Zitron is far more negative when it comes to the utility of LLMs than I am, but dear God would it be satisfying to watch him be proven right on the financials.
His as-of-late frequent appearances on Bloomberg, CNBC, and Scott Galloway's podcast, as well as his collaborations with Ed Elson from Galloway's podcast must feel like a great vindication for him already. Quite impressive for a person who is self-taught in that area, just over the past two years.
edit: And, of course, the post is flagged. We must bury our heads in the sand again.
He sells outrage to ill informed people who don't know any better. There's real issues, but it's far more nuanced than Zitron seems willing to bring to his audience.
I welcome AI skepticism but Ed’s often does seem to be done in bad faith. I feel like his claims border on, “AI has no use case whatsoever.” Which clearly isn’t true in 2026.
I don’t think that’s Ed’s position. As I understand it, Ed’s position is that it has no real economic value.
AI is a tool, a useful tool, an innovative tool, but technology has introduced innovative tool after innovative tool for years. Apache, Twitter’s Bootstrap, Pull to Refresh, React, Kubernetes, all innovative, all delivered real business value. Nobody invested hundreds of billions of capital into infrastructure for React.
AI has endless use cases. Theres no evidence that these use cases deliver the value necessary to justify any capital expenditure. A technology can change the world and have no standalone business case.
Business is boring. Money in, money out. We are still waiting for Anthropic and OpenAI to show how LLMs have moved the needle on business.
Every single thing that an LLM can be used to deliver value for a business today can be achieved by a cheap to run open weight model that companies could host in house. Where does that leave the trillion+ worth of dollars being buried in the ground?
Edit the config of the AI startups you have properly designed to be platform agnostic and make it use the other platforms models, wait the CI green and deploy prod
Stock market might dip 20%+, because OpenAI is a large buyer of GPUs, RAMs, servers and disks, every chip company will be impacted from removing huge customer from their revenue.
then flywheel effect might kick off and impact carriers and construction companies building data centers and delivering things there.
which impacts investor trust and they might start pulling their money from AI companies, which in turn, they either need to increase prices or downsize their efforts
I find it hard to justify any conclusion other than we're about to repeat the crash of 1929 in terms of stock prices. Back then, stocks dropped 90% over 3 years. We'll be lucky if 10% actual value remains after the bonfire that's about to happen.
Chip makers may be fully booked now and have extra revenue because of AI, but that also creates deferred demand elsewhere. The prices will not fall immediately because of the crash of a single company. The scarcity has probably negative impact on the economy in general, so stock market should recover after that quickly or at least stay near a healthy valuation level.
when market sees huge storm of un-bought devices, prices will drop, companies waiting on the line will also drop their contracts because they don't want to buy chips with pre-crash prices and renegotiate their prices
Not commenting on the rest of the piece but why is everyone assuming that OpenAI’s executive departures are all voluntary? Sam Altman has shown plenty of willingness to clean house among the top ranks in the past. He isn’t going to shy away from firing a revenue officer if targets aren’t being met.
This. I also think there'll be more local AI models to fill gaps and people see how we've become needlessly dependent and we start using AI responsibly.
This seems to be an increasingly likely outcome. But In the aftermath, like the dot com crash, the debt, and assets are distributed in the liquidation. So it's not the death of AI, or even of ChatGPT. Doctorow wrote about this, but with less bombast than Zitron. https://doctorow.medium.com/https-pluralistic-net-2025-09-27...
Just another article re-iterating the same bearish takes on these companies with sprinklings of quirky uses of profanity to let you know the author is a human. If you're not interested in reading the same thing you've been reading for the last few years, feel free to move on.
Zitron is far more negative when it comes to the utility of LLMs than I am, but dear God would it be satisfying to watch him be proven right on the financials.
His as-of-late frequent appearances on Bloomberg, CNBC, and Scott Galloway's podcast, as well as his collaborations with Ed Elson from Galloway's podcast must feel like a great vindication for him already. Quite impressive for a person who is self-taught in that area, just over the past two years.
edit: And, of course, the post is flagged. We must bury our heads in the sand again.
