Join the discussion
Write your take first — we'll ask for email only when you're ready to publish.
- Hacker News
- I doubt they would go public if anthropic does and it’s a slaughter. Allowing anthropic to go first might be in their best interest.by edgyquant
- Another excellent Zitron article.
The actual numbers he presents are well sourced and, sadly, correct.
Even if AI is the future of computing, we will have a 9.x economic earthquake headed our way.
Read his articles carefully. Don't be distracted by the salt, the swearing is just there to help the numbers go down easier.
Work it out with a pencil. For those of us with the usual innumeracy about billions, trillions, etc, it can be helpful to draw diagrams on graph paper.
Also, @dang, unflag this please, it is well within the HN ambit.
by 1attice - I would watch it happen with glee. I dont know exactly what all the other bad side effects it would had. I assume it will sux majorly for a lot of people and would not like that.
But, OpenAI investors and management loosing money and power would be the one part of it I would enjoy.
by watwut - Unfairly flagged, bumped way off front page: https://news.social-protocols.org/stats?id=49347207
It’s a long read with well-sourced numbers that make the point well.
by Barbing - Edit the config of the AI startups you have properly designed to be platform agnostic and make it use the other platforms models, wait the CI green and deploy prod
- This seems to be an increasingly likely outcome. But In the aftermath, like the dot com crash, the debt, and assets are distributed in the liquidation. So it's not the death of AI, or even of ChatGPT. Doctorow wrote about this, but with less bombast than Zitron. https://doctorow.medium.com/https-pluralistic-net-2025-09-27...
- A less bombastic quote from the cited Doctorow: " AI is the asbestos we are shoveling into the walls of our society and our descendants will be digging it out for generations". I am a big fan of Cory, but as a developer I tend to think that AI will continue to aid us in refining what we shovel as well as what was once already shoveled -- refining it from a carcinogen into a benign and load-bearing :D foundation. The metaphor is catchy, but may not be apt, unless somehow we unilaterally decide that use of AI itself is the cancer and we all act to eliminate it. I think a dismal fate for OpenAI and Anthropic is likely quite separate from the fate of AI itself, particularly for software development.by waffletower
- Probably a cambrian explosion of new startups. New stars are made of the refuse of old ones.by PLenz
- Stock market might dip 20%+, because OpenAI is a large buyer of GPUs, RAMs, servers and disks, every chip company will be impacted from removing huge customer from their revenue.
then flywheel effect might kick off and impact carriers and construction companies building data centers and delivering things there.
which impacts investor trust and they might start pulling their money from AI companies, which in turn, they either need to increase prices or downsize their efforts
by throwaw12 - Chip makers may be fully booked now and have extra revenue because of AI, but that also creates deferred demand elsewhere. The prices will not fall immediately because of the crash of a single company. The scarcity has probably negative impact on the economy in general, so stock market should recover after that quickly or at least stay near a healthy valuation level.by ivan_gammel
- I find it hard to justify any conclusion other than we're about to repeat the crash of 1929 in terms of stock prices. Back then, stocks dropped 90% over 3 years. We'll be lucky if 10% actual value remains after the bonfire that's about to happen.by mikewarot
- Not commenting on the rest of the piece but why is everyone assuming that OpenAI’s executive departures are all voluntary? Sam Altman has shown plenty of willingness to clean house among the top ranks in the past. He isn’t going to shy away from firing a revenue officer if targets aren’t being met.by paxys
- I don't think they need to be voluntary to be pessimistic about the implication of the departures. It can be argued just as easily that so may high level execs being fired because of underperformance means OpenAI isn't achieving their goals. Revenue targets not being met is a large part of AI bubble promoters' thesis.by PKop
- What happens if people realize Ed Zitron has been rage farming to harvest subscription dollars for a few years now?by WarmWash
- I welcome AI skepticism but Ed’s often does seem to be done in bad faith. I feel like his claims border on, “AI has no use case whatsoever.” Which clearly isn’t true in 2026.by tyleo
- Thats basically all journalismby advisedwang
- look, he says right at the beginning he is NOT trying to be a buzzkill!!! this is real news!!! hahaby 0gs
- He sells outrage to ill informed people who don't know any better. There's real issues, but it's far more nuanced than Zitron seems willing to bring to his audience.by packetlost
- Zitron is far more negative when it comes to the utility of LLMs than I am, but dear God would it be satisfying to watch him be proven right on the financials.
His as-of-late frequent appearances on Bloomberg, CNBC, and Scott Galloway's podcast, as well as his collaborations with Ed Elson from Galloway's podcast must feel like a great vindication for him already. Quite impressive for a person who is self-taught in that area, just over the past two years.
edit: And, of course, the post is flagged. We must bury our heads in the sand again.
by bogzz - It’s far from vindication. All these TV networks have slots dedicated for extreme doomers to come in and say “the sky is falling! There’s going to be a recession soon. Sell everything!!” Been seeing it every day for 15 years now.by paxys
- Zitron is really really good. He taught me the strategy of "screenshot all the wild AI-bro claims" to keep track of them and call them out when it all collapses. The comments here villifying him are wrong and unhinged. Sometimes you need to be disliked a little to correctly predict the future.
- Doesn't look flagged to me. Though it triggered the flamewar checks I thinkby dgellow
- > but dear God would it be satisfying to watch him be proven right on the financials.
I don't get why there are so many people who need Zitron to be wrong. It reminds me of back in the days when people still liked Elon and every criticism of him or Tesla must be a short-seller spreading lies to move the price.
I think it's pretty easy to slot Ed's predictions into your possibility space even if you're still betting on a different outcome being more likley. Something else is going on.
by dogleash - I had to use Google to find the comments after I read the story. Y-combinator moderation is far from invisible.by waffletower