This critique is leaning really hard on their interpretation of "dying". They take the literal company is going to fail type of dying where as I have always taken it the same way he has presented it in his "rot-economy" context. They can remain financially "successful", but more and more people hate their products, their products are getting worse, their products are "dying". Google Search is still a good example, the old Google search is "dead" if you like, a know many people, including myself who no longer use it. More people hate and getting off Facebook. More people are jumping from Windows to macOS or Linux.
These tech giants need AI to continue to grow, and that growth at the moment seems to be coming from just two AI companies who are burning a record about of investments. OpenAI has raised nearly $200B, that is more money than Australia's tax revenue.. and they are getting further from being profitable as Chinese models are getting better and much cheaper.
The article linked seems right, but you have to take these morbid analogies in a very specific way, and assume that the only way to measure these companies is revenue/profits/money rather than their products.
I wish people would hold actual professional media economists to the same standards, along with journalists who just repeat press releases without actually challenging statements. His main argument has been the numbers don't make sense, and can't see how this won't end badly for a lot of people.
If many people hated their products, they wouldn't use them. If they didn't use them they would not be financially successful. Google is not dying just because you personally have a feeling the results are worse than before and there is no definition of dying that would be consistent with Google's current state. If Google were to die they would die the way Yahoo did, because a competitor was demonstrably better than them and everyone switched off. There is no realistic evidence that this might occur in the near future.
> If many people hated their products, they wouldn't use them
This might be true in a true, free market without monopolistic collusion and the abandonment of antitrust regulation and enforcement in the US.
In many cases people don’t switch to something else because there isn’t an alternative. Or because they don’t know how to change the defaults that come installed on their computer. Or they get a big scary warning if they figure it out and try.
I would have a hard time believing anyone who said Google was competing fairly and not juicing their numbers with Gemini. Like with search and ads, they have a lot of vested interest in profits and little regard for much else. There’s no reason to. Almost all safeguards on corporate behaviour have been taken off in the last bunch of years.
Google jumped at renaming Lake Ontario.
Of course they’re going to shove AI mode as the default on search and claim every user loves it.
The top people at these companies don't spend all day building useful products, they have entire teams of people working strategy and looking at numbers to ensure their foothold in the various markets stays air tight and free of any real competition. The simplest example of this is the "switch your search engine back to Google" pop-up that effectively encourages users to switch back to Google if their default search engine changed via installing an extension.
Yup, sitting here on a work-issued laptop that's locked down tighter than a walnut - I couldn't install chrome if I wanted to, and yet every time I have to actually go to google for something I get the "would you like to install chrome" begging.
> In many cases people don’t switch to something else because there isn’t an alternative.
no, they have an alternative - abstinence. And yet, large majority overwhelmingly chooses not to abstain. Therefore, it does not matter what they say, because actions are the truth.
Try living without a Google or Apple account in a country where most bank accounts or other services (incl. in some cases government services) require a smartphone app only delivered through the monopolists' app stores and (in the case of Android, where installing degoogled Android images is technically possible) requiring Google Play Integrity to pass.
> If many people hated their products, they wouldn't use them. If they didn't use them they would not be financially successful.
I think this incorrect diminishes the success of product lock-in and also doesn't consider that the world is moving more and more into concentrated wealth where consumers have less and less to offer. Google's financial success could be sustained or even continue to grow with fewer ad buyers targeting fewer people.
> Google is not dying just because you personally have a feeling the results are worse than before and there is no definition of dying that would be consistent with Google's current state.
Again, "dying" is being used as a proxy for financial success. I don't disagree that Google/Microsoft/Meta will continue to grow their revenue or even profit, but I do argue that their products are becoming worse for consumers. That may or may not lead to real competitors, but that is a whole other regulatory capture discussion.
> If Google were to die they would die the way Yahoo did, because a competitor was demonstrably better than them and everyone switched off.
I think you mean "die" here in a product/usage sense, which I think their current path seems to be going that way, but I think it will matter FAR less to Google/Alphabet than it did too Yahoo.
I would say that's a rich country and gen alpha thing. People who had to download games from a pirate site on the family computer know what a folder is.
Cloud services expose their UI/UX through a web-browser will all of the pain points of running a stateful blob of javascript on the client, talking through a mostly stateless protocol to a "mess of stuff" that aims for eventual consistency in the backend.
The old folks, who are retired and dying according to this thread, mostly grew up using local applications with direct control between UI/UX and action.
GP said Google Search is dead, in a way, not Google itself. Google is just to an overwhelmingly part an ad business at this point. And people hate their annoying ads. So people hate Google search, and Google ads. Basically, the majority of what Google is.
