Did you actually read the articles he made going through the finances of these companies? He definitely has a bone to pick, but his numbers don't lie. The amount of return these AIs need to give due to the amount of spend is so ridiculous that unless they really do automate most jobs, they're screwed. There's a reason these companies only post AI revenue now, not profit.
Bubble doomerism is nothing novel. As is always the case, he's right vertically and wrong horizontally. Serious people in serious publications still speculated that the internet was a fad and would be over soon as late as 2008.
OpenAI will collapse, almost certainly. Anthropic might get by if they can make it to IPO before it all comes tumbling down. Google will buy up all the datacenters in a fire sale like they did with dark fiber after the .com bubble popped and continue building out stuff like NotebookLM.
Amazon and Microsoft will still be there selling server time to model providers and doing custom enterprise solutions like always. They already host the major proprietary models and sell API access.[0]
The top open models are already good enough. At this point prompting and coordination are the big bottlenecks. It would be nice if the bubble lasts long enough for open models to match at least the latest Opus.
His problem is the focus on the bubble and not on what usually happens after. People will bandy his pieces about insisting it's all short lived and they can just wait it out. Kimi K2.5, GLM 5, and MiniMax 2.5 aren't going away.
Rare opportunity for me to actually downplay frontier AI for a change. We can do a lot better. I think the next 6 months will be a stream of releases that shall leave all the current models in the dust. Opus 4.6 will be no more relevant than 3.5 Sonnet.
If this is the case, all bubble talk will have to be re-evaluated.
Why would it need to be re-evaluated? The financials haven't changed, the end goal hasn't changed, even if the AI is better or more useful, the stuff Zitron puts out assumes AI will continue to get better until the money runs out. Unless the AI genuinely starts taking jobs en masse (and not just being used as an excuse for layoffs), they're still in the same situation.
>the stuff Zitron puts out assumes AI will continue to get better until the money runs out
This is categorically false. The big part of his "thing", from the first moment he ever started talking about AI, is the insistence that AI isn't getting better and very soon undergo a devastating collapse.
I don't think Zitron has ever claimed AI to be a fad, at this point there's a cottage industry of people misrepresenting Ed Zitron to feel better about their own precarious financial predictions
"AI fake, AI poo poo, AI going away!" is the only argument he ever had. Nothing more.