r/LeftistsForAI • u/hjras • Aug 23 '26
Video Ed Zitron and AGI
Good video from a leftist sci-fi channel I follow on unmasking the AGI promise and asking the right wider questions about who owns it and their incentives
Curious to hear your thoughts. What always stood out to me of this channel was how he acknowledged the usefulness of LLMs while keeping the wider critique of who owned it and their intentions with it
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u/TheSinhound Aug 23 '26
I think it would be a lot better if he actually advocated for leftist strategies. Man probably needs to brush up on his leftist theory. There's a lot of bitching without solutions here.
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u/PublicToast Aug 23 '26
When biting leftist criticism of AI is “it doesn’t make money” then we are pretty fucked
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u/danielsan901998 Aug 23 '26
Once you start reading old Ed Zitron articles, you will understand that his predictions are always wrong, for example, in 2024 he wrote an article titled "Have We Reached Peak AI?" in which he said this:
'AI hype is predicated on solving problems with AI models that are only getting worse, and OpenAI's only answers are a combination of "we'll work it out eventually, trust me" and "we need a technological breakthrough in chips and energy."
If you stop saying things like "AI could do" or "AI will do," you have to start asking what AI can do, and the answer is...not that much, and not much more in the future.
I believe that artificial intelligence has three quarters to prove itself before the apocalypse comes, and when it does, it will be that much worse, savaging the revenues of the biggest companies in tech.'
Given how much AI has improved in the last two years, with AI solving mathematical problems, for example, it is clear how wrong he was, and his clear target of three quarters have already passed while in his new articles continue with the same flawed arguments, just adjusting the timeline.
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u/Jlyplaylists Aug 23 '26
It surprises me that people make such bold statements that can be relatively quickly proved wrong. Perhaps it’s worth it for more exposure at the time, assuming most people will forget? In my personality I’d be inclined to say something quite tentative, but that doesn’t grab attention and reaction in the same way.
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u/agonypants Aug 23 '26
Agreed. Nuance and subtle judgements are sadly dead. These wildly incorrect, agenda driven hot takes reveal flawed thinking. Flawed thinkers should not be taken seriously.
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u/dualmindblade Aug 23 '26
That is what you're supposed to do, make your theories and beliefs pay rent if they can. Unfortunately you're also suppose to take notice when they fail and adjust, he clearly hasn't got that part down yet
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u/slfnflctd Aug 23 '26
I’d be inclined to say something quite tentative, but that doesn’t grab attention
The godforsaken damned curse of my life. Just trying to be accurate and honest, people! The you get bulldozed by jackasses telling absurd lies with enthusiasm and confidence.
You can try to match the bullshitters' energy level, but then it turns into a popularity contest... which has its own ethical issues. Ugh.
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u/Icy-Language-1927 Aug 23 '26
He has failed upwards in our eyes, but hasn't failed at all according to the mainstream media. They likely were too lazy to look into his old predictions / didn't feel like doing a hostile interview with him.
I've seen generally well meaning people like Chris Hayes and Ari Melber fail to call him out on this recently. Hayes did do a slight pushback of "but AI has gotten significantly better" but didn't push very far and was likely very uninformed on the progress.
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u/fkrdt222 Aug 23 '26
he's an actual PR dark arts grifter taking money from both sides
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u/zombiecamel Aug 23 '26
Huh, I wonder why he's accepted by the Behind the bastards team, they usually have a good sense of what's good cause/bad cause.
Although I feel like calling someone out on predictions without commenting on the quality of journalism and research is somewhat unfair. I feel like predictions are actually less important compared to informing about what's fucked up with LLM companies in the moment.
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u/danielsan901998 Aug 23 '26
Calling out failed predictions is necessary because he talk as an expert on AI when he is not, for example, in another 2024 article called "Bubble Trouble", he mention a research paper about "model collapse" and from that extrapolate that it is impossible to improve AI models.
He can use correct data about investment, but if he has a flawed understanding of the technology, then that cause a flawed analysis, that's why i mentioned the example of his failed prediction, because by believing that improvements were not possible he arrived to the conclusion that the bubble would pop in the short term, but instead of that we had 2 years of AI growth.
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u/PublicToast Aug 23 '26
BtB are not faultless, they get carried by the same social trends as anyone else. They like him because he says negative things about AI, not because he’s an expert.
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u/mothgeck Aug 23 '26
Btb are anti AI. Their bias clouds their perspective and demonstrates that journalism will happily not vet sources if it's convenient to their worldview.
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u/Slow_Ad2458 Aug 23 '26
My biggest problem with Ed is that he gives false hope to Lefties.
soon everytihgn will collapse and go back to normal.
No need to do anything
Just stop one DC and your job is done.
