"I know I sound like an asshole, but I’ve got a serious question: what can LLMs do today that they couldn’t a year ago? Agents don’t work. LLMs - read stuff, write stuff, analyze stuff, search for stuff, 'write code' and generate images and video. And in all of these cases, they get things wrong."
This is obviously supposed to be a critique, but a year ago he would never have admitted LLMs can do any of these things, even with errors. This seems strange but it's typical of Zitron's writing, which is often incoherent in service of sounding as negative as possible. A couple of other examples I've written about are his claims about the "cost of inference" going up and about Anthropic allegedly screwing over Cursor by raising prices on them:
> incoherent in service of sounding as negative as possible
This is a great summary of it. Zitron has some good points on economics and shady deals in his criticism, but it's all buried beneath layers of bad faith descriptions that are almost religious in nature, totally closed off to any sort of debate.
It's a shame because I'd like to see another good and critical writer in this space. Simon Willison's writing for example is excellent, detailed, critical, but inquisitive and always speaks in good faith. There seems to be space for someone taking a less technical, more business/economics approach.
I don't know how far back you're intending to go on Zitron, but I listened a bit to him about 8 months ago, and I got the impression then that his opinion was exactly the same as what he's bringing to the table in that quote. The AI can "do" whatever you believe it does, but it does it so poorly that it's not doing it in any worthwhile sense of the word.
I could of course be projecting my opinions onto him, but I don't think your characterization of him is accurate. Feel free to provide receipts that show my impression of his opinion to be wrong though.
dcre|2 months ago
"I know I sound like an asshole, but I’ve got a serious question: what can LLMs do today that they couldn’t a year ago? Agents don’t work. LLMs - read stuff, write stuff, analyze stuff, search for stuff, 'write code' and generate images and video. And in all of these cases, they get things wrong."
https://bsky.app/profile/edzitron.com/post/3ma2b2zvpvk2n
This is obviously supposed to be a critique, but a year ago he would never have admitted LLMs can do any of these things, even with errors. This seems strange but it's typical of Zitron's writing, which is often incoherent in service of sounding as negative as possible. A couple of other examples I've written about are his claims about the "cost of inference" going up and about Anthropic allegedly screwing over Cursor by raising prices on them:
https://crespo.business/posts/cost-of-inference/
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45645714
danpalmer|2 months ago
This is a great summary of it. Zitron has some good points on economics and shady deals in his criticism, but it's all buried beneath layers of bad faith descriptions that are almost religious in nature, totally closed off to any sort of debate.
It's a shame because I'd like to see another good and critical writer in this space. Simon Willison's writing for example is excellent, detailed, critical, but inquisitive and always speaks in good faith. There seems to be space for someone taking a less technical, more business/economics approach.
delusional|2 months ago
I could of course be projecting my opinions onto him, but I don't think your characterization of him is accurate. Feel free to provide receipts that show my impression of his opinion to be wrong though.