This is pretty much the main point of his frustration.
The world has standardised methods of accounting. Not only do Anthropic and OpenAI avoid using those methods, they both use the same phrase “annualised revenues” to describe two radically different accounting processes.
They’re both also leaking those annualised numbers slowly to the press at irregular intervals, which hints that they’re disclosing new numbers in the days after a big sale lands. So you see “$30bn annualised” because they managed to land a $1bn contract the week before, bumping the annualised figure up by $12bn compared to the start of the previous month, and the end of the next.
Yes, This is the one thing he says that generally resonated with me. A lot of his talking points (harnesses as elaborate rude goldberg machines) read more as exaggerated negative statements supporting a pre-concieved narrative
I tried to make a similar play on Heath Robinson but couldn't make it work. In any case check him out, he's more-or-less the English version of Rube Goldberg. Both a lot of fun.
Zitron complained about a lot of things, one some he was wrong (eg. llm are not useful), on others(eg. "magic accounting" or datacenters ) he has very good points ... but we will see.
He did not say LLMs are not useful, he said they’re valuable for software engineering and could justify a hundred million or billion dollar valuation but not a trillion dollar valuation
This is latests refactor, in older videos he stated more than once that llms are basically crap (and at the time he said that he was probably right, but it was very short sight)
No one has rebutted Ed's points. The only rebuttal is "but look how cool AI is!". He mainly sticks to objective facts about their financial situation, and an honest analysis of that situation is dire, regardless of what you think of AI.
So? Tell me his data is wrong, and then I'll care. His primary "prediction" is that it's a bubble and will crash. And he has lots of empirical facts regarding Anthropic, OpenAI, and all the related companies' actual financial situation. Him being wrong on different predictions does not change the fact that Anthropic and OpenAI are in massive debt and do not have the revenue to handle it, and that a huge percentage of the stock market is being propped up by AI. As he himself says, I really hope nothing bad happens, but the financials are to dire to ignore.
His "facts" are not facts, he makes stuff up, miss-states things constantly, and is financially illiterate. Whenever I read anything he writes I'm constantly face-palming because it's basically all rubbish.
He's anti-tech, anti-AI, incredibly biased, and just honestly full of bile.
And yes, I'm saying his data is wrong, his interpretation of the data is wrong, and his conclusions are wrong.
>For example, when Timothy B. Lee looked at a spreadsheet that Zitron used to create a projection of Anthropic's revenue, he found
>He doesn't count February 1-10, counts March 1-10 twice, counts August 21-October 21 as one month instead of two, and doesn't count October 21-November 1. [another commenter notes that his spreadsheet also contains February 30] ... Ed claims he tried to compute Anthropic's revenue for 2025 and came up with $3.6 billion, suggesting some funny business [but the numbers work out once you fix the errors]
from the above link. Personally I agree it's a bubble and there will likely be some sort of crash. But Ed is way to pessimistic on the underlying technology.
And bubbles and crashes are kind of inevitable with any hot new tech given human nature trying to pile in and get rich quick. It's a bit like prediting it'll rain one day.
