I have already written a comment here, apologies. However, I have something else to say other than a hot take, about Ed Zitron:
I believe that Ed Zitron plays a very important gadlfy role in all of this.
However, if you look at his subreddit, it appears that he has created a 100% AI denier following. My gut makes me worry for them, but I wonder where the truth really lies.
For those of us involved with code, Sonnet 3.5 was a revelation, and Opus 4.5 scared the crap out of many, and converted some of us to believers in "the exponential."
Now, in other verifiable output fields like finance/spreadsheets in general, Claude is scaring even more people.
I really do respect Ed, but I feel like his schtick might make too many people complacent, thinking that this is all fake. Also, I could be wrong.
> > My gut makes me worry for them, but I wonder where the truth really lies.
> Why worry?
Because, instead of telling people that "it's all a bubble," while he might be partially correct, he is still creating a confirmation bubble following. He is creating a denialist community, where as his followers might be best served by learning how to use the tools.
I am not sure about any of this.
Why worry? Because if he is wrong, then there is a chance that we will be killing the animals in our zoos, to feed the people. This is something that really happened during the last "great depression."
I worry about the plight of my fellow man as it affects me.
> Because, he tells people that "it's all a bubble," while he might be partially correct, he is still creating a confirmation bubble following. He is creating a denialist community, where as his followers might be best served by learning how to use the tools.
I still don't see what the big deal is. If LLMs are (or become) all they're cracked up to be, it shouldn't matter whether someone "learns to use the tools" today or tomorrow or five years from now. In fact they should become much easier to use as they become more intelligent, you shouldn't need all these fancy prompting strategies anymore.
(Reminds me of search engines. People who really knew how to search for things honed that skill over a period of time, only for those skills to become irrelevant now that search engines are much smarter.)
I guess my point is - why must the technology insist upon itself? Evangelizing for people to use it when they don't want to, just sounds cultish. If it's useful, people will eventually use it - like any other new technology. If someone doesn't find it useful yet, maybe they just don't work in a field that AI is good at yet.
I agree with what you’ve said. If you want to see what is cultish, look at the subreddit the post is talking about. It’s denialism and not healthy behavior.
I believe that Ed Zitron plays a very important gadlfy role in all of this.
However, if you look at his subreddit, it appears that he has created a 100% AI denier following. My gut makes me worry for them, but I wonder where the truth really lies.
For those of us involved with code, Sonnet 3.5 was a revelation, and Opus 4.5 scared the crap out of many, and converted some of us to believers in "the exponential."
Now, in other verifiable output fields like finance/spreadsheets in general, Claude is scaring even more people.
I really do respect Ed, but I feel like his schtick might make too many people complacent, thinking that this is all fake. Also, I could be wrong.