How Accurate Have Ed Zitron’s Predictions Been? ⇥ danluu.com

Dan Luu, after finding one wrong prediction after another made by Ed Zitron, comparing him to mediocre futurists, and exploring his writing style:

That last sentence really sums up Zitron’s position. “There are so many guys to be mad at the moment”. In this talk, he throws in this jab at Andreesen and blames Andreesen for Meta, Google, and Microsoft pursuing growth. In reality, if Marc Andreesen had never existed, Meta, Google, and Microsoft would almost certainly still be trying to grow so we of course cannot actually blame Andreesen for these companies trying to grow. There’s just this thing that he says is bad, and in his usual style, he pulls some person and says they’re the evil villain that’s to blame for this, and then moves on to the next non sequitur.

Instead of more carefully scrutinizing Zitron’s record, outlets like Vanity Fair are publishing soft interviews with him where he gets to make predictions like “large language models, when you remove all of the insane financialization, it’s probably a $30 billion-a-year industry”. Oh, sure, they ask a single question about wrong predictions since 2024, but he brushes it off by saying he has learned lots in those two years — Luu documents incorrect predictions all the way up until November 2025, after which “most further predictions that I saw were either non-falsifiable or resolve in the future” — and ends the interview by saying “[w]hat comes after the A.I. bubble is actually a little scarier”. Ominous.

The beauty of Zitron’s voluminous output, for him, is that there is a vast difference between what he actually writes and what people remember. Financial experts and more reputable journalists have raised plenty of concerns about how much money is being spent on developing this infrastructure, and how highly these companies are valued. But the words Zitron writes are far more incendiary and conspiratorial than many seem to remember. It is frustrating to see his many media experiences filling the role of the A.I. skeptic when there are far more qualified, sober, and accurate options. We have enough boosters; this is an industry that is co-signed by the world’s most powerful economies. We deserve better A.I. criticism in popular media.