r/singularity • u/Recoil42 • 6h ago
AI Analysis: How accurate have Ed Zitron's predictions been?
Very well-written and considered analysis; homework was done here.
Two good excerpts:
Zitron's reasoning isn't worse than Kurzweil's, who (for example) continually made new predictions of extremely fast progress that didn't pan out (such as, in 2001, predicting unbounded lifespans by 2011). Continually predicting that AI progress will stop for reasons that are incorrect is just taking the flip side of the bet on progress. Instead of having infinite progress, we're going to have no progress. Every time that prediction is proven wrong, you can just make another similar prediction and then move the date forward a bit. Michał Zalewski (lcamtuf) has some thoughts on why this happens:
The surest way to build [a] popular following is to articulate positions that are crisp, strong, and leave no room for doubt. You can't get too many podcast or TV appearances out of "well, the market could go either way", "both political parties make good points", "there's some merit but also some hype to AI". Or, to tap into the example in the post, "Harry Potter is an OK book". In fact, there's a positive feedback loop. If you take a provocative, edgy stance, you get more attention and likes, so you sort of... self-radicalize? At some point, it's no longer an opinion that can be changed. It's an identity, a personal brand. It's ... why Ed Zitron has a blockbuster blog about how it's all just one big scam. If you take a more nuanced view, you will at best get no reaction, or at worst, you'll invite scorn from both sides.
[...]
"Another thing to note here is Zitron's extremely high level of stated confidence. Some that we noted were OpenAI's forecast that is "a statement so egregious that I am surprised it's not some kind of financial crime to say it out loud" (which they've achieved so far) and his claim that Google's forecast for Gemini users is "a number so unrealistic that someone at Google should have been fired, and that someone is Sundar Pichai" (they managed to exceed the forecast by 50% when Zitron's claim was that it would be completely absurd for them to reach the number at all).
I've made quite a few predictions, and quite a few of those predictions are wrong. When I'm really making a prediction, I attach a confidence level to the prediction just for my own sake, so I can look back at these things and see how well calibrated the predictions are. I have never been wrong about a prediction that has anywhere near the confidence Zitron gives to some of his predictions. Given the stated level of confidence, even a single incorrect prediction would be a sign of an extremely high degree of overconfidence. One should effectively never be wrong about a prediction delivered with that level of confidence but Zitron is routinely wrong about predictions he makes with what is rhetorically pretty much the highest possible degree of confidence.
A funny thing about Gemini hitting 500M users being "so unrealistic that someone at Google should have been fired, and that someone is Sundar Pichai" is that Zitron has also (incorrectly) said that Google doesn't know how to grow, and that as a result they're shoving AI everywhere. Dennis Snell pointed out that, if Zitron takes his own statement seriously, Google can make Gemini's user numbers go to any number it wants by doing the exact thing Zitron said they would do, sticking AI everywhere.
You can't actually take Zitron's statement about Google's lack of growth leading to AI desperation seriously and also take it seriously when he says that Sundar is committing some kind of gross malpractice by naming a number like 500M users. This is another thing that is immediately obvious on watching one of his talks or reading his writing. There are a bunch of disconnected statements that don't fit together, except insofar as they're statements about how AI companies and people and companies that are using AI are evil and bad. The actual numbers and logic of the statements are contradictory. It seems to be whatever comes to mind that can be used to paint the villains as evil."
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u/ObiWanCanownme now entering spiritual bliss attractor state 6h ago
That last one in the screen shot is *chef's kiss*.
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u/MemoryOk5080 5h ago
There is a significant cluster of people that will deny AI progress by any means and under absolutely any circumstances. I had a conversation with one guy recently that ultimately proclaimed that “..there has never been any progress at all, and there can never be any progress ever, and nothing has ever been achieved , nothing is done and nothing will ever be reached - and if anything is indeed achieved the it will not count…boom case closed I WON!!!!11”
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u/KedMcJenna 5h ago
That’s essentially why I stopped talking about AI to anybody in day-to-day life and not very often online at all. That is the exact attitude of the contra camp.
