> For any of his posts that I read, while there are numbers thrown around, the numbers don't actually connect to a coherent argument. In many cases, as we saw above, the numbers don't even really support his argument (such as an MAU decline in Facebook causing Meta financial problems which would then cause Meta to spuriously insert AI in places it doesn't belong). I suspect he's relying on people's eyes glazing over when they see numbers and just not thinking about what the numbers mean.
A frustrating thing about Ed Zitron is that he sometimes breaks news - gets hold of leaked numbers that nobody else has, for example - but he then wraps those numbers in his own extremely biased commentary. This makes it much harder to evaluate how credible the new information is.
As someone else mentioned, ignore Ed’s personality and look solely at the balance sheets and capital analysis. Regardless of delivery, the math doesn’t math.
It's wild to me how much Ed is criticized while pathological liars like Musk and Altman are glossed over.
(Disclosure: I pay for Zitron's publication for the capital figures and exclusives he gets his hands on, I do not pay attention to his interviews, we are fact finding, if he wants to perform, I am not bothered, I've seen the performers on the other side)
Zitron has become the distorted reflection of the very AI boosters he criticizes and mocks.
I think the worst thing that happened to him was AI skepticism becoming a political position. This gave him a captive audience - as long as he says what they want to hear, which means that he can never ever concede that he might have been wrong or that AI might actually be progressing or having successes.
This is not conducive to good prediction long-term - rather it leads one to a state of cognitive dissonance where one's chosen enemies must be simultaneously terrifyingly powerful and incompetent dunces. The propagandist's disease.
He has built a following of people that want to hear his extra skeptical views. And even if he changed his mind about some things, he cannot admit it, as that is not what his followers want to hear from him.
It's rare that people make the news and build a following by saying a very balanced, down to earth opinions... unfortunately.
I think the most enjoyable part of this is to have written it in the characteristic long-form Zitron wall of text style while still managing to pack almost the whole text with meaning, which is entirely the opposite of Zitron style.
So far NVIDIA has been very careful, it’s not actual fraud, at least based on public information. It’s a very unstable and extremely risky bet, that is very likely to blow in the face face of AI companies, but it’s not fraud
There is no evidence of fraud that I have seen beyond complete speculation from the likes of Zitron. He basically just says "Look how big the numbers are! It's so big it must be fraud!"
I've been doubting him myself (his recent articles just hedge on data centers more than anything else) but then I want to ask, are there any valid critics of AI? Not a "code is bad but it'll get better" but actual criticism in the nature of the financing, politics, etc. I think separating AI as a tool and it's capabilities and AI as product that needs to make a profit is helpful, however most people are really hedging in one camp or the other in their takes.
Water usage, sure. But emissions has plenty of reasonable concern.
There are the various xAI data centers have/are running using mobile gas turbines.
In general, the extreme amount of power is going to put pressure on the grids. I hope this leads to the world doubling down on renewables to offset it all, but is that going to happen? Hell, the US actively paid [0] to stop a turbine project.
Those are two very different things, and the former should be a serious concern. If AI does indeed become a double-digit percentage of electricity usage as the AI labs themselves predict, then it becomes a significant contributor to emissions, full stop.
Like so many people posing as serious people these days, it's most accurate to think of Ed Zitron as an actor paid by his audience to tell them what they want to hear.
If we sample from Zitron’s claims, a lot of them are wrong. Probably most of them.
I think his contribution to the discourse is the bigger picture. These companies are going into potentially economy-wrecking debt over a speculative future that looks much foggier than the last two previous technological booms.
I used to pay attention to Ed Zitron, exactly because he seemed to be someone who did the research, and looked at numbers. Until one day, I realized that seems to only look at numbers as long as it serves his agenda. When it doesn't, he looks away or makes the case for why the numbers are wrong, and shields himself from these "incorrect" numbers - or people who would point to anything suggesting that AI is not a total fad.
