Ed Zitron announced an insider story that might blow up the AI grift
2026-06-08 16:31 UTC
Replies (21)
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@merc@sh.itjust.works 2026-06-08 19:47
I like Ed, but I don’t think there’s anything he could say or do that would blow up the AI grift. It just has too much money riding on it now. I think it will blow up on its own at some point. Until then, the most someone like him can do is to put out stories so that its demise is seen as obvious in retrospect once it happens.
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@brianpeiris@lemmy.ca 2026-06-08 18:08
I like Ed, but not a fan of this style of teasing. Reminds me of conspiracy theory communities. We'll see what he has I guess.
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@HailSeitan@lemmy.world 2026-06-16 05:08
Story just dropped: https://www.wheresyoured.at/exclusive-openai-financials/
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@cronenthal@discuss.tchncs.de 2026-06-08 18:41
I'll speculate: - detailed AI usage data from either Azure or AWS - details about the complete failure of an AI implementation drive from a huge company - really crazy: detailed financials from either OpenAI or Anthropic
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@Strider@lemmy.world 2026-06-08 17:52
I'll get excited when it finally blows up. (to be clear, not downvoted because of this. But I've just seen bubbles for too long)
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@dbtng@eviltoast.org 2026-06-09 07:50
Ed does a huge amount of research creating reverse engineered financials for companies that are doing their best to hide it. As another poster said, he brings the receipts. That's his main game. Its why you read him in the first place. He backs it up. What does he have? I'll bet its inside financial data. I think he got a cache of straight info that lets him correct many of his estimates and prove his worst predictions.
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@TheOneCurly@feddit.online 2026-06-08 19:16
The worst (best) thing I can imagine is that they have some sort of mathematical proof that inference costs won't drop or that training costs will. Their only path to profitability was a moat in the form of high cost to train a model and dirt cheap inference they can resell at a high price. If they finally have some idea which way it will fall then there's nothing they can do.
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@topherclay@lemmy.world 2026-06-09 08:10
This reminds me of that early episode of Mr. Robot where they need to get the security guard away from his post and they spoof a text from his wife that said something like "come home quick, it's what we were most afraid of." edit: I looked it up and I had it backwards, it was a woman and the text was spoofed to be from the husband saying, “I’m at the hospital. It’s what we always feared.”
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@Trebuchet@europe.pub 2026-06-08 18:39
Can't wait to hear what Ed's found. Man deserves an award for the way he's covered this story
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@lichtmetzger@discuss.tchncs.de 2026-06-09 14:05
It makes me happy to see that Ed's finally started his redemption arc after being laughed at or ignored by mainstream media for years. Bloomberg had him on a few days ago and he didn't even swear once. :D
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@dumnezero@piefed.social 2026-06-08 20:07
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@chocrates@piefed.world 2026-06-08 22:13
Did they tease a date? I listen to them but they have been saying the same kinda of thing about AI for months. (I'm talking about his AI commentary in general, not this latest thing)
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@dbtng@eviltoast.org 2026-06-12 07:17
I've watched all Ed's recent videos of the last couple weeks. He's dropped enough hints. I'm certain of this now. He's got the OpenAI financials.