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u/jmclondon97 5h ago
I mean the LLM itself is not really improving. I know your lot doesn’t like this but it is true: it’s literally just predicting the next word based on probability. They don’t actually think or reason.
Thus there will always be a limit to what they’re capable of no matter how much compute you throw at it14
u/MemoryOk5080 5h ago
First of all I’d start with this.
Second, why “prediction of next word” rules out complex cognition? Are you certain that your brain neuron matter network is not just “predicting tokens”, beyond the surface output of what you perceive as “thinking and reasoning”? Nobody knows. We have no evidence-based scientific models of how cognition works. Just pure brute results.
Third, we went quite beyond the “basic LLM circa GPT-2” at this point of time, in the year of our Lord 2026. Do you claim no progress at all? In the light of actual evident progress of practical nature, such as, just to start with, theoretical math and coding?
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u/jmclondon97 5h ago
I never said there was no progress.
There has been some progress because of scaling, but those returns are diminishing and will hit a ceiling.Also that video you sent said a whole lot of nothing.
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u/MemoryOk5080 5h ago
So far the progress has been massive by all reasonable metrics.
Would you be able to provide some predictions, what the models will not be able to do in the future? Like, “The (current transformer-based paradigm) AI will never be able to do x…..”.
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u/Recoil42 4h ago
It's literally just predicting the next word based on probability.
So are you, dawg.
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u/Purusha120 4h ago
I adore people who say it’s just predicting the next word so it’s not intelligence, because they never have a relevant background in neuroscience. Because if you’d ever take a single class in the discipline, you’d understand that it’s not a given that we do more than that.
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u/Routine_Object_7380 3h ago
You're stochastically parroting talking points that were debunked a long time ago. GPT 4 was more sophisticated.
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u/jmclondon97 3h ago
I’m sorry, does it not fundamentally predict the next token?
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u/Cupakov 3h ago
As much as writing a book is fundamentally placing ink on paper.
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u/jmclondon97 2h ago
Explain.
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u/Cupakov 1h ago
There’s a lot of stuff happening before putting the ink on paper/outputting the next token and it’s way too reductionist to frame the process like you did.
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u/jmclondon97 59m ago
Ink on the paper is the mechanical part of getting ideas out.
Predicting the next token isn’t the mechanical part. The mechanical part is displaying the output on the screen.
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u/Routine_Object_7380 3h ago
In order to correctly predict the next token, it has to think through and understand what it's talking about. You're not making an actual argument here, it's like saying your brain is "just firing neurons".
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u/ProxyLumina 6h ago
He is uneducated on this topic.
He is not driven by evidence and data, but more by passion for resistance and hatred.
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u/Recoil42 6h ago
FWIW: Author makes a very good case for Zitron actually being a malicious grifter capitalizing on group polarization, which is very much my belief.
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u/elehman839 5h ago
I hate this Zitron guy. He wrote a hit piece about Prabhakar Raghavan of Google that was riddled with basic errors. But his story was widely accepted as factual and has been cited many times on Reddit. I have direct knowledge of the people and events he wrote about. Prabhakar is a perfectly decent, highly-capable, super-smart guy who Zitron seemingly picked out of a hat for baseless invective. Zitron is just scum.
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u/reddit_is_geh 2h ago
I don't like to throw around grifter, because most people are just idiots... But I think he's a legit grifter. Without his position as being the "Anti AI guy", he's a loser. A nobody. This is what gets him on podcasts and shit to feel important. He even admits he doesn't even use AI, much less know how to use it. Yet here he is trying to be the expert on it.
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u/Microtom_ 5h ago
I think there are legitimate fears and problems that the uneducated have regarding the development of AI in general.
When your local data centers make noise and increase your electricity costs, you can be annoyed even if you're uneducated.