This is unfalsifiable. AI is juicing the tech majors’ growth. And in the modern economy, it may be necessary for them.
But did Disney need the internet to grow in the 1990s? No, probably not. Did streaming give it all kinds of new growth victors? Yes. And would ignoring the internet for that last three decades have probably killed it? Also yes.
Irrelevant. If AI turns out to be a short-lived fad, a bubble that pops and we all laugh at in a few year's time, Google's investments in AI were simply wasted, it does not follow that Google itself will die from having made the investment. Same for Meta, whose current name is due to a previous bad investment we laugh at.
The popping of the investment bubble of AI, that might kill Tesla and SpaceX, perhaps also Anthropic and OpenAI, but most of the tech giants won't be all that badly hurt.
Maybe, but it does make the analogy poor. Also what was said was they need AI to continue to grow, not that they will die without it. Some big companies just hit a ceiling and do consulting or become a bank. Look at GM or IBM. Apple is already halfway there.
> If AI turns out to be a short-lived fad, a bubble that pops and we all laugh at in a few year's time
I think you can be even more precise here, because “AI” can be a wild success, and the Anthropic and OpenAI product strategy can blow up at the same time. Transformers, LLMs, and harnesses are all technologies with amazing utility like many machine learning methods before them. But there may be no moat that justify the current investments in “AI” - I would reckon if there is no proper moat for OpenAI and Anthropic they may be 100x (give or take an order of magnitude) overleveraged. That’s still a pretty catastrophic bubble given the figures we’re discussing.
VR still has a path to utility / viability. Meta (Zuck) just made an absolutely terrible product strategy around it. That can’t be overstated. Just atrocious judgement on display.
Given the rumours that Anthropic will copy SpaceX with value-by-TAM, I suspect they'll be overvalued even if they did have a moat.
My standard example for why not to price a stock by the TAM is how Wikipedia's not valued at [number of people online] * [peak price of Encyclopaedia Britannica].
> VR still has a path to utility / viability.
Perhaps, but IMO it's a new form factor of games console, nothing more than that.
And the Meta vision was broader, "the Metaverse", without really exploring what that would look like in practice rather than as piece of SciFi world-building ripped equally from Snow Crash and Ready Player One.
This cuts both ways: you can interpret any word to be whatever you want and thus have linguistically correct criticisms for predictions that are functionally useless.
Very clever but if your definition of a dying company includes companies that make more revenue and profit year after year then your definition is pointless. Words mean things.
> More people hate and getting off Facebook. More people are jumping from Windows to macOS or Linux.
Might be true.
But here is another angle, thinking about the people I know that are not in tech or avid gamers, which I would say is still easily the majority of people.
Most are basically addicted to Instagram, Youtube etc.. Meta and Google owned companies, same goes with OS's, I can't think of one person that considered linux as their daily driver (other than unknowingly through phone).
You mean increase the -$2.50 lost for every $1 in revenue, or the $2Tn in debt disclosed 60 pages into the reports as a footnote.
Let us be clear, the only "growth" is in the LLM ectoparasite living rent free in peoples imaginations. The fact is when (not if) the peak of inflated LLM use-case expectations corrects, a lot of the industry won't survive.
Facebook has a founders-syndrome problem, and a product line catering to creeps. Note most normal people aren't creeps, but the ones that are creepy will buy creep-ware at a rate necessary to sustain the founder creeps ego.
Google hasn't built a successful product in decades, and acquired most of its successes like YT. There are 3 reasons this occurs, and 2 are related to corporate cult culture. One would have to fire 70% of the company to fix that problem, and one day someone will have to do just that.
>wish people would hold actual professional media economists to the same standards
OpenAI will go public soon, and the hype-cycle can finally settle down.
I should have been clearer, "tech giants need something to meet their growth expectations, AI is currently that something". I completely agree this is all going to end badly, and AI has made these tech giants grow their market cap, which is what they seem to care almost solely about. I don't think the crash will be the end of Google/Microsoft/Meta/Amazon as companies, I do think it will be the end of OpenAI cause of the insane financial commitments they have, and I think Nvidia will drastically shrink, but this will all likely take longer than I'd like.
What?? Ed Zitron has repeatedly said OpenAi or Anthropic would literally die. This keeps happening - Ed makes a prediction. It gets falsified. And people say, “no actually he meant something else”.
Ed is in public relations. He did not amateurishly claim OpenAI and Anthropic would literally die. Like any PR savvy person, he qualified his predictions by making them conditional on whether OpenAI/Anthropic could raise more money, achieve a technical breakthrough, unlock new lucrative markets, etc.
So far, OpenAI and Anthropic have raised more money. You might even be able to argue they've achieved some breakthroughs and unlocked some markets.
