Birbla

Join the discussion

Write your take first — we'll ask for email only when you're ready to publish.

Sign in
  • Hacker News
  • The chimp brain cant handle unpredictability for too long. Just keep pushing people into unpredictable situations or specifically try getting someone to say I dont know constantly. Beyond a point story generation starts, to feel sane within an "I dont know" reality.

    Truth is things are unpredictable. Predictability of anything hasnt increased.

    Stories/Lies exist for cope. Cause of chimp brain dynamics responding to unpredictability.

    by jxy6
  • So right towards the end Zitron says it isn't clear what Google, MS and Amazons plan is. But he just finished explaining that Anthropic and Open AI are paying for them to build data centers, and implied that on face value, this was to rent the data centers back to Anthropic and Open AI.

    Seems to me they are just bleeding them dry so that when the money runs out for Anthropic and Open AI, they will be left with data centers that the can run their own (or open) models.

    by jay_kyburz
  • Another view of that is, hedging their bets. Which businesses do all the time.
    by JoeAltmaier
  • His follow-up point was, "that seems like a ridiculously nice double-dipping situation" until you realize that money depends on only two "unsustainable" customers, spending other people's money, that now have to become absurdly massive to ever make this work.
    by dd8601fn
  • If you read more of Zitron's work, he says that there's little demand for the AI compute power outside of OpenAI and Anthropic. If they are bled dry, then the hyperscalers will not have enough customers for the data centers which they have blown so much capex spend on and will have to soon go into debt to ensure they can be built. The GPUs and the high bandwidth memory they use have little use other than to run and train these LLMs.
    by Driver4732
  • I don't fully agree with Zitron on all his points but it's very hard to disprove the larger points will somehow resolve themselves. One point that I think will determine the future, moreso with data centers, is politics. Laws are not unchangeable and making decisions that determine the next 5-10 years of action based on the current law is a recipe for disaster. "Buying" a politician still has to account for the fact they can be voted out.
    by tolugenius
  • What laws do you think will change
    by artninja1988
  • > making decisions that determine the next 5-10 years of action based on the current law is a recipe for disaster.

    How else can one make business decisions? Or any long term decision, financial or otherwise.

    If you are correct, which I fear you may be, then we, in the West generally, are now living in a low trust society.

    Which is not a good thing at all, and should be of utmost concern.

    by perpetuallunch
  • Even if we don't consider economics, the reason "AI" has not increased white collar productivity is because it's not necessary for knowledge work beyond aggregating information for research. Knowledge work has always been a lot more arguing than "doing".

    Google was already the default option for this, and Google Gemini is a genuine improvement for Google Search. Google (and Apple) have sidestepped all the drama by just improving their existing products. Sometimes that's the right call in the shorter term, and this is one of those times.

    by sublinear
  • Yes, and the scary thing is, when Google starts selling ads in Gemini results, you wont be able to see them, it will be a bigger business that Google Search ever was.

    Update: Perhaps this is what Zitron doesn't want to say out loud, (and why investors are confused), the return on investment is going to come from having the largest mind control machine the world has even known.

    by jay_kyburz
  • I don't think Zitron has been right about anything in the last 5 years. But he talks a good talk.
    by ikidd
  • I cannot understand why people listen to him? I feel like I must be living in an alternate universe to a substantial amount of people? It's bananas...
    by piloto_ciego
  • Every post about Zitron here seems to have a comment like yours at the top.

    Another thing those comments have in common is that they offer no logical or rational explanation of why he is supposedly wrong.

    by tcp_handshaker