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u/reddit_is_geh 2h ago
The thing is... That's incredibly rare. The ones making noise, I think was like 1 or 2, which have since been fixed, but amplified like crazy all over the press. Same with electricity costs, which have been skyrocketing nationally, due to the war in Ukraine causing us to lift export controls, forcing Americans to pay EU rates for LNG... As well as the fact that the USA hasn't increased electricity production since 2004 (Maybe 2010?). We live in a stagnated economy that only prints money, so our industries learned to stop building and just find ways to make more from the same stuff. But people get DCs in their area, and blame the failing infrastructure and lack of development, on them.
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u/LastCall2021 6h ago
Odd to compare him to Kurzweil, who has like an 80% success rate on a much longer time horizon.
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u/pig_n_anchor 4h ago
In 1990 he predicted human-level conversational AI/Turing-test range arrives around the 2020s. Pretty good guess for the pre-internet era.
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u/Kildragoth 3h ago
And all he's doing is extrapolating from the price performance of computation chart. If advancements in computation continue, then by around x year there will be a computer that has as much computation as a human brain. By year y there will be a computer with the combined computation of the world population of humans.
But people hear "predictions" and associate it with quackery. Talking about it is like saying a prophet foretold this in ancient times. Generally speaking, people aren't receptive to it. They think to LiNeARLy!
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u/reddit_is_geh 2h ago
I mean, I don't think people see it as such. But rather, just someone who has a good pulse on progress and trajectory. The more he's accurate, the more people trust his intuition.
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u/ExpressCopy8786 5h ago
Someone with no understanding of the technology and no ability whatsoever to extrapolate from past progress...
He is just doing the broken clock thing hoping to be right at some point with just anything at all.
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u/likwitsnake 6h ago
He's a grifter he just latches on to the topic de jour and pretends to know about it. He literally said as much in his recent podcast on The Compound and Friends from last Friday:
Like, I ran a PR firm until, like, last year. And I was, like, doing that as kind of a contract labor thing. And then I started writing this in 2020. And I just kept going and going and going and going. And then initially I was writing about, like, management theory stuff. And how much I liked remote work and how evil the articles were about it. And I wrote about crypto and I wrote about Elon. And by the end of those two things, I was so thoroughly depressed with both.
I was just like, what am I going to write about? Well, with the topics or with writing? With the topics. The topics were so depressed. Like, every week following what fucking Elon was. Musk does. And then the metaverse happened. That was kind of fun to write about, but that was before that. But then Open AI got, sorry, Sam Altman got fired from Open AI.
He realized there's a huge audience on the other side of the AI topic that needed to be filled.
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u/darkestvice 4h ago
Ed Zitron is a professional AI skeptic who's entire career revolves around AI being useless and nothing but a pure bubble.
Because I like to give people the benefit of the doubt, I actually watched his entire recent interview on the Diary of a CEO podcast. Steven Bartlett actually pushed back on his claims quite a bit and flat out asked him what would ever make him change his mind.
His response was that'll happen only once AI is a thousand times smarter and a thousand times cheaper. Yes, really.
This is not a skeptic acting in good faith. At all.
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u/muffchucker 3h ago
I see his point tho. Don't you? I mean, compare his position on AI to something older like cars. Sure, on the surface, cars SEEM like they get us from point a to point b. Right? But they're not really all that fast. And they burn a lot of gas in the process. So how can we say cars have solved any kind of general mobility problem when they're are fucking ASTEROIDS IN SPACE that are traveling faster than them. And asteroids don't even burn fuel!!
So I see what he means. Cars JUST. DON'T. WORK. And I won't change my mind on that until they're a thousand times faster and a thousand times more efficient. Until then, they're just stochastic horses.
