Technology

Well, Karen Weaver and Elizabeth Warren (amongst other examples) were objectively incorrect in their predictions and warnings of an imminent crash and likely financial crisis due to sub-prime mortgages for years... Right up until they weren't. Along the way they were branded doomers and "public relations hot air".

Ed repeatedly says verbatim "I'm not a financial advisor" and that he "can't predict the future" - that markets that should crash due to being fundamentally unprofitable can easily be propped up and strung along by intervention by government intervention, so timeline is impossible to guess.

South Korea's stock market was in freefall a few weeks back.. And then a few days back their government announced yet another massive investment in AI - now everyone gets an LLM account and access in SK, yay. OpenAI and others regularly get on their hands and knees to woo large government investment in the US. Did Zitron predict those? Yes. Noted in this article? No.

The money and resources poured into AI is still not predicted to turn a profit until 2030 directly from the mouths of the LLM business leads.. They position the historically high and atypical investment demands as a 'winner takes all' first-past-the-post race that'll pay off in the long run for brave investers - but there's no real logical justification to believe that. That's the problem. A new model trained on different data for specific contexts can function far better than a prior model, and users switch their models regularly depending on how well it's performing for the task they need. That's a hypercompetitive market, not a winner-takes-all akin to social media.

It sure doesn't seem like there will be a 'clear winner' on paper so how to recoup those investors and government costs? It's still, 4 years in, the underpants gnome plan and the LLM CEOs give a different answer to part 2 (how the profit arises) every time they're asked - many of their past predictions have failed.

I find it weird that the skeptics that have invested only time and critical thought are deemed worthy of such a lengthy article, yet the author hasn't bothered to take the same treatment (beyond a token mention in their opening and a couple handwaves) for the several industry giants currently causing a great many real world ills (environmental, social, psychological, political) that seem to have hoovered up around 1/3 of all investment capital worldwide on promises of riches beyond imagination and a future utopia (if you can afford it).

TLDR; its a dumb question.