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

Unresolved claims by Ed Zitron, page 11 of 12

Deadlines are judged as of 2026-11-01. About Ed Zitron and the sources covered.

Unresolved claims by Ed Zitron (1,126)

We checked, and the evidence so far doesn’t settle it. Predictions whose deadline hasn’t come yet are under Not yet due.

Claims 1,001 to 1,100 of 1,126, newest first. Page 11 of 12.

  1. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “While OpenAI could — and I believe will — raise another huge, industry-defining round, doing so will require pulling in Canadian pension funds, Saudi sovereign wealth funds, or massive investment funds that would require swaths of equity.”

  2. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “It has not succeeded in reducing costs so far, and reducing prices would only increase costs.”

  3. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “I see no signs that the transformer-based architecture can do significantly more than it currently does.”

  4. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “If it succeeds — which I add would require potentially entirely new branches of psychology and mathematics to do so, as we humans barely understand our brains — that would be a huge technological achievement that still wouldn't turn things around.”

  5. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “though I believe OpenAI's continued existence is necessary to keep companies interested/invested in the industry at all.”

  6. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “Conversely, OpenAI has devoured no monopoly, and the product category it created — the only one it is really part of — is one entirely subsidized by venture capital and Microsoft.”

  7. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “Because right now the thing I've been on about with generative AI is on top of not being super useful, it's so unprofitable.”

  8. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “As these organizations push their engineers harder, said engineers will turn to AI-generated code, poisoning codebases with insecure and buggy code as companies shed staff to keep up with Wall Street’s demands in ways that I’m not sure people are capable of understanding.”

  9. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “they're allowed to get away from the very obvious problem: that Large Language Models are peaking, will not solve the kind of complex problems that actually matter, and OpenAI (and other LLM companies) are being allowed to accumulate money and power in a way that's allowed them to do actual damage in broad daylight.”

  10. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “The media seems nigh-on incapable of accepting that generative AI is a big, stupid, costly and environmentally-destructive bubble, to the point that they'll happily accept marketing slop and vague platitudes about how big something that's already here will be in the future based on a remarkable lack of proof.”

  11. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “The problem with stories like this is that they suggest that OpenAI is working on Artificial General Intelligence, or something that left unchecked could somehow destroy society, as opposed to what it’s actually working on — increasingly faster iterations of a Large Language Model that's absolutely not going to do that.”

  12. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “The problem is that these pieces aren’t about breakthroughs — they’re marketing collateral dressed up as technological progress, superficially-exciting yet hollow on the inside, which almost feels a little too on the nose.”

  13. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “I guarantee you Anthropic, Google and Meta are all working on something doing exactly the same thing, because what they are describing is something that limits every single Large Language Model due to the very nature of how they’re built, something Reuters even acknowledges by adding that “this is something that has eluded AI models to date.””

  14. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “While there's tons of evidence that they're impossible to fix, surely a safety-minded culture would be one that sought to fix or mitigate the most obvious and dangerous problem of Large Language Models.”

  15. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “In essence, on top of generative AI not having any killer apps, not meaningfully increasing productivity or GDP, not generating any revenue, not creating new jobs or massively changing existing industries, it also requires America to totally rebuild its power grid, which Janous regrettably adds the US has kind of forgotten how to do.”

  16. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “I see no situation where OpenAI and Anthropic continue to iterate on Large Language Models in perpetuity, as at some point Microsoft, Amazon and Google decide (or are forced to decide) that cloud compute welfare isn't a business model.”

  17. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “Basically, there's going to be a moment that spooks a venture capital firm into pushing one of its startups to sell, or the sudden, unexpected yet very obvious collapse of a major player.”

  18. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “All of this excitement, every second of breathless hype has been built on this idea that the artificial intelligence industry – led by generative AI – will somehow revolutionize everything from robotics to the supply chain, despite the fact that generative AI is not actually going to solve these problems because it isn't built to do so.”

  19. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “The reason I'm suddenly bringing up superintelligences — or AGI (artificial general intelligence) — is because throughout every defense of generative AI is a deliberate attempt to get around the problem that generative AI doesn't really automate many tasks.”

  20. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “Generative AI, as I said back in March, is peaking, if it hasn't already peaked.”

  21. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “The jobs market isn't going to change because of generative AI, because generative AI can't actually do many jobs, and it's mediocre at the few things that it's capable of doing.”

  22. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “Or, put another way, each additional step becomes increasingly (and exponentially) more expensive to take.”

