Claims checked against evidence by Ed Zitron, page 12 of 13
Deadlines are judged as of 2026-10-29. About Ed Zitron and the sources covered.
Claims checked against evidence by Ed Zitron (1230)
Each of these claims was checked against dated evidence.
Page 12 of 13: claims 1101 to 1200 of 1230, ordered by the date first said, newest first. To find a claim by its words, use search.
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid
Assessment: ContradictedSaid
“While Google has desperately tried (and failed) to convince Wall Street that it’s building and selling the future”
What happened: Goldman Sachs's reported assessment after I/O is direct evidence that a prominent Wall Street institution accepted Google's AI leadership and product-integration pitch. The original analyst note was not accessible, so this assessment relies on reporting. (Yahoo Finance, )
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid
Assessment: SupportedSaid
“As things get desperate, Altman will use the only approach he knows: sheer force of will. He will push OpenAI to grow and sell into as many industries as possible, a specious hype-man selling to other specious hype-men desperate to connect their company to an AI bubble inflated by Altman himself.”
What happened: The article reports that Altman declared a code red to avoid falling behind competitors and redirected work. This meets the stated reading of serious business pressure, though it does not establish insolvency. (MacRumors, )
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid
Assessment: SupportedSaid
“Despite being an inherently AI-powered feature, it can’t distinguish between ordinary computer usage and genuinely sensitive information — like passwords, health information, or trade secrets that must be protected at all costs.”
What happened: The contemporary reproduction of Microsoft's own FAQ explicitly says that the preview did not hide sensitive information. The surrounding FAQ lists manual and application-based exclusions, which do not amount to automatic sensitivity recognition. (Gibson Research Corporation, Security Now!, )
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid
Assessment: SupportedSaid
“By adding a generative AI assistant, Meta gives users more things to play with, more reasons to interact with the platform, and more ways to generate content to put on the platform, which in turn creates more reasons for others to interact with it.”
What happened: Meta documents an assistant that answers questions and generates images, plus a Messenger and Instagram feature allowing a friend to modify a generated image in the group chat. That directly supplies the additional interaction opportunities described. (Meta, )
Assessment: SupportedSaid
“Embrace that which actually delivers value to your lives, not the theoretical promises of any number of monotonous billionaires that want to turn every website into fuel for a machine that continually gets things wrong.”
What happened: The dated snapshot reports hallucination rates of 2.5% for GPT 4 Turbo, 4.6% for Gemini 1.5 Pro and 7.4% for Claude 3 Opus on document summarization. These recurring errors support the ordinary reading, although the automated scoring and restricted task do not establish a universal error rate. (Vectara, )
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid
Assessment: SupportedSaid
“Yet these tiny little problems all lead to one overwhelming issue: that Sora isn’t so much a tool to make movies as it is a slot machine that spits out footage that may or may not be of any use at all.”
What happened: Cederberg's first-hand account describes inconsistent character details, unwanted features and extensive selection and correction. The same interview also documents a completed film and useful creative applications, so it supports unpredictability rather than total uselessness. (fxguide, )
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid
Assessment: SupportedSaid
“Like I said, useful. But it isn’t AI.”
What happened: The versioned README describes browser automation and demonstrates explicit navigation, clicking and script execution. The assessment infers from that documented mechanism that these scripted actions are not themselves an AI model. (Microsoft, Playwright project, )
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid
Assessment: ContradictedSaid
“Since Rabbit is acting as a third-party, and doesn’t use a standard like Oauth or SAML, it needs to keep user credentials in their original form. This is just insanely dangerous.”
What happened: The report describes inspection during April 29–May 10; the event date marks that testing window's end. It found that service-issued session cookies, rather than entered usernames and passwords, were collected for storage. (Obscurity Labs, )
Assessment: SupportedSaid
“Worse still, it lacks very, very basic features that you’d expect in a device from a decade ago — timers, reminders, calendars, photos, access to your emails, things that one would assume were obvious for an “AI assistant,””
What happened: The launch review identifies four of the five omissions. Its May 1 update reports other improvements without changing this feature list. (Tom's Guide, )
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid
Assessment: MixedSaid
“OpenAI failed to make a more efficient model for Microsoft late last year, and while GPT-5 is meant to be “materially better,” it isn’t obvious what “better” means when GPT-4 performs worse at some tasks than its predecessor.”
What held: This supports the substance of the reported efficiency-project failure. It is secondary reporting, not a primary project record or independent corroboration of The Information's sources. (The Indian Express, )
What did not: The account places cancellation in the middle of 2023, contradicting the literal late-2023 timing while corroborating that a failure occurred. The year-only event date avoids inventing a precise cancellation month. (Synthedia, )
Assessment: SupportedSaid
“Putting aside the remarkable security concerns, the “Large Action Model” also looks like barely-functioning dogshit.”
What happened: This is the review's cumulative result as of publication: neither ride booking nor food ordering had succeeded. The surrounding passage describes repeated attempts and errors. (The Verge, David Pierce, )
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid
Assessment: SupportedSaid
“Funnily enough, this is exactly what the R1 is — an Android app shoved into a bright orange box.”
