Post #1752273
2026-04-28 18:45 UTC
Replies (2)
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@gerikson@awful.systems 2026-04-29 09:24
I take Zitron’s takes with a massive grain of salt, but I think the fundamental difference between him and rats is that for him, AI is just another technology. He’s looking at the figures, seeing the adoption, and not premising his arguments with the supposition that Anthropic’s Claude is literally gonna escape and kill us all. Piper says she’s fine with paying $100/month for Claude. OK, but how large is the total addressable market for that kind of monthly expenditure - especially in a world where costs are rising? I’ve seen people stating that because they personally spend $200 on streaming services, increasing that load by 50% monthly is no big deal for them. But streaming services are much more mainstream than AI agents, and crucially, adding another subscriber to them is basically zero-cost for the provider on the margin. Not so with AI! The more people use them, the more they cost for the provider! We’re seeing “pricing adjustments” from both Anthropic and Microsoft, which sure doesn’t align with the idea that they have a huge inference pricing margin cushion. Everything is gonna get more expensive - fuel, chips, employees (who are gonna be expected to be compensated for their own rising costs). Just based on what I’m reading in the news titls the analysis over in Ed’s favor.
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@scruiser@awful.systems 2026-04-29 19:28
I advise being very cautious about consuming Zitron’s posts He has got a dramatic and vitriolic style, but as dgerard says, he has also dug through the numbers. I see lots of criticism of Ed’s style, but not nearly so substantial criticism about the hard numbers he has come up with. The LLM companies put out contradictory and obfuscated numbers, and taken naively they seem to contradict Ed’s numbers, but as Ed has shown, many, many times, when you start trying to un-obfuscate them they start looking really bad for everyone betting on LLMs. Many coders are using chatbots, but I don’t know of evidence that it makes them more productive So more and more coders are coming around to “actually AI code is okay”… but as we’ve seen repeatedly with LLM generated content, it is very easy for people to “Clever Hans” themselves and convince themselves LLMs are contributing more than they actually are, so I am not going to trust anecdotal reports.