Regarding his predictions: The jury is still out because Ed isn't actually making the falsifiable time-bounded predictions you think he's making. He's good at making his readers think he's putting his neck out, but he's really not.
When you remove all his rhetoric and veneer, his conditional predictions are actually somewhere between bearish and cautious.
If I have a billion trillion dollars but 20% of the population hates me, but I get to live in a giant solid gold mansion with an army of servants keeping the 20% away from me, have I really failed?
It'd depend on what specifically that 20% of the population hates that hypothetical you for. Maybe their hate in this scenario turns out to be an accurate signal that you are an awful human being. In that case, you'd be a very rich, awful human being.
Have you really failed in this case? Not at making money and living a decadent, hedonistic life, if that was your goal, but yes at being a good human being, one who is good to others and is worthy of their respect, admiration, and support.
Still a failure because it is propped up by an inflated US dollar. Those trillions would mean nothing when the US economy collapses due to a cumulative effect of massive national debt, unending wars and inflation.
At least if you have the population by your side, you wouldn't have "guns, gold, potassium iodide, antibiotics, batteries, water, gas masks from the Israeli Defense Force, and a big patch of land in Big Sur I can fly to" [1]
They are all willing to risk everything to see if their bet on achieving "singularity" fructifies. I don't see us getting anywhere close (at least with the current tech).
To even desire that you have to be so broken and impoverished I would say no, you wouldn't have failed, in the same way a dog farting didn't fail to make perfume. They don't even know what perfume is, don't know about any of the ingredients, equipment and processes. And even if they did, that wouldn't do them any good because they don't have opposable thumbs, so why be cruel and even try to explain it to them? It will either frustrate them because they don't understand, or frustrate them even more in the extremely unlikely case that they do.
But more importantly, companies aren't people, they can't be unhappy or happy. They're like fire, you don't ask what the fire wants, you ask how to make it useful.
Wow. Ballmer fans. Hot take - I like the novelty! And yeah, I never really thought about how Bing, Azure, and Office 365 are all actually stellar products. Somehow I missed that. Azure was particularly good in the early days when you could only run Windows servers, not Linux. That was also the Ballmer brilliance - cut off access to the alternatives and they’ll fade away to irrelevance. (Irrelevance is of course not the same as “dying”.) Along those lines, let’s not forget Windows Phone. Also underappreciated. Or Silverlight! Pure genius that one. So many gems from the Ballmer era.
> If you have a large monolithic service where every change has to be coordinated carefully..
Microservices are WAY harder to coordinate for deployments. You end up with feature service dependencies, and you are back to the same coordination, but now harder to discover down stream dependencies..
I think microservices are supposed to be easier to deploy independently, that's the whole point. And if they are not, it means you're just doing it wrong.
But in truth, all the projects with microservices I have seen in real life had deployment coordination problems, and looked to me like distributed monoliths. So maybe it's a 'no true scotsman' thing. Maybe they are always, or at least most of the time, harder.
People do microservices (read: an API spread across multiple processes), but then make all of the mistakes that logically couple the service deployments together. They use shared databases instead of one per service, make breaking changes to API schema instead of non-breaking or versioning, use a shared library of schema definitions instead of having each service define their own data objects for API calls, and have startup logic that depends on another service being up.
I've done a little bit in this space to try and see what works, and maybe it is different per language/framework but found the use case seems best for largely mechanical code changes, eg small direction, lots of simple changes. This sounds good until you realize that IDEs generally have built in functionality to do these tasks waaay faster, cheaper and more accurately.
I love what is trying to be done here. Some feedback to improve would be to cut out a lot of the noise with the "Take tour". There are too many boxes and things changing on the screen to get a sense of what is happening. Also make it interactive rather than automatically switch onto the next subject. Being a passive observer to so much information trying to be conveyed is very confusing.
I really do like these kinds of approaches to showing the inner workings of different kinds of tech, so think this is on the good path to being a very useful tool, but needs some focus rather than more data/graphs/info boxes.
