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- Hacker News
- The use of this phrase by the science denial side of this debate is, so infuriating that I must simply end my comment here.
Look up, Ed. I know you know.
by bbor - > The other problem is the monstrous and abusive marketing campaign from the AI industry itself, and those who use AI on a regular basis. If you are against the consensus that AI will grow ever-larger every single quarter forever, you will be harassed and dogpiled across multiple social media platforms by everyone from AI influencers to actual journalists. The fact that it’s more professionally dangerous to critique the powerful than it is to align with them is disgusting, but I should be clear that these tactics only reinforce that I’m on the right track.
> As Nik Suresh noted in his recent piece, refusing to say that AI is giving you massive productivity benefits will lead to actual professional consequences, because so much is riding on the overall grift about what AI can do (which is much, much less than the boosters will promise). This runs antithetical to productivity or good sense, and everybody involved in it should be both eternally shamed and shunned from any sensible business.
> And while the AI industry and its fandom will claim that people like me are “skeptics” and “haters,” the outright hatred and vitriol that they spew for not falling in line behind a nakedly false narrative built on outright disinformation is disgraceful.
sigh
by minimaxir - Whether wrong or profound, it probably deserves a bit of actual discourse.by MrDrMcCoy
- Ctrl-F “amortiz”: Not Found
Microsoft’s total depreciation and amortization in Q2 2027 was $11B - not clear how much of this is AI related. Apparently they had $34B in AI ARR as of May.
So let’s say their AI capex amortization and revenue are about equal. Not amazing, obviously they’re relying on continued growth, but doesn’t seem like the end of the world?
Compare that to Ed’s framing - Microsoft has $34B in revenue but spent $116B in capex last year to “make it”. They’re doomed!
But that capex spend is to make future revenue. Clearly he assumes demand won’t increase in the future, and that future projected revenue is “fake”. And sure, it definitely might not increase enough to make profitability.
But his whole analysis hinges on that one assumption. The entire article, all the numbers he gish gallops at you, could basically be replaced with “I don’t think AI demand and revenue will increase much beyond today.” Yeah, we know.
by npilk - > gish gallops
this is a funny way of spelling "cites sources" and "does basic math"
by twister2920 - So where would this increased demand come from?
We see that these companies have no moat.
We see that companies are already balking at the cost and are increasingly looking at what the actual return of their current spend is, let alone when these prices have been increasing.
Where is the increase in demand going to be coming from? Especially the increase needed to make this make sense?
by ofjcihen - I get the feeling the author had a very simple and clear idea and then spent a lot of time fumbling about trying to present it clearly.
At one point I'm pretty sure there are six paragraphs shortly after each other that are all trying to restate the paragraphs before it. Since nothing seemed to become much clearer I kind of gave up at that point.
by shiandow - That’s Zitron for ya. To be fair to him, he’s kind of forced into this position: he’s now famous for championing a cause (AI is dumb and will never work and the scientists are lying) that is becoming increasingly untenable by the day.by bbor
- This seems to be the standard response to Ed’s work. He presents facts and figures that backup his theories in a painstaking manner and then detractors reply with something like this.
Following HNs guidelines, my most charitable interpretation of your response is that you don’t understand the arguments or numbers behind them and you aren’t just dismissing the arguments because you don’t like them. For that I’m saying you need to feed the article to the LLM of your choice and work back and forth until you get to an understanding of what’s being argued.
by ofjcihen - Again, Zitron provides the numbers for his theories and they’re very compelling.
I’m still not seeing any equally compelling arguments as to why this is not the case. Only accusations of doomerism and links to him calling the bubble collapse early.
by ofjcihen - Nobody can rebut 10k words of rambling across half a dozen of separate arguments in a forum post. It'd be too long, and there is no readership for a point-by-point rebuttal for the dozens logic errors, misreprentations and various sleights of hand that the arguments (such as they are) are built on. And if you try to just rebut one thing, well, that wasn't actually the core argument but just incidental.
I've seen people talk about how compelling they find these articles, but literally never have they been able to point at a good argument. Like, in a paragraph, what's the most compelling and impactful argument in this article? What are a couple of numbers that make it so?
by jsnell - > I’m still not seeing any equally compelling arguments as to why this is not the case.
Zitron relies too heavily on how big the numbers are and not how workable the numbers are. Further, he seems to think that it will all just implode, which is pretty unlikely.
AI companies are making money. 1T in purchase negotiations is something that can be renegotiated if the numbers don't improve. And there's actually a pretty good chance that these AI companies sell the US federal government on AI being a strategic advantage which can ultimately gets a nice federal funding source.
Even in the worst case of what ed predicts, the more likely outcome is that the AI companies slow rollouts and purchases. The general market takes a hit, but it's ultimately not the end of the world.
But further, even with AI reducing their consumption, that doesn't mean chip manufacturers are hosed, we've already built up huge demand for things like RAM which are supremely supply constrained. That' has slowed the sale of consumer and enterprise electronics. Easing back on the AI market means those markets will likely pick up the slack again. Especially because I suspect businesses will be seriously thinking about things like "Why don't we deploy deepseek locally to save on compute cost?".
I suspect that prices for AI will ultimately increase before any of this happens and with those price increases that's where I can see there being more a demand to break ties with the bigger AI companies.
What Ed misses is that big business has much MUCH more flexibility when it comes to financing than even a midsize corperation. They have direct lines to bank presidents.
by cogman10