In April 2025, Zitron wrote [1] "I am sick and tired of everybody pretending that generative AI is the next big thing." This was at the time when AI coding tools had already gone "mainstream" with devs, and pretty much everyone was using tools like GH Copilot, Cursor, or something similar.
So I replied with this observation, saying how, at least within software engineers, AI is being adopted faster than any technology before [2]. To stay objective, obviously I brought receipts: sharing how, based on an older survey I ran, ~75% of devs in that survey said they used AI coding tools. Zitron made fun of the small sample size (216 people), blocked, and pretended like AI had zero PMF anywhere in the world.
I stopped taking him seriously since then. And I'm wondering ever since: does he deliberately only look at numbers and facts that he can tell the AI doomer story around? Or is it more that he finds that there's not many people who are "informed sceptics", and decided to play this role?
Ed's right about OpenAI being out over its skis, he's right about the numbers for everything being wildly optimistic and he's right about the circular financing/leverage aspect of a bubble. He hates AI though so he can't acknowledge its usefulness, it was pretty clear to see on his DOAC interview, Stephen kept bringing up real wins and clear progress, and Ed wouldn't engage in a substantive way.
Yes, his thesis is pretty much correct, his personal opinions aren’t too relevant or valuable. It’s a mistake to take his predictions as the important thing, it’s pretty much irrelevant, the whole field is very dynamic and complex, and he obviously isn’t an oracle who can predict the future. The only thing that matters is the thesis
He's part of the professional political / social media class now. He makes his money through engagement. I've stopped trusting people of this ilk. I listen to people who make most of their money not via the media ecosystem.
Looking at it from an objective/historical perspective, when he first got on his high horse agents weren’t a thing, MCP was in its infancy at best, and half the code generated didn’t compile from frontier models.
From there everything split into two factions, which I’ll dub as believers and non-believers. From there, it has entirely been a cult following despite the evidence showing that models and agents have legs for software development.
FWIW my post history would show my extreme skepticism, and to an extent I still am. I think the real power of models isn’t the model at all but the harnesses.
Either way I think he lost the plot and runs on vibes himself. I also think this whole AI movement is going to have their 2000/2008 moment before the phoenix rises from the ashes.
what's it with people who think a bubble is literally destined to happen because of some religious belief that history repeats itself? I find it fascinating to understand the theory of mind of such people. So much confidence.
i relate to zitron cuz of how much he seems to genuinely hate the people in charge of this AI bubble. he, like me, seems to wish that when this all falls apart they get proportionate harm to go.
that'll obviously never happen. it's wishful thinking and venting tbh. that's why i like listening to his stuff.
it's better than reading the wholly AI slop docs my CEO keeps sending out
Posting revenue numbers as an example of a company not dying seems rather foolish. Microsoft's gaming side is floundering and dying and Linux has been growing at an unprecedented rate as a result of Microsoft's decisions. Not to mention the geopolitical aspects at play here as countries make a serious consideration to drop Windows.
These companies are all heavily buoyed by their investments in AI which is essentially an oroboros of money.
Zitron in general is representative of the conspiratorial thinking that has infected all spectra of the political space. Zitron obviously occupies more of the left space.
Good critique of LLMs & the companies behind them is hard to find, and it is harder when people gravitate towards this sort of thinking.
Only recently came across this guy and if u ignore the standard social media hyper hype hype he has, I dont think he is wrong even his 2024 predictions.
US has 1.5x the money supply since Covid. This means everything has to go up 1.5x to reach the same parity from before. eg inflation. All corporate earnings are going to inflate as 1b yesterday is 1.5b today.
There is no whete for these mega corps to go. They dont know how to grow. meta becoming well meta with the vr crap is case and point. meta blowing billions on a few hyped AI people is the nail.
Other than cloud, microsft/google aimt doing anything. xbox? nope, hardware? nah. It is all attention economy or selling the pick axes for it.
the only mega corp that still seems to be moving the needle is apple which i think speaks volumes.
