Ed Zitron on CNBC: GenAI Doesn't Work, and Big Tech Is Out of Hypergrowth Ideas

johnathan101

We've gone from asking "Can an LLM do this?" to "Is an LLM actually the best tool for this?" That's a healthier conversation.

trio8453

I don't understand the people who have the patience to listen to Zitron. It's all one-tone takes with no place for nuance, you kind of know what he's going to say and the fact the mixes genuine criticism with bad faith arguments doesn't help.

scotty79

Meanwhile Deepseek just 6x-ed their inference efficiency at zero quality loss.

tyleo

Ed Zitron, He gets things others are missing. He also misses things others are getting. I think it’s nice to have a voice criticizing the fundraising aspect of these companies. I do think we’ll see at least one of them blow up. The technology is obviously useful though. Hundreds of thousands of developers have already changed the way they were working for decades. Some of the criticisms that the technology doesn’t work at all go a bit too far.

vb-8448

Just keep in mind that Zitron is in the business of content creation. It doesn't mean he's wrong[1] but his job isn't making successful predictions. [1] Actually I think it's right on the overinvestments and ROI claims

jacknews

It actually does work for a whole range of things. Is it a panacea? Of course not, but it is potentially a sustainable business. Except - open models are barely months away from the same performance and there is no moat, so we will see commodity pricing, and the billions being heaped on the fire currently will probably not see a return, unless someone comes up with a genius trading bot perhaps.

rybosworld

I believed that $10-30 billion/year TAM figure is sourced from this research report: https://www.precedenceresearch.com/large-language-model-mark... The TAM figure they arrive at is ~$36 billion by 2030. And for 2026 they claim a TAM of $10.6B OpenAI alone is rumored to be on track for $30B of revenue in 2026. Add in Anthropic, Google, Microsoft, Meta, and Chinese providers, and the revenue being generated from LLM's in 2026 is plausibly in the range of $50-100B already. Whatever your thoughts are on the cash burn to get there are irrelevant. There's at least $50B of LLM usage being paid for in 2026. 5x higher than the figure these research report companies are providing.

returnInfinity

Folks if you believe this Ed guy, you're soon going be really disappointed. LLMs are big, Codex app is huge. You can control the browser from within codex app with just natural language. Tell codex to perform a few actions, you go get coffee and come back to work done. This is real boost in productivity.

therobots927

Anyone can explain why this was flagged?

1vuio0pswjnm7

Zitron is recently a very effective HN comment trigger Guaranteed defensive replies, usually personal attacks, HN commenters cannot seem to ignore him He must be on to something Big Tech is a slave to the dynamics of attention and popularity. They monitor these dynamics in real-time Perhaps Zitron is getting more attention and becoming more popular He was recently on Bloomberg and now CNBC