Pundit ClaimsAI claims by Gary Marcus and Ed Zitron, with the evidence

Claims checked against evidence by Ed Zitron, page 13 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 13 of 13: claims 1201 to 1230 of 1230, ordered by the date first said, newest first. To find a claim by its words, use search.

  1. Assessment: SupportedSaid

    “And that’s acknowledging the fact that LLMs — even those developed a legion of well-resourced and well-fed PHDs, like GPT-4, and based on a well-curated dataset of high-quality material — have a habit of hallucinating facts, figures, and events.”

    What happened: OpenAI acknowledges factual hallucinations in GPT-4. Its accompanying report of improvement over earlier models does not remove that recurring limitation. (OpenAI, )

  2. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “Musk is already using Grok as a marketing vehicle for X Premium+’s $16-a-month subscription, and if he actually offers it to every subscriber, there’s no way in hell that this is a profitable transaction.”

  3. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “If Musk launches Grok to every Premium+ subscriber, it creates an inverse revenue model where the site becomes less profitable as its products become more popular.”

  4. Assessment: SupportedSaid

    “Artificial intelligence has become one of the few reliable roads to capital in the current economy, with venture capitalists sinking more than a quarter of their startup dollars into AI-related companies in 2023.”

    What happened: Crunchbase directly reports a share above 25% for American startups. Its accompanying analysis reports increasing AI investment amid a broad funding contraction, supporting the relative-resilience reading. (Crunchbase News, )

  5. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “OpenAI was already in a crisis before Altman was fired.”

  6. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “With AI development an incredibly costly business, OpenAI can’t afford a tightening of the capital floodgates.”

  7. Assessment: SupportedSaid

    “Altman will be fine. OpenAI, however, is an entirely different question.”

    What happened: OpenAI officially confirmed Altman's return to the same chief executive role. This resolves the career setback under the stated ordinary reading. (OpenAI, )

  8. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “Shear doesn’t have much of an AI background, and has never faced the regulatory and legal challenges that threaten OpenAI and the wider AI sector.”

  9. Assessment: SupportedSaid

    “whose open-air beta test of self-driving vehicles has harmed and killed people”

    What happened: The Mountain View crash killed the Tesla driver and injured the Mazda driver; the NTSB identified Autopilot steering and ineffective driver monitoring as causal factors alongside driver distraction and overreliance. The report also documents the beta designation, while identifying damaged roadside safety equipment as contributing to injury severity. (National Transportation Safety Board, )

  10. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “Artificial intelligence allows the modern executive to recategorize more and more labor as “unskilled” because a computer could theoretically do it, even if the work product sucks.”

  11. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “A reasonable person might think that companies wouldn’t lower the quality of their output just to theoretically save a dollar, and they would be wrong.”

  12. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “Either way, we are entering an era where companies will begin testing how much they can automate away the human element of their business, and how much of the customer experience they can trim off until they start losing money.”

  13. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “I believe we are going to see a surge of companies desperately piling money into AI with little regard for the consequences, leading to several smaller versions of the $440 million software glitch that destroyed financial services firm Knight Capital.”

  14. Assessment: SupportedSaid

    “They will gladly replace artists, writers and any other role that they believe can be automated in a heartbeat.”

    What happened: The report documents dismissal of the Spanish editorial staff and replacement with automated translations. It supplies a completed editorial substitution; no direct employer announcement was obtained. (Ars Technica, )

  15. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “These are not real companies (real companies make money and sell things), but symbolic items that venture capitalists hope can be sold to other companies or credulous retail investors because there isn’t a chance in hell they become functional businesses.”

  16. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “Even now, post-SVB, AI companies with no revenue can raise tens of millions — or $150 million, in the case of Character.ai — because they resemble what’s “hot” without any consideration as to whether they’re real businesses.”

  17. Assessment: SupportedSaid

    “While AI will undoubtedly help us become more monetized and more interrupted by billion and trillion-dollar enterprises, it’s arguable that we haven’t already entered a digital society where the corporations are completely in control.”

