If some time in an entirely possible future they come to make a movie about “how the AI bubble burst”, Ed Zitron will doubtless be a main character. He’s the perfect outsider figure: the eccentric loner who saw all this coming and screamed from the sidelines that the sky was falling, but nobody would listen. …
This is not to say the AI bubble will burst, necessarily, but against a tidal wave of AI boosterism, Zitron’s blunt, brash scepticism has made him something of a cult figure.
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Explaining Zitron’s thesis about why generative AI is doomed to fail is not simple: last year he wrote a 19,000-word essay, laying it out. But you could break it down into two, interrelated parts. One is the actual efficacy of the technology; the other is the financial architecture of the AI boom. In Zitron’s view, the foundations are shaky in both cases.
First, there’s the matter of generative AI doing what it’s promised to do. … they cannot really learn, or create, or perform a lot of complex tasks, he argues. He questions even describing this technology as “intelligence”.
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That leads to the second part of Zitron’s argument: that the economics of the AI boom just don’t stack up. … As the dominant manufacturer of GPUs…, Nvidia is practically “printing money”, says Zitron, but … everyone else is borrowing and spending billions they may never recover.