  23. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “It's been eighteen months since this bubble inflated, and since then very little has actually happened involving technology doing new stuff, just an iterative exploration of the very clear limits of what an AI model that generates answers can produce, with the answer being "something that is, at times, sort of good."”

  24. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “Yet, I have a counterpoint: no it doesn't.”

  25. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “While it's a useful efficiency tool, said efficiency is based off of a technology that is extremely expensive, and I believe that at some point AI companies like Anthropic and OpenAI will have to increase prices — or begin to collapse under the weight of a technology that has no path to profitability.”

  26. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “even if their models are all extremely similar, as they’re all trained on the same quickly-dwindling amount of training data.”

  27. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “They don’t care that the output is mediocre, that the product is unprofitable, that there is a quickly-approaching wall that generative AI can’t leap over as it runs out of training data, or that the transformer-based architecture of Large Language Models has hard limitations that are impossible to overcome.”

  28. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “They don’t care that the output is mediocre, that the product is unprofitable, that there is a quickly-approaching wall that generative AI can’t leap over as it runs out of training data, or that the transformer-based architecture of Large Language Models has hard limitations that are impossible to overcome.”

  29. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “The transformer-based architectures like the kind used in OpenAI’s GPT models are gigantic math-machines that know nothing, and will never, ever create the Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) that Sam Altman has been claiming it will.”

  30. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “Generative AI does not appear to provide the kind of easy business returns reminiscent of the cloud computing boom and mobile app store booms, and once that becomes clear, the markets will punish those most deeply invested.”

  31. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “So many promises — augmented reality, home robotics, autonomous cars, and even then, artificial intelligence writ large — never quite materialized into viable business units, making big tech that little bit more desperate.”

  32. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “The deep poison of the Shareholder Supremacy — the nihilistic intention of contorting companies to please analysts and investors — is one that will uniquely punish the tech industry, just like it did to General Electric.”

  33. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “But that’s the thing, in many of my newsletters and podcasts, I’ve argued that the current trajectory of the tech industry will lead it to ruin.”

  34. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “Google, Microsoft and Meta have bet their futures on generative AI, cramming it into their products with little regard for utility, all to show the markets that they’re futuristic rocket ship growth companies”

  35. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “Microsoft is run by Satya Nadella, another MBA that has, in his tenure, overseen layoffs of over 30,000 people, and pushed his company deep into the deeply unprofitable and unsustainable world of generative AI.”

  36. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “The AI integrations (which arrive sometime in the fall to iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max, along with iPads and Macbooks with M1 or later chips) are fairly straightforward and don’t do anything that we haven’t seen elsewhere.”

  37. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “Yet Apple’s deal doesn’t even appear to pay OpenAI for using ChatGPT, meaning that OpenAI’s deal will immediately lose them money from the second iOS 18 launches.”

  38. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “In the event that this integration actually sees adoption by Apple’s hundreds of millions of users, it will cost OpenAI an incredible amount of money thanks to the compute and energy-intensive nature of ChatGPT, especially as I imagine most users will only ask it the occasional question and find no reason to opt for a $20-a-month subscription.”

  39. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “While I’d love to believe that Apple has only used licensed content to train its models, that clearly isn’t the case, and if their version of “publicly available” includes things from Google, or DeviantArt, or social networks, Apple is willingly participating in the AI boom’s continual pillaging of the internet.”

  40. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “Generative artificial intelligence is not going to become the incredible supercomputer that Altman has regularly promised.”

  41. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “When the deck of cards collapses, he’ll find something to blame it on — market forces, a lack of energy breakthroughs, or “unfortunate economic forces” — and remain a billionaire capable of doing anything he wants.”

  42. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “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.”

  43. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “They both went through yCombinator, and both of them have sold products that don't do what they said it would based on what it might do in the future.”

  44. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “The Rot-Com bubble will inevitably pop, but until it does, billions will be plowed into building hardware and software to inflate the Rot-Com bubble in the hopes that the growth-at-all-costs party will never end.”

  45. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “Generative AI is not going to change the world, and while artificial intelligence itself might, it isn't going to do so in the hands of Sam Altman and OpenAI, or Anthropic.”

  46. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “The answer is simple: it isn't coming.”

  47. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “I believe, as crazy as it sounds, that this strategy will lead to the contraction and eventual death of Facebook, and anticipate that as things get difficult for the company, Instagram will begin to decay in a similar way.”

  48. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “Zuckerberg has blown over $40 billion dollars on the metaverse so far, and seems to be intent on doing the same with generative AI, sinking further billions into expensive graphics processing units and other assorted hardware to spin up features that nobody asked for or wanted.”

