Ed Zitron’s AI Predictions
In his day job, Ed Zitron runs a boutique public relations firm called EZPR. This might surprise anyone who has come to know Zitron through his podcast or his social media or the newsletter in which he writes two-fisted stuff like “Sam Altman is full of shit” and “Mark Zuckerberg is a putrid ghoul.” Flacks, as a rule, tend not to talk like this. Flacks send prim, throat-clearing emails to media people who do, on rare occasions, talk like this.
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We were talking about whether any of Zitron’s ranting about the AI industry had cost him business on the PR side of the ledger. He said no.
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He has built an improbable little empire for himself out of tart commentary like this. His weekly podcast, Better Offline, about “the tech industry’s influence and manipulation of society,” has cracked Spotify’s top 20 among tech shows, and his newsletter, Ed Zitron’s Where’s Your Ed At, has grown north of 80,000 subscribers. The Ed Zitron media experience also includes a scrappy Bluesky account, a football podcast, some occasional baseball writing, a lot of to-and-froing with the users of r/BetterOffline, and a book due next year about, as he puts it, “why everything stopped working.” In other media, he has become a go-to source for AI naysaying. When Slate’s What’s Next: TBD podcast or WNYC’s On the Media needed someone to talk about the bursting of the AI bubble, they called on Zitron. It isn’t just the volume of output that has put him on the map; it is the aggrieved style that he brings to criticisms of media figures and industry titans alike.
Each of Zitron’s articles is an impenetrable wall of text often reaching into the tens of thousands of words. This volume of material feels substantial — it can be substantial — to the extent Zitron explicitly markets his newsletter on the basis of its word count. Weird. He explores basically two major themes: A.I.’s economic case, and its usefulness. Zitron is zealously opposed to the possibility of either in real terms; while he will occasionally gesture at people or businesses doing something with A.I., his default position is more-or-less that it has little use.
Dan Luu (Mastodon, Hacker News, Kyle Hughes):
I was curious how well the predictions of the most widely cited AI skeptic I’ve seen (Ed Zitron) have done, so I looked at how his predictions panned out. To disclose my own biases, I’ve never had a particularly strong pro or anti AI progress position. For example, in 2022, I did a comprehensive look at predictions Futurists made, including well-respected folks like Kurzweil and found them to be generally wrong on both the prediction results as well as the reasoning. On the flip side, in 2015, I wrote about how people were underestimating AI’s ability to displace humans in jobs and have repeatedly been on the record as saying that many people are underestimating AI’s ability to displace humans from jobs. My position on AI has been extremely boring and is basically, “if something is currently happening, the people who are saying that it’s impossible that it will ever happen are probably wrong”.
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Zitron says Cursor is dying and expects that it will sell for a firesale price; a price as high as $10B is not plausible [It sold this year for $60 billion.]
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In response to the question, “If you had to guess, what is the timeline we are looking at for the AI bubble to pop?”, Zitron answers, “No later than Q2 2026"
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After this point, most further predictions that I saw were either non-falsifiable or resolve in the future. Note that I didn’t attempt to catalogue statements that are nonsensical or were simply factually incorrect statements at the time, such as his December 2024 claim that “Generative AI’s products have effectively been trapped in amber for over a year” or his January 2026 claim that “[models are] basically the same as they were a year ago. They have the same efficacy”. Zitron has not only made forward-looking statements that AI capabilities will not improve, he’s also consistently made backwards-looking statements that capabilities have not improved which, while obviously false at the time, seem to play well to his base (along with his other false statements). If you connect all his statements together, it’s implied that AI had the same capabilities in January 2026 as they did in December 2023 (and if you connect later statements, it’s actually implied that capabilities in August 2026 are the same as in December 2023, though to be fair to Zitron he frequently contradicts himself and has also admitted to limited improvement in mid 2026).
The beauty of Zitron’s voluminous output, for him, is that there is a vast difference between what he actually writes and what people remember. Financial experts and more reputable journalists have raised plenty of concerns about how much money is being spent on developing this infrastructure, and how highly these companies are valued. But the words Zitron writes are far more incendiary and conspiratorial than many seem to remember. It is frustrating to see his many media experiences filling the role of the A.I. skeptic when there are far more qualified, sober, and accurate options. We have enough boosters; this is an industry that is co-signed by the world’s most powerful economies. We deserve better A.I. criticism in popular media.
Things in general I think he’s right about:
Revenue if anthropic and openai is unlikely to grow to the high levels they need to pay for their commitments. Many of their heavy users (coding) will eventually offset a lot of usage to more efficient and cheaper open weight models. I know of people in a company I was at that spend thousands of dollars a month on tokens. I am sure that what they’re using it for can be substituted in large part by way cheaper models.
A lot of corporate AI usage is being pushed by management that doesn’t really understand the extent of its useful, and just wants to call themselves an AI-first company.
If this datacenter build-out proves to be beyond the actual demand, there might be a big economic crisis as to how much of the financial system is getting tied up with it (insurance money, private credit).
Whether openai and anthropic actually die, I’m not sure. But I don’t think they’ll be the next big tech companies. I think eventually they’ll be absorbed by others.
The whole thing I think, can be summarized as: LLMs will be commodity like. And it’s price will go down and eventually will run locally, it’s not at all clear that this will bring AGI and that it’s worth infinite amount (or trillions) of investment ahead of the actual demand or the AGI level do-it-all-for-you AI being reached.
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To be fair, the AI bubble has just burst in China (40% drop in the last 4 months), so Ed wasn’t that far off…
I find Zitron's writing mostly unbearable to read, and I wish there was a larger pool of skeptics/realists from which popular media could choose, but I also think the present moment needs a guy like this. AI boosterism has a murderer's row of sociopathic self-ascribed cults of personality, up to and inside the White House, and the opposition needs at least one guy like that who doesn't mind shamelessly and loudly and verbosely capturing some of that attention.
