_(1976_film)
Scene:
> It's like everything everywhere is going crazy, so we don't go out any more. We sit in the house, and slowly the world we're living in is getting smaller, and all we say is, "Please, at least leave us alone in our living rooms. Let me have my toaster and my TV and my steel-belted radials, and I won't say anything. Just leave us alone."
> Well, I'm not going to leave you alone.
> I want you to get mad!
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_RujOFCHsxo
* Transcript: https://www.americanrhetoric.com/MovieSpeeches/moviespeechne...
1) He uses expletives and is “too angry” 2) He runs a PR firm and has no experience working with LLMs
Which I think says a lot more about his detractors than it does about him. Time will tell all, and I think he will be remembered as a prescient individual. It’s undeniable that these financial games that OpenAI, Oracle, and now Nvidia are playing are unsustainable and indicative of a large upcoming crash.
He has literally hours and hours of that.
The episode with Shingy also really rubbed me the wrong way too. Just constantly “yeah, but it still hasn’t done anything useful” followed by Shingy relaying numerous examples over and over of how AI has transformed our he things he does, followed by “yeah, but when is it going to do something actually useful?” over and over.
He’s become some one note on the AI stuff it’s tiresome. Moreso given he’s unwilling to actually listen to any other perspective. I wish he’d go back to talking about literally anything else.
I'd love to read/listen to one that he worked on with a talented editor. I don't mind the swearing or the tone, and I enjoy a good rant here and there, but for me the amount of rambling and ranting obfuscates the good points he's making, just by sheer volume.
- ‘Absolutely immense’: the companies on the hook for the $3tn AI building boom [1][2]
- Inside the AI race: can data centres ever truly be green? [3][4]
- Inside the relentless race for AI capacity [5]
[1] https://www.ft.com/content/efe1e350-62c6-4aa0-a833-f6da01265...
[3] https://www.ft.com/content/0f6111a8-0249-4a28-aef4-1854fc8b4...
https://www.ft.com/tabby-kinder
No "unified opinion" but an editorial stance
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_Times#Editorial_stan...
you want to open a wikipedia debate on that :)?
If I were you I'd point to the FT [Weekend] Magazine marquee instead
This holds for most newspapers and makes that whole fake news argument so infuriating. As if journalists had even 15 minutes in a day to coordinate how to present an issue.
There is way too much front-loading of hiring strategies and infrastructure that happens on future (over-)promised capabilities, TAM and profitability projections.
If we are lucky it fizzles out into reasonable valuations and sound investments. If not we have had a giant misallocation of capital on an unprecedented scale setting us back by many many years, a diamond shaped work force in some sectors causing labour shortages and reduced growth in the long run.
The USA stock market is largely driven by a dozen of FAANG companies whose valuation is rising fast and who are investing tens of billions in the LLMs. And all those companies are mono-dependent on the Nvidia cards, whose valuation is skyrocketing based on those expenditures. So point 1 - if LLMs would be as profitable as expected, the whole FAANG top-10 will slow down or even drop.
Point 2 he makes - a lot of the LLM-only companies are deeply in debts, acquire more debt, and continue kicking repayment can down the road, all at the same time. So assuming (again) that LLMs are not as profitable as expected, some LLM-only companies can go bust.
I think he wasn't making a statement that LLMs are intrinsically bad or useless, at least in those articles I've seen. He was just saying that financing aspect if very iffy AND that current world IT sector is way to overdependent on LLMs.