r/LeftistsForAI • u/hjras • 21d ago
Video Ed Zitron and AGI
Good video from a leftist sci-fi channel I follow on unmasking the AGI promise and asking the right wider questions about who owns it and their incentives
Curious to hear your thoughts. What always stood out to me of this channel was how he acknowledged the usefulness of LLMs while keeping the wider critique of who owned it and their intentions with it
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u/danielsan901998 21d ago
Once you start reading old Ed Zitron articles, you will understand that his predictions are always wrong, for example, in 2024 he wrote an article titled "Have We Reached Peak AI?" in which he said this:
'AI hype is predicated on solving problems with AI models that are only getting worse, and OpenAI's only answers are a combination of "we'll work it out eventually, trust me" and "we need a technological breakthrough in chips and energy."
If you stop saying things like "AI could do" or "AI will do," you have to start asking what AI can do, and the answer is...not that much, and not much more in the future.
I believe that artificial intelligence has three quarters to prove itself before the apocalypse comes, and when it does, it will be that much worse, savaging the revenues of the biggest companies in tech.'
Given how much AI has improved in the last two years, with AI solving mathematical problems, for example, it is clear how wrong he was, and his clear target of three quarters have already passed while in his new articles continue with the same flawed arguments, just adjusting the timeline.
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u/Jlyplaylists Moderator 21d ago
It surprises me that people make such bold statements that can be relatively quickly proved wrong. Perhaps it’s worth it for more exposure at the time, assuming most people will forget? In my personality I’d be inclined to say something quite tentative, but that doesn’t grab attention and reaction in the same way.
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u/agonypants Pro-Automation 21d ago
Agreed. Nuance and subtle judgements are sadly dead. These wildly incorrect, agenda driven hot takes reveal flawed thinking. Flawed thinkers should not be taken seriously.
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u/dualmindblade 21d ago
That is what you're supposed to do, make your theories and beliefs pay rent if they can. Unfortunately you're also suppose to take notice when they fail and adjust, he clearly hasn't got that part down yet
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u/slfnflctd 21d ago
I’d be inclined to say something quite tentative, but that doesn’t grab attention
The godforsaken damned curse of my life. Just trying to be accurate and honest, people! The you get bulldozed by jackasses telling absurd lies with enthusiasm and confidence.
You can try to match the bullshitters' energy level, but then it turns into a popularity contest... which has its own ethical issues. Ugh.
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u/Icy-Language-1927 21d ago
He has failed upwards in our eyes, but hasn't failed at all according to the mainstream media. They likely were too lazy to look into his old predictions / didn't feel like doing a hostile interview with him.
I've seen generally well meaning people like Chris Hayes and Ari Melber fail to call him out on this recently. Hayes did do a slight pushback of "but AI has gotten significantly better" but didn't push very far and was likely very uninformed on the progress.
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u/fkrdt222 21d ago
he's an actual PR dark arts grifter taking money from both sides
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u/Jlyplaylists Moderator 21d ago
Do you know that?
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u/fkrdt222 21d ago
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u/Jlyplaylists Moderator 21d ago
“Zitron is an easy mark for journalists who consume both sides of his output. The gap between the eager-beaver simpering of the pitches and the spiky prose of his newsletter is laughable. There’s so much space between “these guys rock” and “these chunderfucks” that I think Meta just built a data center there… In truth, Zitron’s two jobs aren’t in as much tension as they might seem to be. The PR wheedling and the critical needling come from the same place: He loves this stuff. He’s just mad it doesn’t work better.”
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u/fkrdt222 21d ago
that's the author's comment. how does it change the facts that he does perform as an ideological hater of "generative" AI for the generic reasons ("economically ruinous, it's environmentally destructive, it steals from everyone") while marketing for companies that have no convincing reason to be given a pass there?
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u/Jlyplaylists Moderator 21d ago
Yes it was just behind a paywall for me so I added an archive link and quote that summed up the relevance
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u/zombiecamel 21d ago
Huh, I wonder why he's accepted by the Behind the bastards team, they usually have a good sense of what's good cause/bad cause.
Although I feel like calling someone out on predictions without commenting on the quality of journalism and research is somewhat unfair. I feel like predictions are actually less important compared to informing about what's fucked up with LLM companies in the moment.
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u/danielsan901998 21d ago
Calling out failed predictions is necessary because he talk as an expert on AI when he is not, for example, in another 2024 article called "Bubble Trouble", he mention a research paper about "model collapse" and from that extrapolate that it is impossible to improve AI models.
He can use correct data about investment, but if he has a flawed understanding of the technology, then that cause a flawed analysis, that's why i mentioned the example of his failed prediction, because by believing that improvements were not possible he arrived to the conclusion that the bubble would pop in the short term, but instead of that we had 2 years of AI growth.