What happens if people realize Ed Zitron has been rage farming to harvest subscription dollars for a few years now?
He sells outrage to ill informed people who don't know any better. There's real issues, but it's far more nuanced than Zitron seems willing to bring to his audience.
look, he says right at the beginning he is NOT trying to be a buzzkill!!! this is real news!!! haha
I welcome AI skepticism but Ed’s often does seem to be done in bad faith. I feel like his claims border on, “AI has no use case whatsoever.” Which clearly isn’t true in 2026.
I don’t think that’s Ed’s position. As I understand it, Ed’s position is that it has no real economic value.
AI is a tool, a useful tool, an innovative tool, but technology has introduced innovative tool after innovative tool for years. Apache, Twitter’s Bootstrap, Pull to Refresh, React, Kubernetes, all innovative, all delivered real business value. Nobody invested hundreds of billions of capital into infrastructure for React.
AI has endless use cases. Theres no evidence that these use cases deliver the value necessary to justify any capital expenditure. A technology can change the world and have no standalone business case.
Business is boring. Money in, money out. We are still waiting for Anthropic and OpenAI to show how LLMs have moved the needle on business.
Every single thing that an LLM can be used to deliver value for a business today can be achieved by a cheap to run open weight model that companies could host in house. Where does that leave the trillion+ worth of dollars being buried in the ground?
[dead]
Probably a cambrian explosion of new startups. New stars are made of the refuse of old ones.
Edit the config of the AI startups you have properly designed to be platform agnostic and make it use the other platforms models, wait the CI green and deploy prod
Stock market might dip 20%+, because OpenAI is a large buyer of GPUs, RAMs, servers and disks, every chip company will be impacted from removing huge customer from their revenue.
then flywheel effect might kick off and impact carriers and construction companies building data centers and delivering things there.
which impacts investor trust and they might start pulling their money from AI companies, which in turn, they either need to increase prices or downsize their efforts
I find it hard to justify any conclusion other than we're about to repeat the crash of 1929 in terms of stock prices. Back then, stocks dropped 90% over 3 years. We'll be lucky if 10% actual value remains after the bonfire that's about to happen.
Chip makers may be fully booked now and have extra revenue because of AI, but that also creates deferred demand elsewhere. The prices will not fall immediately because of the crash of a single company. The scarcity has probably negative impact on the economy in general, so stock market should recover after that quickly or at least stay near a healthy valuation level.
when market sees huge storm of un-bought devices, prices will drop, companies waiting on the line will also drop their contracts because they don't want to buy chips with pre-crash prices and renegotiate their prices
Not commenting on the rest of the piece but why is everyone assuming that OpenAI’s executive departures are all voluntary? Sam Altman has shown plenty of willingness to clean house among the top ranks in the past. He isn’t going to shy away from firing a revenue officer if targets aren’t being met.
I doubt they would go public if anthropic does and it’s a slaughter. Allowing anthropic to go first might be in their best interest.
your data get's sold
This. I also think there'll be more local AI models to fill gaps and people see how we've become needlessly dependent and we start using AI responsibly.
This seems to be an increasingly likely outcome. But In the aftermath, like the dot com crash, the debt, and assets are distributed in the liquidation. So it's not the death of AI, or even of ChatGPT. Doctorow wrote about this, but with less bombast than Zitron. https://doctorow.medium.com/https-pluralistic-net-2025-09-27...
Just another article re-iterating the same bearish takes on these companies with sprinklings of quirky uses of profanity to let you know the author is a human. If you're not interested in reading the same thing you've been reading for the last few years, feel free to move on.
Could we end up with a merger between them and Anthropic?
https://www.wheresyoured.at/what-happens-if-openai-dies/#ant...
> I think it’s very unlikely this happens, and if it does, it would be ruinous for everybody involved.
The full snippet is in TFA.
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