What happened: The investigator identifies three APKs on MediaTek's Android software and describes extracting the firmware and running the launcher on phones. This supports the ordinary architectural reading, while showing that 'an app' simplifies a small collection of applications. (Rithwik Jayasimha, reproduced by Thread Reader, )
Assessment: SupportedSaid
“To digress, none of this shit actually works if you’re making an actual movie.”
What happened: The interview documents missing control over continuity between separately generated shots. It supports the specific reliability concern, but does not establish that every movie use was impractical. (fxguide, )
Assessment: ContradictedSaid
“Generative AI hallucinates because it doesn’t have a consciousness or any ability to learn or know anything.”
What happened: The experiments demonstrate usable abilities acquired through training and adaptation to examples. They contradict an absolute absence of learning under the operational reading, without establishing consciousness. (arXiv; Tom B. Brown and colleagues, )
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid
Assessment: MixedSaid
“Every single story about artificial intelligence seems to begin with “well, AI can’t do much yet, but…” and then lean into sloppy science fiction that masks that these “autonomous agents” are effectively chatbots that can answer questions based on a document, tech that’s existed for a decade or more.”
What held: The authors describe Watson's February 2011 system deriving answers using unstructured text and matching evidence from passages. This establishes the document-question-answering capability more than a decade before the post, without establishing equivalence to modern agent architectures. (Association for Logic Programming; Adam Lally and Paul Fodor, )
What did not: WebVoyager observes websites, chooses actions and executes them through a browser, with an evaluation reporting 55.7% task success in this original version. Those interactive capabilities exceed answering questions from a supplied document, even though reliability was incomplete. (Hongliang He and colleagues, arXiv, )
Assessment: ContradictedSaid
“Large Language Models are — and always will be — incapable of reasoning or consciousness”
What happened: SATBench reports performance well above its 50% chance baseline on generated, solver-checked puzzles, without allowing external tools during model evaluation. Reasoning-trace checks and partial human validation support a limited inference capability, although they also reveal errors. (Anjiang Wei and colleagues, arXiv, )
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid
Assessment: SupportedSaid
“And all of this is deeply relevant at a time when Rabbit’s R1 device has launched without several key features, such as “Teach Mode” and a stable, reliable version of its alleged “Large Action Model.””
What happened: David Pierce's launch-period testing found repeated failures to complete Uber and DoorDash requests, alongside unreliable Spotify behavior. These firsthand results support the ordinary reading that the delivered action system was not dependable. (The Verge, )
Assessment: SupportedSaid
“The device — which costs $200 — has already started shipping and the reviews are not good.”
What happened: Rabbit reports actual customer handovers and, elsewhere in the same update, customers beginning to receive devices. Customer distribution had begun. (Rabbit, )
Assessment: ContradictedSaid
“And it all kind of makes sense why generative AI doesn’t really help anyone other than those who want to sell something.”
What happened: The dated episode presents the hosts using an AI tour guide for museum descriptions and questions. Access to exhibits during personal recreation is a concrete non-sales benefit. (Eyes On Success, )
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid
Assessment: ContradictedSaid
“As a result, every single LLM-based application — ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Anthropic's Claude, Meta's LLaMA, to name but a few — is trained on an indeterminately-large portion of the internet made up of both Common Crawl (a 250-billion page repository of web content) and what appears to be as much of the rest of the internet as they're able to download, legally or otherwise.”
What happened: The methods restrict StarCoderBase's training set to The Stack's GitHub repositories; StarCoder adds Python fine-tuning from that corpus. This documented training recipe does not include Common Crawl. (BigCode research collaboration, arXiv, )
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid
Assessment: SupportedSaid
“As I wrote (and broadcast) recently, LLMs are running out of training data, and the desperation to find more will lead to significant legal consequences when it's revealed exactly how much they stole and from whom they stole it from.”
What happened: The order publicly disclosed the scale of acquisition and identified affected authors and works. The event date is the judicial disclosure, rather than the earlier downloads; the order also describes using subsets of the acquired collections to train LLMs. (U.S. District Court, Northern District of California, )
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid
Assessment: ContradictedSaid
“These models are not "learning" or, let's be honest, "training" on this data, because that's not how they work — they're using mathematics to plagiarize it based on the likelihood that somebody else's answer is the correct one.”
What happened: The documented objective is predictive model training. A probability over next tokens is not a probability that somebody else's complete answer is correct. (OpenAI, arXiv, )
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid
Assessment: ContradictedSaid
“Artificial intelligence isn't new, these models aren't new, and after just over a year of hype, generative AI is yet to prove it can do anything substantially different other than helping tech company CEOs raise money and create headlines.”
What happened: The public research demonstration reported practical customer-support benefits beyond fundraising or publicity. The event date records when that demonstration became public, not when the underlying workplace observations occurred. (arXiv; Erik Brynjolfsson, Danielle Li, and Lindsey Raymond, )
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid
Assessment: ContradictedSaid
“In essence, the AI boom requires more high-quality data than currently exists to progress past the point we're currently at, which is one where the outputs of generative AI are deeply unreliable.”