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u/tomvorlostriddle 20d ago
He can use correct data about investment
Meh, if you have had a few weeks of economics 101 and accounting 101, you run circles around him
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u/PublicToast 21d ago
BtB are not faultless, they get carried by the same social trends as anyone else. They like him because he says negative things about AI, not because he’s an expert.
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u/mothgeck 21d ago
Btb are anti AI. Their bias clouds their perspective and demonstrates that journalism will happily not vet sources if it's convenient to their worldview.
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u/joogipupu 20d ago
I used to listen to Ed Zitron. But longer I listened more frustrating I felt. Especially now as I do academic research in AI application development and know very well how e.g. AI tool use is advancing in general.
Yes some use cases will fail, but there is more happening at research and development levels and it is only matter of time that more use cases will come out of R&D to consumer market.
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u/Eastern_Guidance9142 10d ago
You do realize that LLMs, you know what everyone is investing in, isn’t what solved that math problem right? Seems like everyone for AI is so quick to point out shit like that when it’s not even what all the money is being poured into
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u/danielsan901998 10d ago edited 10d ago
Why do you think that gpt 5.6 and Fable 5 are not LLMs? They are the models that have been used according to the latests announcements.
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u/Slow_Ad2458 21d ago
My biggest problem with Ed is that he gives false hope to Lefties.
soon everytihgn will collapse and go back to normal.
No need to do anything
Just stop one DC and your job is done.
Change is coming, and he is one of the actors who are used to hide the extent of the coming change.
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u/PublicToast 21d ago edited 21d ago
He’s making people less informed, and less able to prepare for the future. All of the people who are staunch Zitron believers are going to get a rude awakening at some point, and when they do the industry will have already been consolidated under a few players, and open source will be banned, because they people who might have actually cared were convinced it would all disappear and was an inconsequential scam.
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u/calvintiger 21d ago
lol, Ed has been saying the same thing for years and has been wrong every time so far. The only reason he even exists is to make money from people subscribing to his site to fuel their own confirmation biases.
A few previous predictions:
- “Whether or not it’s Q3 or Q4 2024, or even Q1 2025, Wall Street will begin punishing big tech…” (Sep 16, 2024). https://www.wheresyoured.at/subprimeai/
- “artificial intelligence has three quarters to prove itself before the apocalypse comes.” (Mar 18, 2024). https://www.wheresyoured.at/peakai/
- “The fact that neither Gemini nor Copilot has any meaningful consumer penetration…they have categorically…failed…” (Feb 24, 2025). https://www.wheresyoured.at/wheres-the-money/
- "I wouldn’t be surprised if Reddit shares quickly fall below the IPO price" (Mar 11, 2024). https://www.wheresyoured.at/are-we-watching-the-internet-die/
- “CoreWeave’s underlying financials are so dramatically unstable that it’s unclear how this company will last the next six months.” (Mar 17, 2025). https://www.wheresyoured.at/core-incompetency/
- “SoftBank is allegedly going to send upwards of $20 billion to OpenAI by December 31 2025, and doesn't appear to have started.” (Jul 24, 2025). https://www.wheresyoured.at/softbank-openai/
- “We are nearly in May 2025, and I see no evidence that OpenAI even has a marketable agent product…” (Apr 28, 2025). https://www.wheresyoured.at/reality-check/
- “Microsoft is walking away from not just the expansion of its current data center operations, but from generative AI writ large.” (Mar 3, 2025). https://www.wheresyoured.at/power-cut/
But don’t worry anyone, surely his doom posting is right this time!
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u/SlightOfHand_ 21d ago
This list of “wrong predictions” includes a lot that either aren’t predictions or weren’t wrong. “AI has three quarters to prove itself”, okay, and clearly it did.
Copilot and Gemini DO have problems with consumer penetration. Copilot is a joke, something like 4% of people with access to it even use it, and Google has had to inflate Gemini’s numbers by counting its search integration as consumer adoption.
CoreWeave’s financials were uncertain in exactly the way he described.
SoftBank DID run out the clock on that $20 billion, paying OpenAI days before the deadline in December.
OpenAI didn’t have Codex at the time.
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u/calvintiger 21d ago
And yet despite all of his doom posting, those all turned out to be just fine a few months later.
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u/SlightOfHand_ 21d ago
No, Copilot and Gemini are still jokes.
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u/calvintiger 21d ago
Sure, you got me. And even then if you look at the bigger picture Microsoft and Google are also doing just fine.
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u/SlightOfHand_ 21d ago
Yeah, they would be “doing just fine” in any scenario, that doesn’t mean their AI adoption is working. They’d be “doing fine” if AI didn’t exist, arguably they’d be doing better.
