Remember when questioning generative AI meant getting excommunicated from tech Twitter? Back when Sam Altman was treated like a messiah in a Patagonia vest, and anyone pointing out that large language models are basically spicy autocomplete systems got drowned out by venture capital cheerleaders?
Enter Ed Zitron.
While the rest of the tech media was busy swallowing press releases whole and regurgitating breathless stories about how AI was going to cure aging, write our code, and walk our dogs, Zitron was screaming into the void. He called the AI boom a bubble. He called the tech leadership out for algorithmic snake oil. He didn’t just doubt the hype; he went after the architects of it with a chainsaw.
And looking back at Dan Luu’s comprehensive breakdown of Zitron’s predictions, it’s time to face an awkward truth for the tech-utopian crowd: Ed was mostly right.
Let’s not rewrite history. The AI hype cycle of the last few years has been nothing short of a mass delusion. We were promised AGI—Artificial General Intelligence, the magical thinking box that would solve all human labor—by next Tuesday. We were told enterprise software was dead, copywriters were obsolete, and if your company wasn’t pivoting to AI, you might as well pack it in and file for bankruptcy.
Zitron called bullshit. He argued that the economics didn’t make sense, the energy consumption was a planetary-scale disaster in waiting, and the actual utility of these tools was plateauing hard.
Fast forward to today, and where are we? The billions keep burning in data centers that require their own nuclear power plants, yet the actual return on investment for most businesses using AI remains a giant, blinking question mark. Sure, it’s great for writing mediocre emails and debugging junior-level Python scripts, but does it justify the GDP of a small nation being funneled into Nvidia GPUs? Spoiler alert: no.
The most hilarious part of this whole saga is watching the goalposts move. Three years ago, we were weeks away from sentient machines. Today, after endless face-plants, hallucinations, and copyright lawsuits, the pitch has quietly shifted to: “Well, it’s a pretty good productivity assistant if you squint really hard and ignore the electricity bill.”
Zitron’s superpower wasn’t that he possessed some secret crystal ball. It was simply that he refused to drink the Kool-Aid. In an industry dominated by sycophants who are terrified of losing their invite to the next exclusive launch event, having someone willing to look the Emperor in his algorithmic nakedness was refreshing.
Of course, the tech establishment hated him for it. They labeled him a doomer, a hater, a dinosaur who just didn’t “get” the exponential curve. But exponentials are funny things—they usually hit a wall when they run out of money, power, and actual utility.
We are currently crawling through the hangover phase of the AI bender. The VCs are sweating, the hype is turning into corporate fatigue, and the quiet part is finally being said out loud: generative AI is a neat trick, a powerful tool in specific niches, but it is not the magical economic savior we were sold.
Here’s my hot take: Ed Zitron didn’t just beat the tech establishment’s consensus; he exposed how utterly spineless tech journalism and analysis had become. When the most obvious skeptic in the room looks like Nostradamus, it tells you less about his prophetic genius and a lot more about how aggressively everyone else decided to blind themselves for a quick buck.