What happened: SCoRe uses existing MATH and MBPP problems, generated correction traces, and correctness rewards. Its Gemini 1.0 Pro coding experiments improve self-correction on held-out HumanEval, demonstrating further error-correction progress without requiring an expanded stock of human-written material. (Google DeepMind researchers via arXiv, )
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid
Assessment: MixedSaid
“As I've discussed before, today's models are rife with hallucinations that make integrating them actively dangerous for many businesses, and the only way to have fewer hallucinations is to give the models more compute power to process and analyze data, a dwindling resource that AI is actively helping to destroy.”
What held: The January version reports frequent hallucinations on verifiable legal questions, supporting a material risk in consequential business workflows. It supports the risk clause within legal tasks, not a measured count of affected businesses or the compute-depletion claim. (arXiv; Matthew Dahl and colleagues, )
What did not: The paper reports improved Alpaca truthfulness on TruthfulQA through activation intervention and explains how to incorporate it into existing parameters. This counters the necessity of greater deployed processing capacity, although learning the intervention requires offline computation and the result is benchmark-specific. (arXiv; Kenneth Li and colleagues, )
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid
Assessment: SupportedSaid
“Models like ChatGPT and Claude are deeply dependent on training data to improve their outputs, and their very existence is actively impeding the creation of the very thing they need to survive.”
What happened: The study estimates a 25% relative reduction in Stack Overflow activity within six months of ChatGPT's release, using less-exposed comparison platforms. It examines content creation and reports no significant deterioration in post quality that would explain the loss as merely low-quality material. (PNAS Nexus; institutional record at UCL Discovery, )
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid
Assessment: SupportedSaid
“Generative AI is a perfect tool for soullessly churning out content to match a particular set of instructions — such as those that an algorithm follows — and while an algorithm can theoretically be tuned to evaluate content as "human," so can scaled content be tweaked to make it seem more human.”
What happened: The researchers generated tens of thousands of instruction-following examples, establishing repeatable production at scale. Their accompanying evaluation and limitations do not establish flawless adherence or universal content quality. (Stanford Center for Research on Foundation Models, )
Assessment: SupportedSaid
“The algorithms are easily-tricked, and the tools used to trick them are becoming easier to use and scale.”
What happened: The report describes using Byword to generate 1,800 articles in hours and obtain search traffic, supporting accessible production at scale. It also reports that much of the traffic subsequently disappeared; figures are estimates and campaign claims, not audited platform records. (The Decoder, )
Assessment: SupportedSaid
“Yet at some point these portals will generate an answer based off of the data they have (or have access to, in the case of Tumblr and Wordpress) rather than linking you to a place where you can find an answer by reading something created by another person.”
What happened: Google announced public US rollout of AI Mode, describing retrieval across web subtopics and an in-search response experience. The same announcement retains source links, which limits support to direct answers substituting for necessary source visits. (Google, )
Assessment: MixedSaid
“Amazon already plans to heavily integrate generative AI into Alexa, and Apple is planning the same with Siri, all to show the world that they're "innovative" and "pushing boundaries" without being able to explain how.”
What held: Amazon publicly described a substantial LLM-based redesign before the post. This supports the Alexa plan component, not the claimed motive. (Amazon, )
What did not: Amazon explained a concrete intended improvement: creating routines through speech without manual app programming. This contradicts a literal inability to explain the proposed benefit, but does not prove reliable delivery or disprove promotional motives. (Amazon, )
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid
Assessment: SupportedSaid
“While Google has yet to fully make the move, the writing is on the wall, regardless of whether the actual assistant is fit for the task and not, say, hallucinating things that don't exist.”
What happened: The reporter directly confirmed that Assistant could no longer be selected on the tested Pixel. The article places this observation within Google's mobile migration and reports the removal of the previous switching controls. (Droid Life, )
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid
Assessment: ContradictedSaid
“ChatGPT can spin up piles of anodyne business copy, yet its outputs always require enough editing that it's questionable how much time you've actually saved.”
What happened: The randomized experiment involved 453 professionals completing occupation-specific writing assignments. Substantial savings on completed work, accompanied by higher assessed quality, contradict the blanket claim under the stated reading of business copy. (Science; abstract reproduced by Stanford SCALE, )
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid
Assessment: SupportedSaid
“There are cool little app integrations, interesting things like live translation in Samsung devices, but these are features, not applications.”
What happened: Samsung's launch documentation places Live Translate inside its existing Phone app. That supports the feature-versus-standalone-product distinction for the named example. (Samsung Electronics, )
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid
Assessment: SupportedSaid
“And there are so many stories about how unreliable this technology is.”
What happened: The court found that ChatGPT fabricated cases used in the March 1 filing. This is a primary judicial finding of incorrect generated material, rather than an allegation repeated by the speaker. (U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, reproduced by FindLaw, )
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid
Assessment: UnresolvedSaid
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Assessment: UnresolvedSaid