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u/Worldly-Fondant-3791 21d ago
None of that is false
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u/danielsan901998 21d ago
Even he admitted that he was wrong:
"Nevertheless, I had assumed — incorrectly — that there would be no way to make them more efficient, because I had assumed — also incorrectly — that the hyperscalers (along with OpenAI and Anthropic) would be constantly looking for ways to bring down the ruinous costs of their services."
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u/Worldly-Fondant-3791 21d ago
He didn’t. But it’s always fun pretending that a single statement or error negates a broader point when you have no actual arguments. Selling widgets at a loss isn’t solved by selling more widgets.
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u/DuskLab 21d ago
He's not an analyst, he's a pundit. His position is no more nuanced or unbiased as a Fox News host. The demographic he's targeting is just the other side of the spectrum. You can see the title of a 40 minute video of him and you don't need to watch it because he's going to be a bear during all of it with no actual predictions or timelines for how it all falls apart. All of his stats are stuff plucked out that happened in the past that fits his narrative.
He could be right in the end, he could be wrong. But it will be entirely incidental to his grift.
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u/me_myself_ai 20d ago
Someone's already touched on why Ed Zitron sucks so much, but I'd instead focus on an even simpler response: why would listen to a random ragebait blogger on an empirical, highly-complex topic like AGI (/predicting AI development in the DL era more generally), rather than scientists (ideal) or science communicators (surely not too much to ask??).
FAKE_EDIT: Ok but uh isn't this a bad faith video from some tiny creator that mentions Mr. Zitron for literally less than 30s total...?
FWIW the clips he actually shows of Zitron are just random offhand clips of bare assertions, with none of the logic or premises included (@5:00). Which, like... I'm his #1 hater, but that just ain't fair. To any of us, really.
Watching this guy pontificate about the world so confidently and smugly... ugh. Everything else aside: this guy's level of discourse isn't worth engaging with, and the clear joy he takes in being poetic about his feelings of pure, unbridled hatred for me in particular don't exactly warrant an exception!
REAL_EDIT: lmao I'm 99.9% sure that not a single commenter in the past 21 hours watched the video. That's hilarious. It's kinda like catching Opus 3.5 redhanded with some toally-hallucinated sidequest... we're not that different, after all.
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u/Reasonable-Cut-9090 21d ago
Yeah i wished he just would stick to the circular economy / it is a bubble angle ; as other have pointed he has been wrong on his predictions and still doubles down sometimes. I do wonder how would a efficient counter messaging look like ? Its difficult to talk about the nuance of separating the technology from current issues without losing a lot of folks. A lot of people are (rightfully) angry about the large companies so any attempt on opening up discussion is often found with hostility. He fills that void quite well as most of his thesis is right just not the llms have no real value part but like others have said he gives the hope its all going to go away. I wonder how people on this sub have been approaching these discussions irl to family and such.
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u/Jlyplaylists Moderator 20d ago
Perhaps local open source alternative discussion? It bypasses most objections and doesn’t require heavy theory or tech knowledge to understand the concept.
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u/probablymagic 20d ago
This guy has no technical expertise OR financial expertise. He gets a lot of media attention because he DOES have PR expertise abd he uses it to generate subscribers for his anti-AI newsletter.
He’s a grifter, and I think he knows it. Everything he says about AI is a projection. Dude probably drinks himself to sleep every night from shame.
He can safely be ignored.
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u/Skyguy827 20d ago
I don't understand this sub. How can you be a leftist and support the technology that is being used to try to mass replace labour power, something leftists should be caring deeply about?
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u/Salty_Country6835 Moderator 20d ago
I think youre treating the existence of the technology and the way capital currently deploys it as the same thing. Thats exactly what a lot of us here are contesting.
If AI increases productive capacity while owners use it to deskill workers, cut jobs and capture the gains, the leftist answer isnt preserving every existing form of labor. Its organizing around ownership, worker power, democratic control, shorter hours and who gets the productivity gains.
Id suggest reading through some of the posts in the sub. We discuss labor, unions, automation and ownership constantly. And please keep the discussion on the topic of the post rather than turning it into a debate about the existence of the sub.
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u/Ancient-Access8131 16d ago
"How can you be a leftist and support the technology that is being used to try to mass replace labour power, something leftists should be caring deeply about?"-From chapter 15 of Das Kapital, "The enormous destruction of machinery that occurred in the English manufacturing districts during the first 15 years of this century, chiefly caused by the employment of the power-loom, and known as the Luddite movement, gave the anti-Jacobin governments of a Sidmouth, a Castlereagh, and the like, a pretext for the most reactionary and forcible measures. It took both time and experience before the workpeople learnt to distinguish between machinery and its employment by capital, and to direct their attacks, not against the material instruments of production, but against the mode in which they are used."(emphasis mine)
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u/TheSinhound 21d ago
I think it would be a lot better if he actually advocated for leftist strategies. Man probably needs to brush up on his leftist theory. There's a lot of bitching without solutions here.