  49. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “Yet by incentivizing as much content and as many interactions as possible rather than curating the experience in any way is slowly killing Facebook.”

  50. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “Just so we are abundantly, painfully, earnestly clear here, OpenAI lied to the media multiple times.”

  51. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “AI agents are error-prone, and the likelihood of failure in an automated task like moving a calendar invite or ordering an Uber is exponentially higher and less tolerable in a consumer setting.”

  52. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “and he still can’t get past any of these very obvious problems, partly because he isn’t technical and thus can’t really solve any of the problems himself, and partly because the problems he’s facing are burdened by the laws of mathematics and physics.”

  53. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “To make Sora kind of useful, OpenAI will have to find a way to dramatically increase the precision of prompts, reduce hallucinations to almost nothing, and vastly increase processing power across the board.”

  54. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “Generative AI is extremely expensive because even the simplest prompts require GPT-4 to run highly-complex mathematical equations on GPUs that cost $10,000 apiece.”

  55. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “Sora’s attempts to replace filmmakers are dead on arrival because these are impractical and ineffective solutions to problems that nobody complained about other than Hollywood executives.”

  56. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “If, say, Uber changes the layout of its website, or changes the flow of certain actions (like booking a cab, or changing the pickup location), it would effectively break that entire part of the service.”

  57. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “While Rabbit has tens of millions of dollars of venture funding, Rabbit’s business is about as functional as the R1, and I would bet money that it finds a way to try to charge its 100,000 or so customers some sort of subscription fee to stay afloat, just after the single most conspicuous tech reviewer called it “barely reviewable.””

  58. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “Lyu — and, for that matter, Rabbit/Cyber Manufacture Co. — has failed to be transparent with its customers, the press, and the public writ large. And yet he demands an unbelievable amount of faith from users of the Rabbit R1, who must provide their usernames and passwords for any service they wish to connect to the device by remotely connecting into a virtual machine and typing them.”

  59. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “In many respects, this comparison is eerily prophetic, given the slowdown (and even regression) of improvement we’ve seen in LLM-based services like ChatGPT.”

  60. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “First, AI can’t handle one of the most essential tasks of software engineering, which is collaboratively discussing the requirements of a project and how to implement the technology.”

  61. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “LLMs also tend to hallucinate, a virtually-unsolvable problem where they authoritatively make incorrect statements that creates horrifying results in generative art and renders them too unreliable for any kind of mission critical work.”

  62. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “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.”

  63. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “Yet I believe generative AI is going to lead several of these companies to ruin.”

  64. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “As these generative AI companies become more desperate, they'll (intentionally or otherwise) ingest AI-generated content, which causes a degenerative training effect called "model collapse" (also known as Habsburg AI) that destroys the model's ability to deliver useful answers.”

  65. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “OpenAI may make billions, but it has yet to turn any kind of profit, and its operating costs vastly surpass any revenue it gets from licensing its technology or selling premium memberships.”

  66. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “As you'd expect, these lax standards have led to Facebook being flooded with content created with generative AI”

  67. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “Google and Amazon have invested billions in ChatGPT competitor Anthropic (and both claim to be Anthropic's primary cloud provider), and in doing so have guaranteed — according to a source of mine — $750 million a year (Google Cloud) and $800 million a year (AWS) in revenue by mandating that Anthropic uses their services to power its "Claude" model.”

  68. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “Nvidia is likely to be the canary in the coal mine for the AI industry, and if AI fails to drive meaningful profits for both the customer and the provider, orders for Nvidia chips will dramatically slow.”

  69. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “There is no iPhone moment coming, I'm afraid.”

  70. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “That doesn't fix the overall problem that we are running out of data to feed the models, and that the solution in many cases is to use the broken tool to make more data.”

  71. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “If businesses don't adopt AI at scale — not experimentally, but at the core of their operations — the revenue is simply not there to sustain the hype, and once the market turns, it will turn hard, demanding efficiency and cutbacks that will lead to tens of thousands of job cuts.”

  72. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “Generative video models like OpenAI's Sora are dead on arrival, requiring massive amounts of compute and significantly more training data — which is itself both complex and scarce, and carries with it massive legal implications.”

  73. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “Paying publishers to license their content doesn't actually fix the problem, because it doesn't increase the amount of content that they create, but rather helps line the pockets of executives and shareholders.”

  74. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “In the event that adoption slows — or, more accurately, demand never arrives — Microsoft, Amazon and Google only have so long before the markets sour on their "it's the future, we swear!" messaging, demanding real revenue to match their multi-billion dollar infrastructural bets.”