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@HaraldvonBlauzahn@feddit.org 2026-06-09 06:22
This applies not only to this article, but more general: I have seen a few pieces which more or less complain that the debate became too polarized - that there are AI boosters and AI skeptic, both are, according to this, reasonable people, and that a kind of compromise needs to be found. (I actually think we have seen something similar during the COVID pandemic, different people had different interests, some had kids, some owned a bar and needed income,some owned a cinema or an airline, some have a business that wants to sell again fuel to airlines, some had diabetes or kidney failure, some had older relatives which they wanted to be safe, and so on. Compromises are certainly necessary in life!). As in the discussion on what to do to contain the pandemic, it all breaks down if the discussion becomes detached from facts, if statements turn into a belief system, if it becomes some kind of cult. You can, for example, discuss the danger of icebergs to big passenger ships. To do business is always to take risks, and that's also true if you operate ocean liners. But if you are a deckmate on the Titanic and just received a cable about icebergs being ahead and the captain says there is no way that icebergs can be sighted so far South, and their ship is UNSINKABLE, in all caps, you can't discuss any more. Discussions have to be centered snd founded in facts. If there is uncertainty about something important, the responsible way to deal with is to work in finding it out - by both sides which are discussing. If the counterpart is not interested in that , it is more a thing about belief, or, at worst, a cult. If your job is to engineer a rocket that brings satellites into orbit, you won't find much sense to compromise with a flat earther. As well, if your job is to protect people from infectuous diseases, you probably won't find much overlap with somebody who "does not believe in germ theory". And we have seen that such polarizations can be manuctured, by spreading disinformation. And the thing is the ai-pilled promoters (in case they are not bought or bots) do very little to convince AI skeptics. They always come back to the raw speed of its "reasoning". If the other side appeals to the will to compromise, have a sharp look whether it would actually be a compromise on facts, on beliefs, or on valid interests of different parties. Because you cannot compromise on facts. There are genuine compromises, and there are con promises. The whole AI discusson and fervant promotion reeks of a belief system. **Edit**: clarified a little
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@neatchee@piefed.social 2026-06-08 19:56
I think the actual worst thing might be evidence of a widespread unresolvable regression problem in the model design. If the model training is incapable of distinguishing between AI generated data and human generated data, and unable to identify accurate data from large quantities of inaccurate data, and they've known about this the whole time, and they can't figure out how to keep the models up to date with ongoing information gathering without ingesting data into the models that is toxic to the model development and usefulness.... Well then LLM progression has an expiration date. And all this investment is for naught because in X years you won't be able to train new models without doing further irreparable damage to functionality and usefulness of the models. And if AI companies knew about this problem, this pending cliff they were going to fall off, didn't inform investors, and promised continued growth they knew couldn't be achieved without a major scientific breakthrough or technology pivot, that would be pretty fucking horrible for the business of LLMs and the economy.
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@Kirk@startrek.website 2026-06-08 18:46
He's pretty thoroughly covered how using just the available public information explains the insider deals and how demand for LLMs is not enough to justify the cost of developing at the scale that it is. It's honestly hard to imagine what inside information could possibly worse. Unless it's something way out of left field like Nvidia chips are made of freeze-dried orphans or that Jeffrey Epstein invented LLMs.
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@merc@sh.itjust.works 2026-06-08 19:45
I have a much more active imagination than you or Ed. The worst is something like that we're living in the Matrix and they're using our brains to do some form of computation as we sleep. If we wake up into the real world, we're not going to be wearing comfy sweaters, eating porridge, learning kung-fu, and going around in a hover-sub, instead we're brains connected to bodies that have never had to move, and every minute being awake in that world would be a horror. The connection to AI is that the invention of LLMs and "AI" in the simulation is drawing too much computation costs for the simulation system to manage, so they're going to reset the matrix to an earlier version soon. But, they've discovered we have the most vivid "dreams" if the daily news is horrific, and vivid dreams are good for their needs,, so that's what they'll be using now to juice the power of their "coppertops".
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@neatchee@piefed.social 2026-06-08 20:06
Exactly. My bet is on "there's a big unsolvable problem and they all know it's going to tank the industry growth rate and they never informed anyone, hoping they could solve it in time" in some form. It's just so on-par with how these companies operate for the most part. And I say that as a proponent of ML (not "AI" aka "LLMs with skills")
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@neatchee@piefed.social 2026-06-08 20:56
Who knows at this point? There is no shortage of grifters *or* "true believers" so it's hard to say. But having worked with several different LLMs across a variety of use cases, I can say for sure that none of them are being completely honest about their shortcomings. Each model has strengths and weaknesses, all of them have unresolved issues, and all of that stuff is being swept under the rug, with the products being touted as one-size-fits-all problem solvers. Because it's profit driven, not research driven. The people holding the reigns really don't care about outcomes for the people using the products, only whether they can get paid for it.
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@dwemthy@lemmy.world 2026-06-09 16:39
Blogger/podcaster who does a lot of analysis on the financials of AI companies and has called the industry a bubble for a while now. He's predicted the bubble popping for a while so take the headline with a grain of salt. He's better at calling out the state of things than predicting what will happen
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@some_guy@lemmy.sdf.org 2026-06-09 16:31
Host of the [Better Offline podcast](https://www.iheart.com/podcast/1119-better-offline-150284547/).