Eds point is that AI tam or expectations are insane full stop and he admits coding has a use just not as big of a tam. Gen ai in art, music, etc did not take off at all esp compared to code. this makes sense, no one pays an artist 500k/year. their time is worth little compared to coding.
Where he is wrong tho is that this is not new. there is always a hype cycle of nonsense that screws the little people. what is new is the level of polarization. it feels like ai psychosis right now in ways that remind me of crypto but worse because ai is actually useful so people are even more insufferable.
Hate on him all you want (he's gotten very repetitive for the sake of subscribers and reads), but the basic premise that the modern AI industry is a circular-dealing, point-of-diminishing-returns grift still holds. The bubble is here and the longer it inflates, the worse the pop will be. Sure the goalposts have moved, but the basic numbers don't math.
Zitron implied 2 years ago that OpenAI would collapse by now. How's that bubble popping going? All NVDA+memory co+frontier lab numbers are accelerating
By all means, keep betting on this being a wild success and we'll see who's right in a little while. If you don't think this is a bubble then you're in for a ride.
It is funny to see mainstream media finally catching up to how much of a grifter this guy really is. I believe I was the first at least on HN to make a list of his horrible predictions over the time [1]. Since then Kelsey Piper [2] also wrote about it and got some traction.
I knew that somewhere in the future, something has to give because you can't just go around saying anything without losing some credibility. You still have some ardent followers in his cult of a subreddit.
But just to be clear: Ed is part of a bigger problem in tech journalism which is characterised by extreme pessimism and excessive skepticism. It is not correct to view Ed in isolation rather to see it as a part of the culture in which he can thrive.
A frustrating thing about Ed Zitron is that he sometimes breaks news - gets hold of leaked numbers that nobody else has, for example - but he then wraps those numbers in his own extremely biased commentary. This makes it much harder to evaluate how credible the new information is.
It's wild to me how much Ed is criticized while pathological liars like Musk and Altman are glossed over.
(Disclosure: I pay for Zitron's publication for the capital figures and exclusives he gets his hands on, I do not pay attention to his interviews, we are fact finding, if he wants to perform, I am not bothered, I've seen the performers on the other side)
In the face of AI, should be try to be even handed by an equally debased reality takes form?
Seems like one of those memes about the overton window. Critics are suppose to be even handed, but not the materialistic capitalists!
I think the worst thing that happened to him was AI skepticism becoming a political position. This gave him a captive audience - as long as he says what they want to hear, which means that he can never ever concede that he might have been wrong or that AI might actually be progressing or having successes.
This is not conducive to good prediction long-term - rather it leads one to a state of cognitive dissonance where one's chosen enemies must be simultaneously terrifyingly powerful and incompetent dunces. The propagandist's disease.
I've got some bad news for you.
He has built a following of people that want to hear his extra skeptical views. And even if he changed his mind about some things, he cannot admit it, as that is not what his followers want to hear from him.
It's rare that people make the news and build a following by saying a very balanced, down to earth opinions... unfortunately.
The other...
It's interesting how he has pivoted from denying that LLMs are useful to accusing frontier labs of Enron-scale fraud.
I suppose it's the natural pivot you have to make when your whole business is an anti-AI newsletter that costs $7 per month.
- safety critics who think AI can take over the world like Yud (I find this the least credible but still valid)
- Bernie type of critics who think AI can cause widespread job losses
- Ruxandra Teslo who thinks AI can remove meaning which I feel is the most serious one [1]
What are not valid
- environmental like emissions and water usage
- AI is useless and it will take the economy with it because it is a bubble
- AI spreads misinformation and causes societal damage
[1] https://substack.com/@ruxandrabio/p-213699661
Water usage, sure. But emissions has plenty of reasonable concern.
There are the various xAI data centers have/are running using mobile gas turbines.
In general, the extreme amount of power is going to put pressure on the grids. I hope this leads to the world doubling down on renewables to offset it all, but is that going to happen? Hell, the US actively paid [0] to stop a turbine project.
