I prescribe literally zero truth value to what Sam says. He will say whatever he needs to get ahead. It is honestly irritating to me that you and many others here seem to implicitly assume his messages are correlated with truth, doing his social engineering work for him, as if his word should adjust your priors even slightly.
I don't necessarily think he's lying, but there's so much obvious incentive for him to lie here (if only because his employees can save face).
He doesn't even need to be lying, the comment is vague and contains enough loopholes that it could be true yet meaningless. I explained some that I noticed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47190163
And fired from YC for lying. And lied to investors about how many Loopt employees he had. And lied about having 100x the actual number of users when he sold it. And lied to employees about the Microsoft deal. And lied to his safety team.
I don't trust Sam to be telling the truth. It would be to his benefit to lie about this and make Anthropic look bad, so he of course would, even if it's not actually the case.
Hell, I would have thought it likely that anthropic was doing the same thing. Of course that was proven wrong, but for OAI I wouldn't even be guessing. This has always been what sama does.
I think it's all he knows. His "oh, shucks" good-boy routine is what he's been doing for 15 years now, it's gotten him far, it's never been genuine, but it feels especially out of place now with much attention on him and his lies being so obvious.
Am I right in thinking these numbers look awful for OpenAI? They're down by 22% from last month while Gemini is up 50% again. Their supposed user moat doesn't look very sturdy...
I feel RevenueCat is on shaky ground, their market position can only get worse and worse as Apple and Google improve their complimentary offerings and they are forced into more A/B testing that directly competes with others. Recent StoreKit changes this year close a lot of the remaining gap. I would have sold. I wonder why they chose not to.
"I know I sound like an asshole, but I’ve got a serious question: what can LLMs do today that they couldn’t a year ago? Agents don’t work. LLMs - read stuff, write stuff, analyze stuff, search for stuff, 'write code' and generate images and video. And in all of these cases, they get things wrong."
This is obviously supposed to be a critique, but a year ago he would never have admitted LLMs can do any of these things, even with errors. This seems strange but it's typical of Zitron's writing, which is often incoherent in service of sounding as negative as possible. A couple of other examples I've written about are his claims about the "cost of inference" going up and about Anthropic allegedly screwing over Cursor by raising prices on them:
> incoherent in service of sounding as negative as possible
This is a great summary of it. Zitron has some good points on economics and shady deals in his criticism, but it's all buried beneath layers of bad faith descriptions that are almost religious in nature, totally closed off to any sort of debate.
It's a shame because I'd like to see another good and critical writer in this space. Simon Willison's writing for example is excellent, detailed, critical, but inquisitive and always speaks in good faith. There seems to be space for someone taking a less technical, more business/economics approach.
I don't know how far back you're intending to go on Zitron, but I listened a bit to him about 8 months ago, and I got the impression then that his opinion was exactly the same as what he's bringing to the table in that quote. The AI can "do" whatever you believe it does, but it does it so poorly that it's not doing it in any worthwhile sense of the word.
I could of course be projecting my opinions onto him, but I don't think your characterization of him is accurate. Feel free to provide receipts that show my impression of his opinion to be wrong though.
I think that’s roughly right — both then and now he has stressed that people think it does something but it fails to do so. However I do think I’ve seen a subtle shift in phrasing in both him and other critics as it has become more obvious and undeniable that experienced and highly skilled experts in various domains are in fact using LLMs productively to do all those things (most notably producing software)
I dug around a bit but wasn’t able to find a slam dunk quote from a year ago. Might look around more later.
> However I do think I’ve seen a subtle shift in phrasing in both him and other critics as it has become more obvious and undeniable that experienced and highly skilled experts in various domains
I'd caution that you separate the underlying opinion from the rhetoric in those cases. Personally I'm a huge skeptic, including of claims that it's "obvious and undeniable" that "experienced experts" are using it. I don't lead with that in discussions though, because those discussions will quickly spiral as people accuse me of being conspiratorial, and it doesn't really matter to me if other people use it.
As the assumptions of the public has changed, I've had to soften my rhetoric about the usefulness of LLMs to still project as reasonable. That hasn't changed my underlying opinion or belief. The same could be the case for these other critics.
Reasonable, and I get it because I did the same thing before agents got good this year (obviously good, I say again) — I felt the trajectory was clear but didn’t want to sound like the shills and wackos.
On the other hand I think accusing Zitron of subtlety or tempering his rhetoric is a bridge too far.
I'm not sure, but there is a difference: the researchers don't have much incentive to get everyone to use their model. As such, they're not really the ones hyping up AI as the future while ignoring shortcomings.
I know someone (not an engineer) who was applying to jobs for a long time and got a 100% pay increase from moving to Meta, about $60k -> $120k. In such circumstances, it is difficult to turn down such a job. You are only one small part of the machine and it is such a quality of life increase (in USA), I cannot imagine many people saying no.
Some other common reasons that I disagree with, but are quite defensible:
"Well-targeted advertising is a net positive, or at least not hugely negative, for the world. Better targeting has helped many small businesses succeed where they would otherwise not been able to get customers"
"I am working on account security/React/ML/etc which is a good thing. I don't endorse all the bad things"
"It is more complicated than it seems, and most people at Meta try to do the right thing"
"I might as well work at the company and try to make it better from the inside" (while making lots of money)
Many people are bad parents. Many are bad at their jobs. Many at bad at both. At least this guy is good at his job, and can provide very well for his family.
It is all relative. A workaholic seems pretty nice when compared to growing up with actual objectively bad parents, workaholics plus: addicts, perpetually drunk, gamblers, in jail, no shows for everything you put time into, competing with you when obtaining basic skills, abusing you for being a kid, etc.
There are plenty worse than that. The storied dramatic fiction parent missing out on a kid's life is much better than what a lot of children have.
Yet, all kids grow up, and the greatest factor determining their overall well-being through life is socioeconomic status, not how many hours a father was present.
Im very interested in that topic and haven’t made up my mind about what really counts in parenting.
You have sources for the claim about well-being (asking explicitly about mental well-being and not just material well-being) being more influenced by socioeconomic status and not so much by parental absence?
About the guy: I think if it’s just a one time thing it’s ok but the way he presents himself gives reason for doubt
A parent should provide their kids with opportunities to try new things. Sometimes this might require gently making a kid do something at least a few times until it's clear it's not something they are good at or interested in. Also deciding when to try something is important - kids might need to try it at different ages. And of course convincing and reassuring a kid might be necessary to try something they are afraid to do. Until the age of 12 or so, it's important to make it fun, at least initially.
It's debatable whether a parent always needs to "lead by example": for example, I've never played hockey, but I introduced my son to it, and he played for a while (until injuries made us reconsider and he stopped). For mental well-being, make sure to not display your worst emotions in front of your kids - they will definitely notice, and will probably carry it for the rest of their lives.
I don't necessarily think he's lying, but there's so much obvious incentive for him to lie here (if only because his employees can save face).