"He's the perfect outsider figure: the eccentric loner who saw all this coming and screamed from the sidelines that the sky was falling, but nobody would listen. Just as Christian Bale portrayed Michael Burry, the investor who predicted the 2008 financial crash, in The Big Short, you can well imagine Robert Pattinson fighting Paul Mescal, say, to portray Zitron, the animated, colourfully obnoxious but doggedly detail-oriented Brit, who's become one of big tech's noisiest critics."
"His tech newsletter, Where's Your Ed At, now has more than 80,000 subscribers; his weekly podcast, Better Offline, is well within the Top 20 on the tech charts; he's a regular dissenting voice in the media; and his subreddit has become a safe space for AI sceptics, including those within the tech industry itself one user describes him as a lighthouse in a storm of insane hypercapitalist bullshit."
"The more I looked, the more confused I became, because on top of the fact that large language models (LLMs) very clearly did not do the things that people were excited about, they didn't have any path to doing them either, he says. Nothing I found made any suggestion that this was a real business at all, let alone something that would supposedly change the world."
Ed Zitron gained prominence by vocally opposing prevailing AI enthusiasm, especially around generative AI and large language models. He began examining LLMs in 2023 and concluded they failed to perform as claimed and lacked credible pathways to the touted capabilities. Zitron operates a newsletter with over 80,000 subscribers, hosts a Top 20 tech podcast, and moderates a subreddit used by AI skeptics, including industry insiders. His style combines blunt skepticism, detailed technical critique, and provocative media commentary, positioning him as a prominent counterweight to intense industry boosterism.
Read at www.theguardian.com
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]