[0]: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c1e1vg0gjl5o
Those are two very different things, and the former should be a serious concern. If AI does indeed become a double-digit percentage of electricity usage as the AI labs themselves predict, then it becomes a significant contributor to emissions, full stop.
> - AI spreads misinformation and causes societal damage
Lol, I appreciate the sprinkling of well timed humor in an article that is mostly straightforward facts and analysis.
I think his contribution to the discourse is the bigger picture. These companies are going into potentially economy-wrecking debt over a speculative future that looks much foggier than the last two previous technological booms.
In April 2025, Zitron wrote [1] "I am sick and tired of everybody pretending that generative AI is the next big thing." This was at the time when AI coding tools had already gone "mainstream" with devs, and pretty much everyone was using tools like GH Copilot, Cursor, or something similar.
So I replied with this observation, saying how, at least within software engineers, AI is being adopted faster than any technology before [2]. To stay objective, obviously I brought receipts: sharing how, based on an older survey I ran, ~75% of devs in that survey said they used AI coding tools. Zitron made fun of the small sample size (216 people), blocked, and pretended like AI had zero PMF anywhere in the world.
I stopped taking him seriously since then. And I'm wondering ever since: does he deliberately only look at numbers and facts that he can tell the AI doomer story around? Or is it more that he finds that there's not many people who are "informed sceptics", and decided to play this role?
[1] https://x.com/edzitron/status/1916903519594156407?s=20
[2] https://x.com/GergelyOrosz/status/1916906481686921483?s=20
From there everything split into two factions, which I’ll dub as believers and non-believers. From there, it has entirely been a cult following despite the evidence showing that models and agents have legs for software development.
FWIW my post history would show my extreme skepticism, and to an extent I still am. I think the real power of models isn’t the model at all but the harnesses.
Either way I think he lost the plot and runs on vibes himself. I also think this whole AI movement is going to have their 2000/2008 moment before the phoenix rises from the ashes.
that'll obviously never happen. it's wishful thinking and venting tbh. that's why i like listening to his stuff.
it's better than reading the wholly AI slop docs my CEO keeps sending out
These companies are all heavily buoyed by their investments in AI which is essentially an oroboros of money.
Good critique of LLMs & the companies behind them is hard to find, and it is harder when people gravitate towards this sort of thinking.
US has 1.5x the money supply since Covid. This means everything has to go up 1.5x to reach the same parity from before. eg inflation. All corporate earnings are going to inflate as 1b yesterday is 1.5b today.
There is no whete for these mega corps to go. They dont know how to grow. meta becoming well meta with the vr crap is case and point. meta blowing billions on a few hyped AI people is the nail.
Other than cloud, microsft/google aimt doing anything. xbox? nope, hardware? nah. It is all attention economy or selling the pick axes for it.
the only mega corp that still seems to be moving the needle is apple which i think speaks volumes.
Eds point is that AI tam or expectations are insane full stop and he admits coding has a use just not as big of a tam. Gen ai in art, music, etc did not take off at all esp compared to code. this makes sense, no one pays an artist 500k/year. their time is worth little compared to coding.
Where he is wrong tho is that this is not new. there is always a hype cycle of nonsense that screws the little people. what is new is the level of polarization. it feels like ai psychosis right now in ways that remind me of crypto but worse because ai is actually useful so people are even more insufferable.
Zitron implied 2 years ago that OpenAI would collapse by now. How's that bubble popping going? All NVDA+memory co+frontier lab numbers are accelerating
I knew that somewhere in the future, something has to give because you can't just go around saying anything without losing some credibility. You still have some ardent followers in his cult of a subreddit.
But just to be clear: Ed is part of a bigger problem in tech journalism which is characterised by extreme pessimism and excessive skepticism. It is not correct to view Ed in isolation rather to see it as a part of the culture in which he can thrive.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48447549
[2] https://www.theargumentmag.com/p/ais-biggest-critic-has-lost...
Would love to see broken down counter example of public company