It's amazing 3D going on, and then 80% of the visual space is popups that completely block it. It'd be have a nice prominent ways of reducing the noise, and that pops were partially transparent.
it was silly, quick check out of curiosity what Opus 5 can do – and the first thing I saw was so impressive that it made me spend hours during weekend polishing it
here it is from history, without edits
> you're a veteran Postgres hacker and expert. I want 3D visualization of how Postgres works, for browser -- all its major components, presented as a 3d model, complex, with all parts zoomable, and animated, with controls -- checkpointer, bgwriter, autovacuum, walwriter, backends, walsender, etc etc etc. Imagine we need to build a 3d model of whole city. That's same level. We need this so engineers who are non-DB-experts would easily understand how it works. Design must be cool, modern, super cool, running all in browser, with controls, with camera position flying with arrow keys and mouse, zoomable, etc. Think deep how to implement it, which modern cool tech to use, and use ultracode to implement in a new directory (we'll commit it later). OK to use the most cool and most modern stuff. Think deep choose tools wisely and let's build an awesome in-browser 3d model of Postgres engine
(later I came with lots of materials about internals and behavior and we started to polish / improve)
I frequently have asked Claude to explain different software architecture things that I don’t know because I’m not formally technically trained - like “explain Django as though it’s a city with different parts having different roles”. I’m a visual learner so this helps a lot and gives me ideas for how to have similar visualizing for other stuff at various levels of abstraction.
This is good general advice. If your software needs a "tour," that's a good indicator you should work on your UX instead. If you're just excited to tell the user about a new feature, they'll discover it when they need it.
Not everyone will come to view this model from the same vantage point. Some will simply be curious about some famous software that they don't happen to use. So the tour is an excellent idea. Great presentation. Congratulations.
Very true. Strangely, I also found this in competitive games. You get a very accurate sense of cooldowns without consciously tracking them. StarCraft with different build times, Apex Legends with character abilities, etc.
Per the "Availability" section of the page, seems like should come back to all plans eventually...
* From today through June 22, Fable 5 is included on Pro, Max, Team, and seat-based Enterprise plans at no extra cost.
* On June 23, we’ll remove Fable 5 from those plans. Using it after that will require usage credits. If capacity allows, we’ll extend the included window.
* After this point—when sufficient capacity allows us to do so—we aim to restore Fable 5 as a standard part of subscription plans. We intend to do this as quickly as we can.
Coding plans are a (massive) subsidy. We can debate until the cows come home whether western frontier models' API pricing rates are fair, but the coding plans are all heavy discounts below those API rates meant to draw people in and get them hooked (and, ostensibly, to be useful for hobbyists or other lower-usage cases).
It's been discussed at length (on this site, on other sites, on like every blog ever, etc) that, eventually, those subsidies will end, much as the $5-10 Ubers/Lyfts I used to take from the far north end of Chicago into the Loop in 2016 would eventually end once those companies had a footing and didn't need to hook folks.
So - yeah, I mean, a v5 model launching in a year where Anthropic has a rather deeply established market and in a year where AI costs are rising from nearly all providers (sometimes for multiple reasons) seems like exactly the thing I'd expect them to pull the subsidy plug on after a launch teaser.
(Even the open-weight models sometimes do this: for example, OpenCode Zen/Go has a rotating door of free models at any given time that eventually leave the free tier and move into the paid tier once the launch day hype/marketing dies down)
The worst part is that Uber "only" lost about $30bn. AI will probably lose at least $300bn by the time the bubble pops. Which means that the pressure to hook and enshittify will be at least 10x as high.
Problem with that website/perspective is separating training costs from inference costs. Training is a one time cost, and while it is certainly not something you can completely ignore, it being one time changes the answer to "Is AI profitable?".
That site doesn't list the dozens of companies doing pure inference, and making a profit while doing so.
What makes you think “most of them will just pay 10 or 20 times more for AI”?
They can’t measure ROI, and it will start costing more than their staff. You might be right, but I can’t think why any competent C suit would agree to this..
Look at cloud spend - how many of your employers have measured the ROI of using cloud vs. self-hosting? At a certain point these things just become the cost of doing business I suppose.
Every single one minus Federal Gov. if you are in a leader position you absolutely should be assessing hosting options, trade offs, costs etc, and looking forward as things grow to make sure you aren’t just burning cash. Only my experience from Australia, the low interest environment could be different in the US, but I would expect this attitude to change if interest rates stay above 5%.
Of the 4 series A-B startups I've helped grow, none have measured and made decisions on cloud spend based on measurement. The only time this came up is when bills got too large and spend needed to be controlled. You're right that it may be a difference of environment (USA here)
These tech giants need AI to continue to grow, and that growth at the moment seems to be coming from just two AI companies who are burning a record about of investments. OpenAI has raised nearly $200B, that is more money than Australia's tax revenue.. and they are getting further from being profitable as Chinese models are getting better and much cheaper.
The article linked seems right, but you have to take these morbid analogies in a very specific way, and assume that the only way to measure these companies is revenue/profits/money rather than their products.
I wish people would hold actual professional media economists to the same standards, along with journalists who just repeat press releases without actually challenging statements. His main argument has been the numbers don't make sense, and can't see how this won't end badly for a lot of people.
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