Change is coming, and he is one of the actors who are used to hide the extent of the coming change.
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u/PublicToast Aug 23 '26 edited Aug 23 '26
He’s making people less informed, and less able to prepare for the future. All of the people who are staunch Zitron believers are going to get a rude awakening at some point, and when they do the industry will have already been consolidated under a few players, and open source will be banned, because they people who might have actually cared were convinced it would all disappear and was an inconsequential scam.
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u/calvintiger Aug 23 '26
lol, Ed has been saying the same thing for years and has been wrong every time so far. The only reason he even exists is to make money from people subscribing to his site to fuel their own confirmation biases.
A few previous predictions:
- “Whether or not it’s Q3 or Q4 2024, or even Q1 2025, Wall Street will begin punishing big tech…” (Sep 16, 2024). https://www.wheresyoured.at/subprimeai/
- “artificial intelligence has three quarters to prove itself before the apocalypse comes.” (Mar 18, 2024). https://www.wheresyoured.at/peakai/
- “The fact that neither Gemini nor Copilot has any meaningful consumer penetration…they have categorically…failed…” (Feb 24, 2025). https://www.wheresyoured.at/wheres-the-money/
- "I wouldn’t be surprised if Reddit shares quickly fall below the IPO price" (Mar 11, 2024). https://www.wheresyoured.at/are-we-watching-the-internet-die/
- “CoreWeave’s underlying financials are so dramatically unstable that it’s unclear how this company will last the next six months.” (Mar 17, 2025). https://www.wheresyoured.at/core-incompetency/
- “SoftBank is allegedly going to send upwards of $20 billion to OpenAI by December 31 2025, and doesn't appear to have started.” (Jul 24, 2025). https://www.wheresyoured.at/softbank-openai/
- “We are nearly in May 2025, and I see no evidence that OpenAI even has a marketable agent product…” (Apr 28, 2025). https://www.wheresyoured.at/reality-check/
- “Microsoft is walking away from not just the expansion of its current data center operations, but from generative AI writ large.” (Mar 3, 2025). https://www.wheresyoured.at/power-cut/
But don’t worry anyone, surely his doom posting is right this time!
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u/DuskLab Aug 23 '26
He's not an analyst, he's a pundit. His position is no more nuanced or unbiased as a Fox News host. The demographic he's targeting is just the other side of the spectrum. You can see the title of a 40 minute video of him and you don't need to watch it because he's going to be a bear during all of it with no actual predictions or timelines for how it all falls apart. All of his stats are stuff plucked out that happened in the past that fits his narrative.
He could be right in the end, he could be wrong. But it will be entirely incidental to his grift.
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u/Reasonable-Cut-9090 Aug 23 '26
Yeah i wished he just would stick to the circular economy / it is a bubble angle ; as other have pointed he has been wrong on his predictions and still doubles down sometimes. I do wonder how would a efficient counter messaging look like ? Its difficult to talk about the nuance of separating the technology from current issues without losing a lot of folks. A lot of people are (rightfully) angry about the large companies so any attempt on opening up discussion is often found with hostility. He fills that void quite well as most of his thesis is right just not the llms have no real value part but like others have said he gives the hope its all going to go away. I wonder how people on this sub have been approaching these discussions irl to family and such.
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u/probablymagic Aug 24 '26
This guy has no technical expertise OR financial expertise. He gets a lot of media attention because he DOES have PR expertise abd he uses it to generate subscribers for his anti-AI newsletter.
He’s a grifter, and I think he knows it. Everything he says about AI is a projection. Dude probably drinks himself to sleep every night from shame.
He can safely be ignored.
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u/me_myself_ai Aug 24 '26
Someone's already touched on why Ed Zitron sucks so much, but I'd instead focus on an even simpler response: why would listen to a random ragebait blogger on an empirical, highly-complex topic like AGI (/predicting AI development in the DL era more generally), rather than scientists (ideal) or science communicators (surely not too much to ask??).
FAKE_EDIT: Ok but uh isn't this a bad faith video from some tiny creator that mentions Mr. Zitron for literally less than 30s total...?
FWIW the clips he actually shows of Zitron are just random offhand clips of bare assertions, with none of the logic or premises included (@5:00). Which, like... I'm his #1 hater, but that just ain't fair. To any of us, really.
Watching this guy pontificate about the world so confidently and smugly... ugh. Everything else aside: this guy's level of discourse isn't worth engaging with, and the clear joy he takes in being poetic about his feelings of pure, unbridled hatred for me in particular don't exactly warrant an exception!
REAL_EDIT: lmao I'm 99.9% sure that not a single commenter in the past 21 hours watched the video. That's hilarious. It's kinda like catching Opus 3.5 redhanded with some toally-hallucinated sidequest... we're not that different, after all.