Dan Luu's piece talks about this! He gives the example of Ray Kurzweil, who is similarly catastrophically wrong about everything, just in the opposite direction as Zitron. Luu's point isn't that anti-AI analysis is bad; it's that Zitron is bad. Zitron is bad in this analysis no matter what Altman says. It could be the case that Altman is also bad.

> Ed Zitron is a blow hard and frequently overstates things to the point where it is hard to take seriously, but so are the AI industry leaders.

Except that the AI industry leaders actually have skin in the game/are in the trenches and competing in the market. Ed Zitron wants you to subscribe to a newsletter so that you can read doom and gloom and...?

If you invested based on his advice, you'd have missed huge gains and/or lost money.

And I say this as a person who thinks most of the "AI industry leaders" are ethically questionable, at best, and ethically bankrupt, at worst, and that the stock market should be approached with caution due to valuations.

> multiple breathless press releases warning that the end of white collar work is "just 6 months away"

I'd like to see an example of this.

I think Altman and Amodei have been quite sober with their actual predictions. They've said things like "models can now do white collar work" but haven't yet said it is the end of white collar work.

The closest actual quote to this was in In March 2025, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei told a Council on Foreign Relations audience that AI would be writing 90 percent of code in three to six months, and essentially all of it within twelve months.

I think that he underestimated how long it takes for technology to get uptake but in terms of capabilities he was perhaps 6 months out. I'd say that Fable class models are definitely capable of writing essentially all software, and that was released June 2026.

I think one important distinction is at least they have some humility to admit they were wrong. I think Ed Zitron has rarely, if ever acknowledged he was wrong.

Man, as a former extreme skeptic, I watched a video from Eric Schmidt in early 2025 where he said that by the end of the year nobody would be coding, and that one was dead frickin on.

My bet is that Amodei's claims about the dangers of AI are the most likely to come true – I'm predicticing amodei/anthropic will become the evil it was against.

Yep I distinctly remember at the beginning of 2023 that folks were predicting that we were less than two years away from there being no jobs for software developers. Pretty soon we'll reach double that timeline.

And of course it really has changed everything! But that was not all that a lot of people were prognosticating.

No, you see, they were right all along, they just "didn't anticipate the public outcry against data center expansion", thus the obviously inevitable AI takeover of the economy is being slowed by NIMBY curmudgeons who should be ignored and punished.

The end of white collar work mean that company can finish all jobs by new model.

The 5090 Nvidia card evidently is selling for five grand now! It’s just a question of when the bubble burst….

To be fair, Zitron's career is as a commentator. To some extent, I expect CEOs of companies to make ridiculous claims. At the end of the day, when shareholders come knocking, what they care about is whether or not your company is growing.

No such mechanism for social media personalities. You can be wrong 90% of the time, and your audience will still praise you for the 10% of the time you were right.

The big difference is that Altman et al aren't just, or even mainly, pundits or prognosticators. Zitron's whole thing is commentary and predictions about AI and his predictions are almost all wrong.

Altman and friends are mainly actually making and delivering AI. If they also hype their timelines/valuations, they also seem to make directional progress on the goals.

Here's an example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_predictions_for_autono...

But I think anyone who evaluates their claims understands that they’re talking their own books.

Zitron’s problems are more subtle. He benefits financially from his own claims, while also touting his impartiality and capacity for objective thought.