[returnInfinity]

Offtopic - The success of coding agents must be Ed Zitron's nightmare.

He has been a perpetual bear

[jbreckmckye]

I don't think so.

His argument is not "this tech doesn't work", but rather "these businesses aren't economically viable"

And that the smoke and mirrors accounting and perpetual thirst for more billions indicates just how unviable it is

Whilst he does dunk on LLM capabilities, the framing is the business angle - can Anysphere etc. actually form a moat and make a profit?

[simianwords]

>His argument has never been "this tech doesn't work", but rather "these businesses aren't economically viable"

Why? because of cost?

[simianwords]

I don't think Ed doesn't comment about the actual tech. Here are some things he has said before and please tell me if these still hold in the spirit?

> You cannot "fix" hallucinations (the times when a model authoritatively tells you something that isn't true, or creates a picture of something that isn't right), because these models are predicting things based off of tags in a dataset, which it might be able to do well but can never do so flawlessly or reliably.

ChatGPT is fairly reliable.

>Deep Research has the same problem as every other generative AI product. These models don't know anything, and thus everything they do — even "reading" and "browsing" the web — is limited by their training data and probabilistic models that can say "this is an article about a subject" and posit their relevance, but not truly understand their contents. Deep Research repeatedly citing SEO-bait as a primary source proves that these models, even when grinding their gears as hard as humanely possible, are exceedingly mediocre, deeply untrustworthy, and ultimately useless.

This is untrue in spirit.

> You can fight with me on semantics, on claiming valuations are high and how many users ChatGPT has, but look at the products and tell me any of this is really the future.

Imagine if they’d done something else.

Imagine if they’d done anything else.

Imagine if they’d have decided to unite around something other than the idea that they needed to continue growing.

Imagine, because right now that’s the closest you’re going to fucking get.

This is what he said in 2024. He really thought ChatGPT is not in the future.

There are so many examples and its clear that he's not good faith and has consistently gotten the spirit wrong.

[Lariscus]

Which success? I still see those things churning out laughably wrong code at every turn.

[ubercore]

It's not a point and click code machine, but it's laughably wrong to say they just churn out laughably wrong code.

[cleaning]

You're telling on yourself here

[delaminator]

I guess everyone stopped using Claude Code already then, if it doesn't work.

[simianwords]

Some one should compile concrete predictions that he made vs how they turned out.

[Kye]

He hedges so much that it's probably impossible to catch him in a contradiction or missed prediction. It must be all that practice running a PR firm for AI companies.

[jaredcwhite]

"Success" is a very relative statement in this context.

[vv_]

Have they been successful?

[luke-stanley]

This is not off-topic at all!