The post is silly, but I do not expect Zitron's commentary to be particularly illuminating as he is a charlatan himself. I could point to many examples, but here is a blog post I wrote about one case of him trying very hard to not understand a simple and familiar situation: https://crespo.business/posts/cost-of-inference/.
I still fear for what AI training will cost (financially and ecologically). The outputs also seem like a force multiplier that's more likely to be used for bad than good, at least without better guardrails. And it doesn't seem to make people any better, aside from a narrow view of productivity.
Hopefully Ed is wrong. Or at least there are more articulate and methodical skeptics who can keep us grounded.
>And it doesn't seem to make people any better, aside from a narrow view of productivity.
This could be said about almost any new technology. Spreadsheets, word processors, nearly any tech startup.
People who use LLMs daily generally feel their lives are better because of them. Yes, including the non-"4o cultist psychosis" types.
As for harms: thoughtful AI worriers and doomers have been trying to sound those alarms for decades, but AI skeptics generally shoot it all down because it would require accepting what "hype" and "boosters" say about likely future capabilities, or something like that.
Not to say all AI skepticism (especially concerning very short timelines) is necessarily unwarranted, but Zitron and Marcus are just professional contrarians selling a message to people who want their biases and priors affirmed.
But who was the charlatan? The person predicting the recession, or the government who stopped the predicted recession by adding another $5T to the debt pile, to almost inevitably cause a recession later, at a more politically convenient time for those in power today? The recession happened, as predicted, the government absorbed it for another day.
The person predicting the recession. Even if the government were preventing each new recession through historically unrivalled foresight, the predictor should eventually start incorporating that into the prediction.
The post is silly, but I do not expect Zitron's commentary to be particularly illuminating as he is a charlatan himself. I could point to many examples, but here is a blog post I wrote about one case of him trying very hard to not understand a simple and familiar situation: https://crespo.business/posts/cost-of-inference/.