I'm not even saying he's "wrong"; I wouldn't want to be long OpenAI (I don't think they're doomed but that's too much risk for my blood). But I would bet all my money that Zitron has no idea what he's talking about here.
Yeah, I'm also not saying that, I'm not "OMG AGI tomorrow" either. I think he was one of the first to voice concerns about the financial situation of AI companies and that was valuable, but if you look at his blog he's basically written the same post nonstop for two years. How many times do you need to say that?
Mind sharing why you think that (genuinely curious)?
I think Ed hit some broad points, mostly (i) there were some breathless predictions (human level intelligence) that aren't panning out; (ii) oh wow they burn a ton of cash. A ton; (iii) and they're very Musky: lots of hype, way less product. Buttressed with lots of people saying that if AI did a thing, then that would be super useful; much less showing of the thing being done or evidence that it's likely to happen soon.
None of which says these tools aren't super useful for coding. But I'm missing the link between super useful for coding and a business making $100B / year or more which is what these investments need. And my experience is more like... a 20% speed improvement? Which, again, yes please... but not a fundamental rewriting of software economics.
Yeah; if this ends up as “some people and companies find this to be a useful programming tool and will pay a moderate amount for it”, then you have essentially recreated Borland, or Jetbrains, business-model-wise. The current valuations are based on something else altogether.
I absolutely would not trust an AI CEO either, though all of them understand the basics of technology more than Zitron does; Zitron has said some really cringe things (he's not a technologist by background, and it shows).
I have been strongly-tempted to make Zitron and Marcus GPTs... But every time I think about getting started I realize a simple shell script would work better.
Oh wait Claude did a better job than I would have:
That's why I wanted to share that session specifically -- usually I provide a heck of a lot more context than that. But ... They were so well-known in personalityspace that that's all it took, which was its own funny.