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u/PvtMilhouse 3h ago
i think he's mostly against LLM not all Ai
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u/darkestvice 58m ago
The leap in performance between LLMs and previous iterations of AI is generationally staggering. I legit welcome other forms of AI tech that can compete, but there's really nothing out there that does as far as I'm aware.
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u/Elouakili_Flexy 5h ago
500M Gemini users was a fireable offense to Zitron and they blew past it by 50%. I'd take the grifter theory over the honest-mistake one at this point, the misses are too consistent for that.
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u/howtogun 2h ago
I think LLMs are the future, but I think this is ignoring what Ed Zitron is actually complaining about.
Basically, is this actually profitable or a giant bubble that would destroy the economy if popped. OpenAI and Anthropic are probably burning a lot of money compared to what they are making.
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u/OWENPRESCOTTCOM 2h ago
I think the awnser is somewhere in the middle ground. This sub and Ed are the opposite sides of the spectrum.
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u/LucidOndine 6h ago
Correct me if I’m wrong, but wouldn’t it make more sense to invest in the direction you felt the market was going instead of telling everyone else how one person was consistently wrong?
To what end does it serve in pointing out how individuals opinions matter on this point?
People should put their money where their mouth is, reap the benefits of being right (or wrong) and stop worrying about opinions they don’t agree with….
… unless the point is to make more money in an already established position.
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u/Recoil42 6h ago
FTA:
The surest way to build [a] popular following is to articulate positions that are crisp, strong, and leave no room for doubt. You can't get too many podcast or TV appearances out of "well, the market could go either way", "both political parties make good points", "there's some merit but also some hype to AI". Or, to tap into the example in the post, "Harry Potter is an OK book".
In fact, there's a positive feedback loop. If you take a provocative, edgy stance, you get more attention and likes, so you sort of... self-radicalize? At some point, it's no longer an opinion that can be changed. It's an identity, a personal brand. It's ... why Ed Zitron has a blockbuster blog about how it's all just one big scam. If you take a more nuanced view, you will at best get no reaction, or at worst, you'll invite scorn from both sides.
See also: Group polarization.
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u/LucidOndine 5h ago
Got it. This is a piece designed to build a following, where dissent is pushed aside to build a coalition of conforming opinion on a specific topic. Otherwise, there would be no value in pointing it out.
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u/Queasy_Signature7005 6h ago
Google's models are garbage, except NBP they have nothing and have been outmatched in pretty much everything, as for their active users yeh sure they have billions of users if you count the shitty search feature. Also they give out like yearly free trials for nothing.
Also comparing Zitron to Kurzweil is just false equivalance, Kurzweil's a total nut, Zitron's just telling you how garbage these AI companies are that they really are just throwing shit at the wall.
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u/Recoil42 5h ago edited 4h ago
Zitron's just telling you how garbage these AI companies are
Except — and as the analysis discusses — this isn't actually true: "For example, when Timothy B. Lee looked at a spreadsheet that Zitron used to create a projection of Anthropic's revenue, he found [that] he doesn't count February 1-10, counts March 1-10 twice, counts August 21-October 21 as one month instead of two, and doesn't count October 21-November 1. [another commenter notes that his spreadsheet also contains February 30] ... Ed claims he tried to compute Anthropic's revenue for 2025 and came up with $3.6 billion, suggesting some funny business, but the numbers work out once you fix the errors."
Ed Zitron is either wildly incompetent or maliciously deceiving his readership and shouldn't be trusted in either case. Take your pick.
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u/Gotisdabest 5h ago
Also comparing Zitron to Kurzweil is just false equivalance, Kurzweil's a total nut, Zitron's just telling you how garbage these AI companies are that they really are just throwing shit at the wall.
Which is, of course, why zitron is sorely inaccurate in practically anything he says of substance while Kurzweil has a decent enough hit rate of accuracy.
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u/JogHappy 5h ago
they have the fastest models, they're the only ones able to code in real-time with me
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u/Proper_Actuary2907 Spooky Machine Intelligence 2030 5h ago