  75. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “You simply cannot fix them. Hallucinations are not going away.”

  76. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “I can find no companies that have integrated generative AI in a way that has truly improved their bottom line other than Klarna,”

  77. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “As we speak, there are few if any meaningful improvements to our lives as a result of the last year's artificial intelligence boom.”

  78. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “If the AI bubble pops, the entire tech industry will suffer as venture capitalists are once again washed out through chasing an unprofitable, barely-substantiated trend.”

  79. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “In reality, a Habsburg AI will be one that is increasingly more generic and empty, normalized into a slop of anodyne business-speak as its models are trained on increasingly-identical content.”

  80. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “And because these platforms were built to reward scale and volume far more often than quality, AI naturally rewards those who can find the spammiest ways to manipulate the algorithm.”

  81. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “This is why so many models' responses sound so similar — they're heavily dependent on the stuff they're fed for their outputs, and so much of their "intelligence" comes from the same training data.”

  82. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “Like a plant turning to capture sunlight, parts of the internet have already twisted toward the satisfaction of algorithms, and as others become dependent on generative AI (like Quora, which now promotes ChatGPT-generated answers at the top of results), so will the web become more dependent and dictated by automated systems.”

  83. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “The ultimate problem is that this morass of uselessness will lead companies like Google to force their generative AIs to "fix" the problem by generating answers to sift through the crap.”

  84. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “The numerous lawsuits against OpenAI could break the back of the company, and while Altman and other AI fantasists may pretend that these models are an intractable path to the future of society, any force that controls (or makes them pay for) the data that they use will kneecap the company and force them to come up with a way to make these models ethically.”

  85. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “As more internet content is created, either partially or entirely through generative AI, the models themselves will find themselves increasingly inbred, training themselves on content written by their own models which are, on some level, permanently locked in 2023, before the advent of a tool that is specifically intended to replace content created by human beings.”

  86. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “The only thing that can truly make them better is more stuff, but when the majority of stuff being created isn't good, or interesting, or even written for a human being, ChatGPT or Claude's models will learn the rotten habits of rotten content.”

  87. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “OpenAI's ChatGPT and Anthropic's Claude are dependent on a constant flow of training data to improve their models, to the point that it's effectively impossible for them to operate without violating copyright.”

  88. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “I am not saying that user-generated content will disappear, but that human beings cannot create content at the scale that automation can, and when a large chunk of the internet is content for robots, that is the content that will inform tomorrow's models.”

  89. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “When I tried to replicate this in the real world, Copilot made four images with completely incomprehensible text, only one of which said "Mike's."”

  90. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “I believe that once reality catches up with artificial intelligence's marketing, there will be a dramatic knock-on effect that savages the entire tech industry.”

  91. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “Big tech has turned the startup ecosystem into a giant goldmine, one that guarantees that almost every dollar spent on any AI product is eventually shared with one of a few multi-trillion dollar tech firms.”

  92. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “As a result, every interaction with ChatGPT or Claude is, on some level, guaranteed revenue for one of the big tech firms.”

  93. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “Public companies are pumping their valuations and executive salaries off the back of artificial intelligence hype, yet nobody is saying the blatantly obvious — that this industry is deeply unprofitable and yet to prove its worth.”

  94. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “As the use of artificial intelligence grows, so do these revenue streams, forcing almost every single dollar spent on AI into the hands of a few trillion-dollar tech firms.”

  95. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “Despite the frothy tales and visions of how generative artificial intelligence will automate our entire existence, there's a distinct lack of practical outputs that suggest that it is even capable of doing so.”

  96. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “The assumption is that audiences are stupid, and ignorant, and "just won't care," and I firmly disagree — I think regular people will find this stuff deeply offensive.”

  97. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “As it stands, OpenAI and Anthropic are heavily dependent on companies believing that they have to integrate AI into their products, which will require these companies to be able to find ways to integrate AI that users actually care about.”

  98. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “AI fanatics are currently fantasizing over a world where they can put a few sentences into a prompt and create an entire series of TV, unable to realize that we are rapidly approaching the top of generative AI's S-curve, where after a period of rapid growth things begin to slow down dramatically.”

  99. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “And as I've suggested above, while these models might "improve," the billions of dollars burned by OpenAI, Anthropic and Stability AI's models have found few ways to mitigate the restrictions of an artificial intelligence that doesn't have an intellect.”

  100. Assessment: UnresolvedSaid

    “Moreover, the scale is different, and serving a webpage will always cost less than processing a request sent to a generative AI model.”