Item — HN Reader

I can’t read the linked FT article but I wanted to mention that Ed Zitron’s podcast Better Offline is interesting for me because he has a contrarian view of tech that is often different from my own. Some of his recent podcasts on the funky economics of excessive AI investments and data center investments vs. any real payoffs for society. I feel my own views slightly shifting when I listen to him.

I value material that makes me re-visit my own assumptions about the world.

4 comments

I found "Better Offline" through "Tech Won't Save Us" where Ed is occasionally a guest. It also has some critical takes on technology if you are looking for more of that content.

I found him in the same way, and thought he was interesting and insightful.

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.

> funky economics of excessive AI investments and data center investments vs. any real payoffs for society.

This is why I'm convinced Sam makes his money from when OpenAI spends rather than when OpenAI earns.

What a co-incidence. In the USA the GDP goes up mainly from consumers spending, and business spending to a lesser extent. Otherwise not in relation to any wealth being created or value added by those people and enterprises.

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.

"I can't read the linked FT article ..."

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.htm

Interesting if he really is more convincing in speech than in writing. His writing is certainly flamboyant, but the aggression and expletives seem more targeted at hyping up people who already believe the things he writes, not for making people change their minds. He found a niche in anti-tech grift, and is now exploiting the niche for all he can.

But 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.

This is exactly on point. Also, his day job is shilling AI companies.

Yeah, I have no doubt that he's got some good insights, but its crystal clear that he's just hyping it all up as part of a grift. I get serious Alex Jones vibes from him

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.

Distorting the economy is a real issue and should be talked about.

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 thing I find off in his analysis is he just assumes AI is rubbish and won't get better, hence all the investment in it is wasted. I don't think that's realistic. Even if you are skeptical there's some chance it'll work out.

I've read a handful of his LLM articles completely, last year and this year. What I'm getting from his articles (I think) is this:

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.