    What happened: The section confirms that ads directly within AI Overviews were available to US mobile users after testing, adding a placement inside the generated answer. That establishes AI-mediated commercialization and an additional commercial intrusion under the stated reading. (Google, )

  18. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “People are concerned that AI is going to turn the internet into a porridge of low-quality service journalism and/or ecommerce marketing, and I’m not worried because that’s what the internet already is.”

  19. Assessment: SupportedSaid

    “AI might help profligate this kind of content, but you are completely delusional if you can’t see that the modern content mill of the internet is already full of crap specifically built to convince Google to give it more traffic.”

    What happened: The investigation describes padded commercial copy, interviews a producer about writing for Google, and identifies mass SEO-oriented publishing at media outlets. This supports an established production practice; reputable reporting is used because no comprehensive contemporaneous primary measurement was found. (The Verge, )

  20. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “AI will allow the AMPTP to reduce writers’ rooms to one person and one machine, which will in turn reduce the number of people in the Writers Guild of America, which will in turn weaken and eventually destroy one of the most powerful unions in the world.”

  21. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “While a human being might get involved, those person-to-person interactions will become increasingly rare, and as a result distance the company from any customer responsibility.”

  22. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “The strike has already cost the entertainment industry billions of dollars of losses in share value, and all because the AMPTP has decided that streaming content isn’t as valuable as television or film (despite taking just as much effort), and because entertainment’s elites very clearly want to be able to use artificial intelligence to write content.”

  23. Assessment: SupportedSaid

    “And now, less than two years after the name change, Meta is pivoting again, with Zuckerberg saying that Meta’s “single largest investment is advancing AI and building it into every one of [their] products].””

    What happened: Confirms the attributed statement and prominent emphasis on AI within two years of the rebranding. It establishes management's characterization, not an independently measured spending comparison. (Meta, )

  24. Assessment: ContradictedSaid

    “He has spent hours of interviews vaguely mumbling about how the metaverse would change everything, only to give up on the idea the second that artificial intelligence became the new big thing.”

    What happened: Meta's global affairs head reaffirmed the metaverse strategy in a briefing held inside its operating Horizon Workrooms product. The report documents continued pursuit during the claimed abandonment period. (Bloomberg, republished by The Business Times, )

  25. Assessment: MixedSaid

    “While it may seem strange that he’d drop his metaverse idea at the first sign of something more perceptually interesting to Wall Street, he has a proven track record of chasing other people’s ideas and failing to compete.”

    What held: The report identifies Poke as Facebook's Snapchat response and records its unsuccessful run ending in removal. This supports one instance of the claimed pattern. (MacRumors, )

    What did not: Two days before the post, Meta announced expansion of Horizon Worlds and described newly developed protections. This is concrete continued pursuit of its metaverse product. (Meta, )

  26. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “The lack of a robust labor movement within tech also contributes to this anxiety, with no unions to protect against layoffs caused by a company’s focus on generative AI.”

  27. Assessment: ContradictedSaid

    “On top of that, these products are extremely expensive to run. ChatGPT burns millions of dollars a day in computing power, while charging a per-access-token price for companies to plug into its models.”

    What happened: The preceding sentence explicitly identifies this as February research on the hardware supporting ChatGPT. Its estimated daily cost is below either US$1 million or US$2 million. (Computer Weekly, )

  28. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “The result will be genuine human suffering as a result of dressing a fallible, experimental intelligence up as an authoritative source of information. People will be inspired to harm themselves or others, all while their ideas and likenesses are counterfeited and monetized, all so that wealthy executives can tell the world - and Wall Street - that their companies are “innovative.””

  29. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “These moves are unquestionably hurting Google, to the point that Microsoft’s Bing (paired with OpenAI’s ChatGPT), has gained major headlines for providing the service that everybody wished Google would.”

  30. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “Mark Zuckerberg was wrong about the metaverse, Marc Andreessen and Chris Dixon were wrong about Web3, David Sacks was wrong about just about everything, and Google has obfuscated the purpose of their search engine so badly that they have had to beg their co-founders to return to help fight OpenAI’s ChatGPT, a product from a company of a few hundred people which just got a $14 billion investment from their biggest competitor (just after said competitor laid off 10,000 people).”